This death is not simply the end of life, but the immersion into the eternally returning pulsation of Life itself, symbolized by the sea waves; in her death, Aels is transfigured into the cosmic impersonal life-substance. (jf. Žižek)

There it is. Lacanian theory brought to interpretation of a romantic film by a Nazi Director. In this approach symbolic interpretation receives priority over engagement with technique; Lacanian interpretation is granted authority over other narratives; and film directors are construed either as masters who already grasp Lacanian theory (e. g., Hitchcock) or carriers who get caught in its logic. Words such as “symbolize”, “structure”, “paradox”, “fantasy”, “precisely,” and “of course”, grease the analysis. The story is the thing. Its paradoxical structure could almost as easily be drawn from a novel, a Bible, a play or a philosophical text as a film. I exaggerate, of course...

I do so because I am interested in an approach to the nexus between film and politics that is inflected differently. Here interpretation becomes shallower and more modest about itself because the interpreter doubts that the world possesses a structure amenable to deep, authoritative interpretation, whether that depth is conveyed through a logic of coherence or one of paradox. As the hegemony of narrative interpretation is relaxed, attention to technique is accentuated. Film techniques mix sound, image, words and rhythm together to work on the visceral register of human sensibility. It is the intersection between techniques and story which is critical. Attention to such intersections discloses how immersed we are in the sea of micropolitics. By micropolitics I mean, for starters, organized combinations of sound, gesture, word, movement and posture through which affectively imbued dispositions, desires and judgments become synthesized.

Micropolitics saturates cultural life, helping to set the stage for macropolitical action. Do you seek to include gays in the military? End capital punishment? Reorganize subliminal orientations to poverty by people in the middle class? Micropolitics in and around the dinner table, the church, the movie theater, the union hall, the TV sitcom and talk show, the film, the classroom, and the local meeting set the table for macro-policy initiatives in these domains by rendering large segments of the public receptive or unreceptive to them. 

 

The intriguing thing about film is that it both participates in micropolitics and teaches us how this ubiquitous dimension of politics operates. So why is the technical dimension of film often subordinated to the task of narrative interpretation? Since much of contemporary film theory views movies through a psychoanalytic lens, part of the answer may reside in Freud’s own hesitancy about technique. Freud, who was at odds with Kant on other issues, reinforced Kant and neo-Kantians in their resistance to technique. Kantians are reserved because they participate in a two-world metaphysic that depreciates the embodied character of human being. Freud does not accept this metaphysic. But he shares that reserve. One reason, doubtless, is those intensive “memory traces” that reach back to primordial times. They do not possess a form appropriate to intellectual concatenation. Freud’s critique of the hubris of intellectualism is well taken, in my judgment. But, on his reading, memory traces are also extremely resistant to modification by tactical means. You can at best try to control them. Which is why Freud, by the time of Moses and Monotheism, at least, thinks of ethics on the model of intensive instinctual renunciation and skimpy sublimation. According to him ethics at its highest rises above crude instruments such as image, rhythm, ritual, trance, hypnosis, magic and the like, some of which form the very material of film. Moses, “the great stranger” introduced a more spiritual God to the Jewish people, “one as all loving as he was all-powerful, who, averse to all ceremonial and magic, set humanity as its highest aim a life of truth and justice.” [i] This means, first, that the intellect is engaged to control the lower instincts and, second, that corporeal tactics or gymnastics such as ceremony, ritual, hypnosis, image and magic are avoided or minimized.

What Freud admires most about the effect of the Mosaic faith upon Jews is how it “formed their character for good through the disdaining of magic and mysticism by encouraging them to progress in spirituality and sublimations.” [ii] Why? It “signified subordinating sense perception to an abstract idea; it was a triumph of spirituality over the senses; more precisely an instinctual renunciation accompanied by its psychologically necessary consequences.” [iii]  The “athletic virtues,” Freud says, are associated historically with cruel, military cultures. I agree that intellectual regulation of socially developed instincts forms one dimension of ethics. But Freud’s syncretic urge hesitates just when it might have drawn more sustenance from practices endorsed by generous, nonmilitary, nontheistic pagans such as Epicurus and Lucretius. Freud’s depreciation of paganism may have encouraged him, first, to invest too much therapeutic efficacy in the talking cure (even though lying on the couch is a corporeal tactic), second, to draw the line of distinction between therapy and ethico-political life at the wrong place, and, third, to depreciate the profound significance of multimedia arts to political and ethical life.

