Cosmopolitical Spectatorship in Resnais, Kluge, and Sembène

COSMOPOLITICAL SPECTATORSHIP IN RESNAIS, KLUGE, AND SEMBÈNE

DANIEL NORFORD

A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

2017

To Krissi, without whom this would not have been possible.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

To my parents, Ann and Don, who have been unflaggingly supportive; to my brother, Jesse, for his lifelong friendship; to my partner, Krissi, who has shown patience, support, and love throughout this process; to my dissertation chair, Barbara Mennel, for her indispensable support, guidance, and rigor, and to my dissertation readers,

Maureen Turim, Philip Wegner, and Alioune Sow, for their insightful comments and guidance. Thank you also to the students at the UF Application Support Center, who guided me through the process of formatting this document for final submission.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... 4

LIST OF FIGURES ...... 6

ABSTRACT ...... 7

CHAPTER

1 INTRODUCTION ...... 8

2 NIGHT AND FOG, HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR, AND COSMOPOLITICAL SPECTATORSHIP ...... 26

3 EXTRATERRESTRIAL BIO-POWER: ALEXANDER KLUGE’S UTOPIAN SPECTATORSHIP ...... 77

4 OUSMANE SEMBÈNE’S PEDAGOGICAL FILM PRACTICE AND THE MAKING OF AN AFRICAN MULTITUDE ...... 126

5 CONCLUSION ...... 176

LIST OF REFERENCES ...... 180

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 185

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure page

4-1 Dieng gorging himself ...... 178

4-2 The moolaadé rope ...... 178

4-3 Bird’s eye view of the village compound ...... 179

4-4 An altermodern African space ...... 179

Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

COSMOPOLITICAL SPECTATORSHIP IN RESNAIS, KLUGE, AND SEMBÈNE

DANIEL NORFORD

May 2017

Chair: Barbara Mennel Major: English

This project investigates the role of spectatorship in selected films by Alain

Resnais, Alexander Kluge, and Ousmane Sembene. In the postwar era of decolonization, the work of these directors conceptualizes a global viewing subject that I call the cosmopolitical spectator. This viewing position is motivated by the international crises of World War II, decolonization, and global capitalism. Through modernist formal strategies, especially montage, the films under discussion interpellate a radically connected spectator driven by an awareness of how modern capitalism posits human cognition as a privileged value form. As such, the cosmopolitical spectator posited by these films claims an ambivalently universal status by virtue of the common insertion of a global humanity into the mechanisms of capitalist reification. The project will be of interest to scholars working in the fields of Film and Media Studies, Postcolonial

Studies, and Critical Theory.

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

The chapters which follow explore what I call a cosmopolitical spectator: a subject position that I associate especially with the non-classical cinemas of postwar modernist film (Neorealism, the French New Wave, etc.). Although other films—and other directors—might have been chosen, the films and filmmakers which form the object of this project stand out for their sustained concern with montage as both a formal practice and a political strategy. In his Night and Fog and Hiroshima mon Amour

(1959), Alain Resnais uses montage to explore the traumas of the Holocaust and the bombing of Hiroshima; this exploration implicates industrial modernity generally and colonialism specifically in crimes against humanity. In Resnais’s films, montage especially invokes the components of film spectatorship—cognition, interpretation, memory, and so on—and thereby implicates the filmic apparatus in the appalling catastrophes of capitalist, industrial modernity. In Alexander Kluge’s Der groβe Verhau

(1971) and Willi Tobler und der Untergang der 6. Flotte (1972), montage first indexes a pre-classical cinema capable of challenging classical narrative film’s hegemonic interpellation of spectatorship. More fundamentally, montage is the chief device through which Kluge explores human cognition as a potentially radical historical form of labor, one that might challenge the expropriating mechanisms of global capitalism from within.

Lastly, Ousmane Sembène uses montage in Mandabi (1968) and Moolaadé (2004) to invoke a native audience’s capacity to participate in the film text and, by extension, in the transformation of Senegal in particular and Africa in general. Despite their wildly different cultural, social, and historical situations, each of these directors treats montage as an index of the human capacity for reason, and in so doing they also posit

spectatorship—one of the privileged cognitive modes of the twentieth-century—as a potentially radical activity; an activity capable of influencing and transforming social reality in the name of a better future for humanity. This impulse forms the basis of the cosmopolitical spectator.

