I had a great conversation with Becky today that made me realize that I've perhaps not been forthcoming enough about how the course is attempting to raise the question of the political. This lack of clarity on my part may have caused a misunderstanding about the centrality of the political in the approach to reading/viewing we've explored.
In Jacques Rancière's work, there is an important difference (which will be found in most "poststructuralist" French thinkers) between Politics and The Political (la politique/le politique).
Politics usually refers to the organization of political systems - questions of governance, distribution systems etc. In a broad sense, you could say that Politics touches on macropolitical regimes of organization.
The political refers to the more processual, micropolitical fissures. These can and do operate across the macropolitical, so they must not be seen as "smaller" issues. This is a transversal regime. At this more unformed level, there is still potential for change, which is why thinkers of political change tend to speak of the political instead of politics.
It is important to be able to distinguish these two levels when we speak of politics. When we analyse political structures - when we explore the work of film festivals in the context of film distribution, for instance - we are looking at a regime from a macropolitical perspective (we are looking at the film not for itself - not in its singularity - but in terms of its wider effects in a system that makes particular demands on those effects). This is not to say that there is no potential for political change at this stage. Everything makes a difference. But this stage is usually more solidly constituted. Questions that emerge at this level include systemic issues: how is culture distributed? what constitutes culture at the level of state systems? how do larger systemic issues of race and gender play into constituencies produced by the circuits of distribution called forth?
When we speak of the political we are speaking of politics in germ. We are speaking of potential. Art works at this level (there is of course "message" art that is more didactic, but this is very rarely successful at doing the work it tries to do). The political force of art is not its message, but the intricate way in which it creates the conditions for a different mode of existence or encounter with the world.
When we spoke of the films as we tried to do in the 4 weeks of film viewing I was in no way wanting to discount the macropolitical issues that come up in relation to circuits of distribution and global cinema. I was simply hoping to practice a close reading of the work on its own terms in order to begin to understand how it might be doing the work of the political. In my way of seeing things, to speak in complex ways about how art circulates, you need to be able to engage, in detailed and thoroughgoing ways, with what makes it the work it is.
Of course, this approach may not be of interest, and it is not necessary for it to be of interest. But, as an artist, I find it important. It matters to me how decisions are made, and what makes a work the work it is. In the case of cinema, this touches on the relationship between light and colour and sound and voice and duration and rhythm. It also touches on inheritances, techniques, localities, ethnicities. None of these aspects can be singled out, and all must be actively part of any discussion of "content,"I think. From here, from this discussion of what is singular about this particular work, another discussion can ensue that pulls the concern toward macropolitical issues (of which the anthropocene is arguably one). But for me, to make the second discussion - the one about Politics - primary is to ignore the singularity of how art can be political in its activation of modes of experience that may otherwise be backgrounded.
I would love to hear more about your ways of thinking the political.
Thank you for this blog entry, and clarification. For me, political, and politics, speak of people. I chose to be involved in the political at the story making level. There are many layers of political. That one that I can't do without, in my own research and art, and in my system of belief, is stories. For example, myths, old tales and urban myths, proverbs, and even the names - of most interest the image-names such as "lady bug" - people have given to things(etc) they live with, are quite telling tales of the politics making. For example, the Space Shuttle Challenger (1983-1986) is named after the fictional character of this name. First appearing in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle The Lost World (1912) and then as a fictional narrator in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980). Or maybe, the Space Shuttle was named after George Henry Challenger, British pilot and engineer (1881-1947). One or the other, or maybe none of the above is true, but to not pay attention to any of it is depriving Challenger of a story. Nevertheless, the possible stories illustrate that fiction and nonfiction weave each other in and out of what makes the political of the humans. My definition of political, evolving like the political itself, today's definition is that of making real what's fiction, and making fiction what's not yet real, or has been real but never fictionalized. Fiction gets factualized, facts get fictified. Striving to remove the political to get a clearer, more asepticized viewpoint of anything - fact or fiction, cuts the body (oye, the body word) of it in half. It makes no sense, it can't live on, it's got no life. The political is present as part of the story. Are places of nonhumans devoid of the political? Well, no, because the human is looking at that place. The description comes from this place of human observation. I've yet to read a book by a mountain that speaks of a river (that's my research, when I get some results, you will read about it perhaps, in some academic journal!) It's a moral choice to choose not to view any material of study without considering its various political layers. It seems to be a lasting fad, the depoliticisation of discourses. I may be at fault for holding on to my place-of-making. I'm a 70's kid raised Quebecois. I remember in the province of Quebec, in the first referendum, kids would embark naturally in political discourses, and chalk the streets full of "yes" and "no". I also remember attending undergraduate courses at Concordia university in 2012, History of Canadian Theatre, I remember students complaining about politics, and how theatre history should stay away from politics, and enter just that place of fiction. The students didn't want to bother with boring politics, as if politics was this fungus, this black mold flourishing on humid dirty badly light toilet stalls. I really was happy for the Student Strike in 2012, and the opportunities many undergrads had to weave in fact and fiction together, through political action via theatre interventions. Likewise Erin, political action I believe, is not the only layer of politics in the arts. The political is a body (ooooooo, the word.....) of fact and fiction. Taking the political out of a body is a choice. Yet, ultimately, it's a nonviable choice. ~ Christine cricri Bellerose
ReplyDeleteThanks Erin for this, and for your clear, articulate thoughts on the matter.
ReplyDeleteI have always loved the overlapping distinction between the two concepts you have outlined here, along with the overarching theme of 'everything is political' (to use the axiom), and believe in focusing on both macropolitical and micropolitical perspectives, especially how they are inextricably intertwined.