Does film theory in the psychoanalytic tradition continue to manifest this reserve?  I cannot answer that question authoritatively. Here I will illustrate an approach in which technique provides a critical nexus between film and politics.

 

Let’s start with a film Žižek admires. In Vertigo Alfred Hitchcock carries us to the point where Scottie, the retired detective who gets dizzy at high places, is recovering. His recovery is slow because a year ago he saw Madeleine - the eerily beautiful woman he was hired by her husband to follow because she was communing with a dead woman - fall to her death after jumping off a mission tower. He did not chase her to the top because an attack of vertigo stopped him in his tracks on the way up. He is now haunted by a mixture of guilt, love for the dead woman and a strange sense that she may still be alive. We hope he recovers from the last folly. But we too have an uncanny sense that she is alive. Why?

Žižek explains Scottie’s obsession, and our implication in it, through reference to “this impossible relationship between the fantasy figure and the ‘empirical’ woman who, quite by chance, finds herself occupying this fantasy place.” [iv] I find Žižek’s account persuasive, up to a point. The dissent arises if such a fantasy place is treated as a consuming feature of desire. How complete and inevitable is Scottie’s immersion in this dialectic? Does our involvement in it vary, so much so that many of us need additional lures to participate in the story line? The more inevitability you subtract from the narrative the more attentive you may bestow upon the techniques that help to carry it forward. Hitchcock may agree, since he deploys several such tactics to pull us into the story, tactics that disclose the critical role of technique in film and micropolitics.

When Madeleine fell, we were located in the same line of vision as Scottie, whose vertigo agitated him as he stared down at the falling body. We were agitated, too, by the intensity of the drama, accentuated by the harsh musical score accompanying it. The body, as it drops head first, looks a little less like a live body falling than it should. Besides, the scream precedes the fall in a way slightly askew to the timing of a person who has jumped. When I saw (and heard) the film a second time after many years, knowing the plot but not recalling its details, I thought that Hitchcock at that point fell below the technical virtuosity generally marking his films. But I now think, after a third viewing, that he inserted in both Scottie and us an infra-percept below the threshold of conscious attention while the unnerving action was under way. We saw her fall to her death, but a dissident infra-percept also inserted a hesitation inside that perception. It later infuses an eerie undertone of doubt into the recollection of her fall.

 

Such a doubt can be explained narratively, of course. “It is due to our desire that this beautiful woman be alive.” I agree, up to a point. But, again, not everyone is deeply invested in the particular ideal of femininity infecting Scottie. Midge, for instance - Scottie’s down to earth girlfriend who designs bras and girdles - is not. My suggestion is that some members of the audience who do not share Scottie’s fantasy so intensely are nonetheless haunted by an infra-conscious perception that disrupts the impression of a fall they saw with their own two eyes. And if Scottie did not participate in the line of vision we shared with him, the power the fantasy exercised over him may have been more muted as well.

The layered, dissonant memory of the fall becomes fodder for dreams and daydreams. The result might be a new and surprising line of thought, or an obsessive course of action not fully comprehensible to the one overtaken by it. So Johnneo - as his practical girlfriend “Midge” sometimes calls him - finds himself searching the San Francisco streets for Madeleine a year after he has recovered enough from her loss to get up and around. One day he meets Judy, a working class woman with darker hair and a coarser style who nonetheless looks strikingly like Madeleine.

After Scottie concludes that Judy is really Madeleine, he insists that they change their plans for dinner and drive to a restaurant on the same road he and Madeleine had taken to the mission. If she is Madeleine she is implicated in murder. By this point we know she is Madeleine (Hitchcock had to fight to get this point past the producer). We feel her anxiety level rise as they drive to the mission again. As we do Hitchcock does further supplemental work on our anxieties. The scene flashes from a take in which the car is going down the right side of the road to one in which Scottie is driving on the left side. There is a shortcut, and we then return to the car running faster down the left side of the road with the white dividing line dimly discernible through the rear window.