My argument builds upon two major frames of reference: the psycho-dynamic subject of narrative cinema developed by 1970s psychoanalytic accounts of film spectatorship, and overlapping Marxist accounts of film spectatorship as a form of alienating labor. The work of Louis Althusser on ideological state apparatuses and their attendant media is crucial here.

In Althusser’s ground-clearing account of ideology’s functioning through institutional apparatuses and their encounter with concrete individuals, he makes a crucial distinction between “individual” and “subject.” With this distinction, Althusser insists on the central function of ideology: “ideology has the function (which defines it) of

‘constituting’ concrete individuals as subjects.” Althusser sets up this distinction within a narrative scenario, one in which an abstract person is greeted by other persons, and who thus are mutually constituted in the act of recognizing, and being recognized by, one another within the context of a social relationship and its attendant state apparatuses. However, Althusser then insists that “concrete individuals” are “always- already” subjects of ideology, and that this always-already problematizes the temporal structure of the narrative example. In other words, “individuals are ‘abstract’ with respect to the subjects which they always-already are” (84). The temporal sequence of a person’s subjectivization—what Althusser calls his or her interpellation—is a rhetorical figure that does not correspond to the actual phenomenon of being a subject. The

always-already indicates that we are always in ideology from the very beginning, and that this beginning is not reducible to a distinct, concrete moment in time. Ideology, in other words, functions in an abstract, instantaneous way, and this accounts for the

“obviousness” with which the ideological institution of the subject presents itself to concrete individuals. The challenge for Althusser, then, lies in trying to “outline a discourse which tries to break with ideology, in order to dare to be the beginning of a scientific (i.e. subject-less) discourse on ideology” (85).

Althusser’s faith in scientific discourse notwithstanding, his account of ideology and its relationship to media has been one of the fundamental stakes in psychoanalytic analyses of film spectatorship. Scholars such as Christian Metz, Jean-Louis Baudry, and Laura Mulvey helped establish ideology—specifically the hegemonic ideology of a given social order—as perhaps the central preoccupation in apparatus theory.

Althusser’s account of the subject of ideology was and is a hegemonic element of such accounts. As an ideological apparatus, film is seen as achieving a more or less instantaneous interpellation through its fantasmatic appeal to the deep forces of desire, identification, and projection which accompany the originary development of the subject in Lacan’s abstract mirror stage. As articulated by the major psychoanalytic film theorists of the 1970s, film emerges as a unified institution fully in the service of dominant ideology. Judith Mayne provides a concise summary of this position:

“[v]irtually all theorists of the apparatus assume a monolithic quality to the cinema, that is, the cinema works to acculturate individuals to structures of fantasy, desire, dream, and pleasure that are fully of a piece with dominant ideology” (14). The monolithic nature of cinema relates to the abstract nature of Althusser’s subject, in that the cinema

works to break down the temporal experience of social reality—the source of individuality and singularity—in favor of a homogeneous and atemporal identification with the abstract subject of ideology as such.

Based on the versions of cinema and spectatorship proposed above, the task of a radical scholarly position becomes conceptualizing an Althusserian break from the psycho-dynamic schemas of film, manifesting most canonically as a Barthesian “reading against the grain” to detect and expose the paradoxes, contradictions, and interstices of the apparatus. While the following project is deeply indebted to the notion of a radical break with the seamless functioning of ideology, I also propose that film spectatorship— and ideological functioning as such—has never been “obvious” in the way that Althusser and others have described it. That is, a viewer must always consent to the interpellation of an ideological apparatus, and no matter how instantaneous or ubiquitous, this choice is a part of the spectatorial encounter; it is a moment that can be made legible as a function of the film text. In other words, film, like all texts, can foreground the choice attending the spectator’s activity. This is one of the major contributions of the global art cinemas which emerge in the decades following World War II.