I think it has felt difficult to express how the micropolitical articulates itself in the macropolitical in class for some reason, perhaps because it is tricky to ponder on how the singular examples within the film texts impact on macropolitical structures - especially in relation to complex systems of global circulation and cultural specificity. I'd love to talk about this more in class to hear about what people think in relation to how race and gender played into systems of circulation and reception and get more thoughts.
While this does not relate directly to the films we have discussed throughout the course, the notion of the structuring of identity and hierarchies of power, particularly in relationships, have come up a few times over the last few months and I thought I would share a passage from Guattari's 'The Adolescent Revolution', where he speaks to the micropolitical reorganisation and potential that occurs during adolescence (not necessarily an adolescence restricted to teenagerdom). It may be an interesting way to think about how the macropolitical might influence the micropolitical.
'The little boxes begin in nursery school when the little girl jumping rope has to arrange her body in a certain way and progressively submits to all kinds of behaviors and images. The boxes are everywhere. But on the level of what I call the economy of desire, obviously, there are no boxes. And so, trying to stay close to your question and not be too evasive, I think that adolescence, as far as I can recognize it, constitutes a real microrevolution, involving multiple components, some of which threaten the world of adults. It is the entrance into a sort of extremely troubled interzone where all kinds of possibilities, conflicts and sometimes extremely difficult and even dramatic clashes suddenly appear. A whole new world opens up when one emerges from the relative equilibrium, the homeostasis or autoregulation of childhood (a category that should be handled with tweezers). But, almost immediately, everything closes up, and a whole series of institutionalized social controls and the internalization of repressive fantasies march in to capture and neutralize the new virtualities.' (131-132, Soft Subversions)
Thanks for this! This is key, I think: "I think it has felt difficult to express how the micropolitical articulates itself in the macropolitical in class for some reason, perhaps because it is tricky to ponder on how the singular examples within the film texts impact on macropolitical structures - especially in relation to complex systems of global circulation and cultural specificity."
DeleteI think the reason it's particularly difficult is that the passage isn't linear. We become accustomed, through the shortcuts of placing "politics" in the realm of "the political", to drawing cause-effect links. This approach can't work because it doesn't take into consideration the singularity of events as they coalesce and their tipping points or thresholds. We tend to become accustomed to drawing too-neat lines between a past and a future (this happened a lot in the Arab spring) losing sight of the complex parastrata that move the relationship between content and expression, as Deleuze and Guattari might say. In the context of race and gender, we see this often. It comes up chiefly in the context of identity politics, where something like race or gender is taken as a representational given. If we are talking about a film like Uncle Boonmee, for instance, were we tempted to discuss gender in terms of men and women, we might lose sight of the complex way in which a becoming-animal emerges that troubles those categories. To do a strong analysis, we'd have to really explore the figure of the interval in the film and how it creates a fissure in identity (and in time). We'd then have to look at how the image works in its framings to give us a sense of what a character might be. In the end we might no longer be talking about "race" and "gender" as general categories but instead we would be exploring how these categories are activated and subverted in the complexity of what makes the film a film (as opposed, say, to literature, or poetry, or painting). The example I gave last week about Leni Riefenstahl was similar. All of the literature around Riefenstahl focuses on the "fascistic" body in her films, but none or very little of this literature really asks what/where the body is in her work. I completely agree that there is a fascistic body, but it isn't, in my view, a body we've seen before in the cinema, and it isn't the body that is usually described. If you look closely at the shots, you note (as I write at length in my book Relationscapes) that bodies come in series across landscapes (creating landscapes). And so to do an analysis of what the body might be doing in her films, you have to begin to ask what a body-series is. What kind of biopolitical regime is at work? It takes time to get to this question but it is so much richer for having been explored through the singularity of how her films work.
Another example might be the way Fred Moten makes the difference between black lives and black life.
DeleteIn a videotaped conversation entitled “Do Black Lives Matter” between Fred Moten and Robin D. G. Kelley, Moten speaks of the concept of black sociality in the context of the 2014 murders of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. He explains:
"We need to understand what the state is defending itself from and I think that in this respect, the particular instances of Michael Brown’s murder and Eric Garner’s murder are worth paying some attention to. Because what the drone, Darren Wilson [the police officer], shot into that day was insurgent Black life walking down the street. I don’t think he meant to violate the individual personhood of Michael Brown, he was shooting at mobile Black sociality walking down the street in a way that he understood implicitly constituted a threat to the order he represents and that he is sworn to protect. Eric Garner on the every day basis initiated a new alternative kind of market place, another mode of social life. That’s what they killed, ok? So when we say that Black lives matter I think what we do sometimes is obscure the fact that it’s in fact Black life that matters. That insurgent Black social life still constitutes a profound threat to the already existing order of things."
To achieve an analysis that can trace the difference between the black body (black skin) and blackness (black sociality), there needs to be a strong engagement with all of the micropolitical ways in which blackness expresses itself, including ways it expresses itself outside of the representation of blackness.
These are reasons why I think it's worth moving slowly, refraining from an attempt to situate and categorize before the singularity of how content/expression co-composes is truly explored. In doing so, what then becomes clear is how incredibly fluid the relation between the micropolitical and the macropolitical is - how often the micropolitical challenges the strictures of macropolitics. This kind of research cannot be done from the perspective of an existing methodology, and it cannot be programmatic: it requires an in depth analysis at each conceptual turn. And so it's extremely difficult, as you say.