 

In action oriented perception the eye takes in more than it registers explicitly, as Henri Bergson teaches. The first time I saw this scene I was engrossed in the intense feelings it engendered. I did not form an explicit image of the car in the left lane. But an implicit awareness of it surely formed part of the subtext agitating me: in San Francisco driving on the left side of the road could cause a head-on collision. This side-perception was not exactly a repressed perception. It never made it to the conscious level to be repressed.

Something in the second viewing encouraged me to convert the side-perception into a conscious image. It was a second viewing after all, and I was reading Bergson at the time on how the rapid influx of sensory material is subtracted in the organization of action oriented perception. On yet a subsequent viewing, with three other people, we observed the lane switch together. Here Hitchcock does to us what Scottie does to Madeleine, and what she had previously done to him. He infects us with a touch of vertigo. A little vertigo is indispensable to creative thinking; a lot can freeze you into a zombie, as Scottie was for a year after Madeleine’s apparent death.

So I concur that a Lacanian reading of this story can be given. But I doubt both its sufficiency and the authority with which it is sometimes invested. [v] That combination places the theorist in the role of master, always ready to fit our lives into an authoritative narrative in which we are unwittingly caught. These concerns, familiar enough by now, are linked to another. Deep immersion in this meta-narrative diverts attention from multi-media techniques that pull viewers into a story line they might otherwise resist. It is through attention to such techniques that we learn how micropolitics regularly proceeds.

 

Let’s turn to another issue and another film. Thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze suggest that modern conceptions of linear and teleological time support unwarranted hubris in explanation and interpretation while often supporting punitive conceptions of political morality. But, according to these very thinkers, everyday perception itself does not secrete the nonlinear image. The question becomes: How to expose oneself viscerally to a nonlinear image of time?  Gilles Deleuze, in Cinema II, The Time Image, [vi] reviews a series of films that vividly convey time as “out of joint”. Another film that does so is Stranger Than Paradise by Jim Jarmusch. A notable thing about it is its accumulation of “irrational cuts” tied to a bracing musical score. An irrational cut, briefly, presents the unrepresentability of the temporal fork between one scene and another. The fork is unrepresentable because between scenes things happen at a virtual level that engender effects but are unamenable to close self-reflection or third person observation.

 

CITAT: “Gilles Deleuze, Henri Bergson and Alfred Hitchcock, unconstrained by Freud’s wish to put technique and micropolitics on hold, could have a field day together.”

 

In Stranger than Paradise we are repeatedly treated to a scene in which a series of events unfolds; then to a blank, black screen for a few seconds; then to a new scene that neither we, nor the characters, anticipated. We can retrospectively make sense of each break, at least to some degree. But we could not predict each turn prior to its occurrence. Exposure to the repetition of such irrational cuts may work upon one’s subliminal experience of time. You may eventually become inhabited by the idea that below the threshold of attention (the virtual level) intensities flow that are too small and fast to know, but effective enough incumulative effect to issue in surprising twists and turns when placed in conjunction with new events. It will now appear hubristic to think you could capture all these elements in the detail and depth needed in the course of living. Some may indeed lack a shape to be amenable in principle to intellectual capture. They are comparable to Freud’s memory traces, without necessarily being as primordial as Freud takes them to be. As this awareness sinks into your sensibility, you may soon find yourself exploring an orientation to meaning and ethics that affirms the rift an intrinsic part of being. You now experience meaning less as something to be discovered and more as a series of investments made into selective activities and events. The attainment of meaning and a rift in time now become intermeshed. Similarly, you may begin to connect freedom more closely to becoming, as that strange activity by which the new surges into being from a threshold below the reach of the perceptions, theories and stories already available to us.

 

To be infected by the image of a rift in time is not only to suggest modifications in one’s experience of meaning and freedom. You also see more clearly why an ethic that plays up the importance of cultivation, sensibility, ethos and critical responsiveness to the new may possess some advantages over amorality grounded in transcendental commands or fixed contracts. For each time a fork or turn occurs it becomes timely to reassess established interpretations of the universal that grow up like underbrush in and around us. [vii] Eventually, rather than treating the rift as a crisis in the fabric of causality, meaning, morality and freedom, you may modify each idea in relation to the others. Such modifications, if they take, sink into your subliminal sensibility as well as rising into the higher intellect. For being is layered. These modifications involve experimental intersections between thinking, technique and sensibility.