This project proposes that the ‘abstract’ nature of the subject—it’s seemingly instantaneous and homogeneous quality—is not solely a source of ideological consolidation. Rather, as abstract, the subject foregrounds the collective and social significance of spectatorship. In a way similar Benedict Anderson’s conception of

“homogeneous empty time” and its relationship to nation as an imagined community, the apparatus foregrounds the collectivity of spectatorship. When foregrounded through modernist form, I argue that this abstract subject becomes a possible conduit for

precisely the kind of resistance to ideology that psychoanalytic film theory both demands and problematizes.

My project follows Judith Mayne’s account of one of the major critiques of the ideological subject, which provides an important cue for understanding the radical potential of the subject:

[T]oo often the claim, by 1970s theorists, that the ‘subject’ is a discursive position and not a real person is taken to mean that the experiences of living, breathing communities comprised of individuals are not of interest to the loftier preoccupations of theorists…but more relevant to the present discussion is the critique that was made of the tendency in middle-class, Western cultures to understand the “real person” in terms of a universal “human nature” – that is, as an entity outside of history, outside of social constructions, yet available to common sense or consciousness. (17)

Mayne’s reference to a “universal ‘human nature’ ” invokes a critique made not only in film studies, but also in postcolonial, feminist, and queer studies. Postcolonial scholars such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, for instance, have challenged the universal humanity concept as an ethnocentric product of the enlightenment and neocolonialism.

Spivak sees the narrative of universal humanity as a justification for the West’s unequal development—and strategic underdevelopment—of the global south and its subaltern inhabitants (333). We should certainly be vigilant of the paternalistic, racist underpinnings of abstract narratives of humanity, but I venture that there is a seismic unintended consequence to such narratives that opens the door for radically questioning the exclusionary dimensions of the West. More specifically, a truly universal conception of humanity can lay bare the false universality of the West’s narrative of human history and progress.

The false universality inherent in the Western articulation of human nature— otherwise known as the ethical universal—is often taken to be a justification for rejecting

the idea of a universal humanity altogether. However, my project proposes that a universal concept of humanity can be appropriated to challenge Western paternalism and exclusion. The Western conception of humanity as such, in other words, is an abstract subject position which contains the seeds of its own problematization. A universal humanity which is truly without reserve forms one of the major bases of this project. In that sense, I take inspiration from the work of postcolonial scholars such as

Kwame Anthony Appiah (C.f “The Postcolonial and the Postmodern,” in In My Father’s

House, 1992).

Viewed within the colonial—and postcolonial—context, the abstract subject of the cinematic apparatus becomes a contested site through multiple discursive positions which can challenge dominant accounts of human nature and progress. The posited subject of classical narrative cinema, then, contains the potential to exceed the prescribed boundaries of dominant ideologies. This subject is a universal humanity without reserve, and it is what I am calling the cosmopolitical spectator.

Fundamental to this subject position is the positing of spectatorship as a form of labor. In his influential analysis of the classical Hollywood cinema, David Bordwell provides a useful account of how the cinematic conventions of classical narrative presuppose the forms which a viewer’s activity should take. Using E.H. Gombrich’s concepts of schemata and mental sets, Bordwell describes film viewing as the process of making and revising hypotheses based on the use of formal patterns (schemata) and the viewer’s prior experience (mental sets) with these patterns. Based on this, Bordwell sums up spectatorship as follows: “[t]hrough schemata, the style’s norms not only impose their logic upon the material but also elicit particular activities from the viewer.

The result is that in describing the classical system we are describing a set of operations that the viewer is expected to perform” (8). Bordwell’s work challenges the overly “passive” accounts of the spectator that emerge in “illusionist theory” by emphasizing the complex cognitive activities that characterize viewing even the most standardized and familiar filmic schemata. That said, Bordwell also provides an account of how the schemata and corresponding mental sets of classical narrative cinema posit spectatorship as work of a very specific kind—that is, as work that generates value in the form of the viewer’s attention. In “meeting the film halfway,” as Bordwell puts it, the viewer participates in the reification of both film and spectatorial attention. The viewer’s attention, then, corresponds to labor in that it co-produces the ideological text as both a commodity and as an ideological production. To be sure, Bordwell’s account is meant to be merely descriptive, but he nevertheless provides an invaluable foundation for a political economy of spectatorship. It is precisely this that Jonathan Beller attempt’s in his extensive account of the cinematic mode of production and its codifying of the spectator’s attention.

In Beller’s analysis, films function as elements in modern capitalism’s reification of human cognition as a focal point for the generation and extraction of value. Beller’s claim is based on the idea that film and its “attention economy” have fundamentally conditioned the human sensorium—the cognitive and perceptual phenomena of human consciousness—to perform spectatorship as a form of valuable labor. In Beller’s account, this happens first of all through film form, and especially montage. In his extended analysis of Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929), Beller traces how the film’s montage aesthetic implicates human perception in an industrialized

production of commodities. In Vertov’s film, montage foregrounds the productive and economic role of spectatorship, and thereby contests ideological mystification by connecting film viewing to a social totality—a social totality that classical narrative cinema will later efface. Through Vertov’s concept of the “interval” that attends the transition from one shot to another, Beller describes how Man with a Movie Camera exposes the social significance of spectatorship and links it to a social totality in which human cognition is yoked to industrial and technological production. Specifically,

Vertov’s film demonstrates how the human sensorium is implicated in the industrial production of the commodity, both in the material sense of specific commodities, and in the abstract sense as the symbolic focal point of modern industrial societies. Vertov’s film treats this yoking of human perception and industrial production as the necessary prerequisite for communist resistance to capitalist reification. In the ensuing evolution of commercial narrative cinema, however, the linking of the human and the apparatus becomes the fundamental vehicle through which spectatorship becomes alienated labor, precisely because the social and economic dimensions have been suppressed.

Beller goes on to explore the streamlining perfection of this relationship in what he calls the attention economy of cinematic spectacle (C.f. The Cinematic Mode of Production

(2006), esp. pp. 37-88). Through our cognitive activities, we reify and reconstitute images as commodities, and in doing so we also consent to the commodification of human perception.

This project follows Beller in understanding the human sensorium as a posited totality of neural and sensual capacities which have developed overtime, and which have gained relatively recent significance in the era of modern capitalism. This historical

development is key to the cosmopolitical spectator, for in positing the sensorium, global capitalism reifies human cognition as a value form, but it also inadvertently establishes the cognitive labor of spectatorship as a commonwealth. As the purview of a universally posited humanity, the human sensorium indexes the cosmopolitical spectator’s radical inclusivity. Beller implies as much even as he describes the alienation inherent in modern spectatorship:

[T]he alienation of labor…is a precursor to the separation and expropriation of vision from the spectator. This alienation of vision, in which vision is captured to produce worlds that confront spectators as something hostile and alien, depends upon a kind of disembedding of the commons—the expropriation of a communal province (nature) that was heretofore an inalienable characteristic (possession) of humanity. (8)

Beller’s account is crucial to my project because it demonstrates how capitalist exploitation is connected to the suppression of a commons which alienates human beings from each other and from the historical world. At the same time, Beller implies that this commons remains as a spectral property of the text, and one which can be made legible as it is, for instance, in Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera.

The preceding discussion demonstrates the highly theoretical nature of my project. This is another dimension of my major term: the cosmopolitical spectator emerges not only in response to the global phenomena of capitalism, decolonization, and human trauma, but also in response to the imperative to conceptualize a theoretical base from which to resist capitalist and neocolonial modernity. This theoretical base, the most finished version of which is Hardt and Negri’s multitude, is similarly posited as a commonwealth through which radical forms of solidarity and belonging become possible. This is the import of the cosmopolitical spectator: it is a specific instantiation of

a common humanity linked by its vulnerability in the face of industrial and capitalist modernity. The focal point of this connection is labor, specifically the labor that spectatorship performs. All of the filmmakers under discussion conceptualize spectatorship as a form of labor; each of them approaches filmmaking as only one part of a larger intellectual and ethical project, and all three directors treat the filmmaking process as inherently collaborative. This not only extends to the complex hermeneutic contract between filmmaker and film viewer, but also to the other forms of collective labor that produce any given film. Resnais collaborates with writers such as Jean Cayrol and Marguerite Duras; Kluge’s films are extensions of his theoretical collaborations with

Oskar Negt; Sembène’s films are in dialogue, however combatively, with Léopold Sédar

Senghor. More fundamentally, however, the modernist approach of all three directors treats film itself as a function of a social totality: that is, films become component parts of an open and perpetually changing network of discourses, texts, and events. As indexes of a social totality, films thus become conduits to a potential encounter with the global structures that occur in complex and unpredictable ways.