 

After a series of such interventions, you might now be moved to consider in a more receptive mood conceptions of nature developed by Epicurus, Lucretius, Nietzsche, Ilya Prigogine, Isabelle Stengers and Stephen Gould. For these images of nature, with its “swerves” (Epicurus and Lucretius), or “forks” and “bifurcations” (Prigogine and Gould), or “becoming” (Nietzsche) mesh with the image of time enacted in Stranger than Paradise.

What is experienced initially as a set of intellectual themes to explore may gradually slide into a series of experimental techniques to recode your sensibility. That is the translation process by which the compositional dimension of thinking and acting comes into its own - the processes by which new pathways are forged in one’s sensibility. Suppose you now watch Stranger than Paradise again, paying close attention to the cuts and forks it portrays. Now, perhaps, your dream life can be drawn into play. The idea is to translate these intellectual themes into modest strategies of self-composition, even as you know that such strategies are both experimental in form and apt to be limited in cumulative effect.

According to contemporary neurologists, it takes both deep, slow wave sleep and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep to consolidate new experiences. “During the first two hours of slow-wavesleep...certain brain chemicals plummet and information flows out of the memory region called the hippocampus and into the cortex.” Then “during the next four hours” the brain engages in a kind of internal dialogue that distributes this new information into the appropriate networks and categories.” Finally, in the last two hours “brain chemistry and activity again change drastically as the cortex goes into an active dreaming state.” The cortex now “re-enacts the training and solidifies the newly made connections throughout its memory banks.” [viii]

After several such bouts of dream-synthesis or “processing” you may embody more actively the double experience of time initially projected intellectually. The habit of interrupting periodically the linear image through which action oriented perception is organized with an appreciation of the rift in time becomes folded into your sensibility. It corresponds roughly to the practice we now adopt as we fold into everyday experience appreciation of the discrepancy between the appearance that the sun revolves around the earth and the second order understanding that the reverse is what happens. The double experience of time may now find expression in occasional bursts of laughter, in a disposition to self-modesty in interpretation, and in a readiness to draw upon an ethical reserve of presumptive responsiveness to the new as you encounter twists and turns in time.

You thus promote, repetitively and experimentally, a series of syntheses within the self, allowing a mixture of images, gestures, postures, rhythms, memories, arguments and ethical concerns to be folded into your sensibility. You simulate the techniques by which film already acts upon us, recalling that those multimedia techniques themselves simulate and intensify the micropolitics through which predispositions to experience and action are composed in everyday life. You do so, in this case, tore-code the image of time. As the double-image congeals, the project of working on related images of meaning, ethics and causality may now emerge. Moreover, recalling how contestable such experiences of time and ethics will be in a culture saturated with secular concepts of linear causality and Christian ideas of eschatology, you may begin to cultivate agonistic respect for different orientations to time and morality. For the question of time persists as an existential question, while a definitive resolution of it acceptable to all seems unlikely. It is like Lacanian and Nietzschean philosophies in those respects.

 

Intriguing things happen as you place film technique into contact with cultural theory, neuroscience, and everyday-experience, and bring all four to bear upon micropolitics. The multimedia synthesis of lived-experience becomes more vivid and, perhaps, somewhat more amenable to strategic interventions. Some findings in cultural theory and neuroscience, initially implausible to many, become available to a wider audience through a series of films. Film was, for instance, the pre-eminent medium through which psychoanalysis became infused into popular culture in the United States during the nineteen forties and fifties.

To probe connections between film and micropolitics it is desirable to move beyond Freud’s strictures about technique and, by implication, the confined sense of micropolitics that may continue to haunt film theory in the psychoanalytic tradition. [ix] Eventually it becomes pertinent to explore how an ethic of cultivation can mute and qualify an ethic of renunciation, preparing us to come to terms with the pressure of the new in presumptively pluralist ways in a world moving faster than heretofore. Gilles Deleuze, Henri Bergson and Alfred Hitchcock, unconstrained by Freud’s wish to put technique and micropolitics on hold, could have a field day together. All might concur with Robert Bresson, the film director, when he says, “Hostility to art is also hostility to the new, the unforeseen.” [x] And perhaps with a corollary: “Hostility to art finds expression in theories that demand authoritative interpretation and diminish the significance of technique in life.”

 

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