The chapters which follow attempt to articulate this cosmopolitical spectator, whose base is the historically developed capacities of the human nervous system.

These capacities have arisen in part through the overlapping phenomena of capitalist expansion and colonization in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. What results is the positing of the human sensorium as the locus of capitalist reification and exploitation. The abstract position of the cosmopolitical spectator, then, originates out of collective experiences of exploitation and oppression as the result of industrial capitalist

modernity. Its duplication of this abstraction makes it a spectral bearer both of historical trauma and utopian hope.

This project argues that the modern industrial shaping of the human sensorium gains a new dimension in the post-World War II era, especially concerning the related events of global economic transitioning, decolonization, and neocolonial adjustment.

These events are likewise haunted by the very recent traumas of the war, which fundamentally challenge the West’s articulation of itself as the sole bearer of universal humanity and reason. In the uncertainty created by the unsettling of the West’s narrative of itself as the privileged bearer of reason and progress, the cosmopolitical spectator emerges as a potential alternative to the false universality of Western reason and historical progress. This alternative subject position haunts the textual unfolding of postwar cinema. In their formal and thematic challenge to the schemas of classical narrative film, these films (and the films they subsequently inspired) attempt to articulate a different relationship both to the world and to the seismic events cited above.

Coterminous with the rearticulations of global capitalism and its mining of the human sensorium, the modernist films of Europe and West Africa posit human cognition as a form of labor which may serve as a virtual commonwealth of revolutionary potential and resistance, even as they also testify to cognition’s historical imbrication in capitalist modernity. In Ousmane Sembène’s use of montage to suggest the contingent composition of social reality, for instance, he demonstrates both that dominant ideology can be challenged and that this challenge depends on the viewer’s ability to cognize and interpret the formal disruption. As a form of cognition, however, this challenge also testifies to the positing of the human sensorium as value-creating by modern capital,

and thus insists on spectatorship as a form of labor that is always-already exposed to reification. I argue that this positing of cognitive labor as a virtual commonwealth anticipates the concept of the multitude explored by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

The films under discussion all share this central preoccupation with spectatorship as a form of labor, but a labor that can contest its own reification and posit an alternative social reality. Through the omnipresent—though hardly homogeneous—use of montage and elliptical editing techniques, these films reflect one of the dominant tendencies in postwar modernist film in their Brechtian foregrounding of the work both of filmmaking and of spectatorship. They thus testify to a labor that transgresses national, cultural, and linguistic boundaries. These films are also variously concerned with exploring the status of human identity as such in the postwar period, and especially how the crisis of identities generated by postwar trauma and the emergence of the postcolonial condition provides an opportunity to rethink human historical being as a form of labor that affirms our collective makeup. Labor as collective, shared, and common: these are the bywords of the cosmopolitical spectator. Even in the profound alienations generated by war, colonialism, and industrial modernity, the conceptualization of cognition as labor provides the impetus to think humanity’s strange connection in the postcolonial era of emergent empire. The ambivalence of this condition, however, is considerable.

Sean Cubitt’s insightful analysis of what he calls cosmopolitan film articulates elegantly the ambivalence of the cosmopolitical spectator. Departing from one of the fundamental insights of apparatus theory, Cubitt asserts that films constitute audiences as subjects of reification. Neither film nor spectator are independently existing entities;

rather, both are mutually constituted in the apprehension and cognizing of the film text.

In the twenty-first century context of hyper-mediation and expanding global networks, this mutual constitution of film and audience is one of the basic premises of what Cubitt calls “the cosmopolitanism of contemporary capital” (335). That is, through an exponential “informationalization,” a global audience is interpellated for the cosmopolitan products of an increasingly leveraged world market. In Cubitt’s terms, the global audience (as ideological subject) is a special effect produced by the informatic logic of global capitalism—that is, it is a technologically, industrially produced phenomenon.

Although Cubitt’s intervention addresses an early twenty-first century context, the germ of this global audience is already legible in the postwar period of the mid- twentieth-century (a connection that earlier chapters of Cubitt’s tome also makes). The transition of the postwar world into the era of neocolonialism and global empire entails the figuring of precisely such a global audience for the fantasmatic commodities of a spreading consumer culture. The following statement vividly expresses the logic of this new audience set: “[t]he global audience is dimensionless. To the extent that it succumbs to the global media product…the sublime effect deprives the global audience of space and time. The audience, as commodity, becomes the full void of the commodity fetish that, as secret core, goal, and medium of informational capital, it must be” (339). As described by Cubitt in an earlier formulation, this audience becomes an expression of the West’s will to power through the synthesizing atemporality of the commodity.

Cubitt’s emblem of cosmopolitan film is the global blockbuster, specifically special-effects driven spectacles such as The Matrix (1999) and Crouching Tiger,

Hidden Dragon (2000). Cubitt indicates his debt to apparatus theory by reading the sublime spectacle of the global blockbuster as an immersion of the viewer that removes them from the historical world: “[Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon] absorbs an awestruck audience with mesmeric intensity, strips away the sense of time, eliminates the ordinary power to act. Its reality is already past, and with it the possibility of any action other than those that, in the cinematic future perfect, already will have occurred” (350-351).

The cosmopolitical spectator is deeply connected to this idea of a global audience. It too is an abstract subject position that flattens out singularities in favor of the common. Unlike the global audience, however, the cosmopolitical spectator foregrounds the antinomy of its makeup: it must compose itself of singularities even as it also insists on a levelling abstraction, and it does so not in the names of information and commodification (although it is also not free from these forces) but in the names of solidarity and connectivity. In short, the cosmopolitical spectator posits a global audience motivated by a logic of shared suffering and radical resistance. As such, it foregrounds the singularities which must compose the spectral body politic; while repressed, these singularities are not effaced. The cosmopolitical spectator therefore indicates the radical aspect of cosmopolitanism as described by Ulrich Beck: that we are both the same and different, both separate and aligned, both alone and together in the era of empire. The cosmopolitical spectator and its instantiating films posit the historical capacities of labor as the connective tissue of this global solidarity, constructing a vision of universal humanity without reserve.

My project is organized along historical lines: the Resnais films precede Kluge and Sembène, who are more or less contemporaries. That said, the theoretical trajectory of my argument also motivates the organization. Resnais’s films establish the cosmopolitical spectator and its relationship to capitalist modernity, especially how the latter posits spectatorship as a form of labor. Kluge’s films in chapter 2 follow from this insight and further articulate the cosmopolitical spectator’s relationship to neocolonialism and a radically connected humanity. Kluge also pinpoints the multitude of those inserted into global capitalism as the privileged subject of revolutionary struggle. Sembène concludes the project not only because his final film, Moolaadé

(2004), is the most recent film under discussion, but also because he fundamentally revises Hardt and Negri’s multitude by challenging the term’s ahistorical transcendence.

In place of a generic multitude cleansed of any trace of identitarianism, Sembène’s films argue that the multitude cannot be conceived apart from its constitution in and through capitalist and colonialist exploitation. This means that the multitude arises from history conceptualized as given culture, or what Spivak calls an “enabling violation” (“Cultural

Facts,” 333).

The first chapter examines the germ of the cosmpolitical spectator in Alain

Resnais’s Night and Fog (1955) and Hiroshima mon Amour (1959). Driven by the traumas of World War II, these films intervene in the transnational reformulations of

Western and European identities in the face of decolonization and seismic economic and cultural change. Specifically, Resnais uses the catastrophic events of the Holocaust and Hiroshima as allegorical focal points for a critique of capitalist modernity’s internal colonization of the human sensorium in the name of sustaining the dynamics of

colonialism and commodity fetishism. Through a critique of French national identity and complicity, Resnais and his collaborators articulate a cosmopolitical viewing position tasked with detecting the abstract connections of disparate spaces and times in order to intervene in the West’s leveraging of historical eventfulness and human cognition. The montage aesthetic of both films is a major expression of this tendency. As such,

Resnais anticipates the work of Alexander Kluge in film, narrative, and theory. The cosmopolitical spectator figured in these films finds its potency in the eruptive force of historical trauma as it punctures the film text in the form of involuntary memory as disjunctive montage.

The second chapter focuses on Alexander Kluge’s intervention into the colonizing logic of global capitalism, especially in the context of West Germany’s social, cultural, and industrial transitions in the decades following the war. Recognizing the pervasive logic of capitalist reification, Kluge posits the human sensorium as a primal, even prehistoric commonwealth through which the bio-power of human labor may contest the expropriating logic of industrial modernity. Through the genre of science- fiction, Kluge articulates a global humanity whose exploitation exceeds national, cultural, and spatial borders. His Der groβe Verhau (1070) and Willi Tobler und der

Untergang der 6. Flotte (1972) address an audience that is both specific and global.

Through the montage aesthetic which renders these films’ dystopian setting, Kluge makes a Kantian appeal to the universal import of humanity’s historically contingent capacity for reason. This capacity posits a collective historical subject joined by the will to protest the unbearable reality created by the emergent forces of empire. Key to this project is the emergence of a postcolonial subject position capable of challenging the

central status of the West even as it also foregrounds the ambivalent commonwealth created by global capitalist networks. As manifested in the representation of feminine, affective labor, this commonwealth is a privileged site of a utopian futurity opposed to capitalist modernity’s annexation of historical time.

The final chapter examines Ousmane Sembène’s Mandabi (1968) and Moolaadé

(2004) as representative of the director’s attempt to conceptualize an African multitude based in the common heritages of colonial resistance and pre-colonial cultural labor.

Specifically, through his appeal to both a modernist aesthetic and African narrative conventions, Sembène interpellates a continental African audience driven by the utopian forces of collectivism and African bio-power. Key to this project is the ambivalent role of Senghorian Négritude, which provides a base from which to engage with the ambivalent hybrid identities generated by the colonial encounter, a phenomenon that Sembène encapsulates in his final film’s transient articulation of an altermodern African space. Contra Hardt and Negri, however, Sembène rejects the concept of an exceeded postcoloniality in favor of a vision of the postcolonial condition as “given culture” (C.f. Cheah, Inhuman Conditions (2007)) and therefore as a contaminated legacy from which anti-colonial resistance must necessarily begin. In this,

Sembène supplements and revises the transcending gestures of both Resnais and

Kluge by returning the cosmopolitical spectator to the ground of historical materialism, through which African singularities—and especially women—can and do express their capacity for revolt and self-fashioning.

Each chapter attempts to demonstrate how these films invoke an abstract humanity connected by its capacity to cognize the material of history; it is a capacity that

provides both the burden and the key to imagining an alternative to the capitalist era of global empire. As labor, spectatorship is the result and the tool of humanity’s common— though not identical—insertion into the mechanisms of capitalist modernity.

CHAPTER 2 NIGHT AND FOG, HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR, AND COSMOPOLITICAL SPECTATORSHIP

In his Multidirectional Memory, Michael Rothberg defines his central concept not only in contrast to what he calls competitive memory, but also in contrast to the kind of public sphere that the latter assumes: “Fundamental to the conception of competitive memory is a notion of the public sphere as a pregiven, liminal space in which already- established groups engage in a life-or-death struggle [for recognition or memorial legitimacy].” In contrast, “[p]ursuing memory’s multidirectionality encourages us to think of the public sphere as a malleable discursive space in which groups do not simply articulate established positions but actually come into being through their dialogic interactions with others” (8). Rothberg’s articulation of the public sphere is central to what I call the cosmopolitical spectator. The cosmopolitical spectator signifies a subject position that emerges through the traumas of World War II, decolonization, and the evolution of global capitalism in the postwar, cold-war era. The transitioning global space acts as a common frame of reference for the articulation of positions, perspectives, and identities that are collectively constituted and transformed. Because these issues circulate in global space, the resulting public sphere transcends national, cultural, and social barriers, at least up to a point.

The cosmopolitical spectator designates only one possible subject position among others, but I argue that it has a transcendent character that haunts other subjective instantiations. It is my contention that the modernist cinemas—that emerge out of postwar Europe and Senegal constitute major loci for this cosmopolitical subject position. This first chapter focuses on Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog (Nuit et Brouillard,

1955) and Hiroshima mon Amour (1959), two films which function as ur-texts for the

cosmopolitical spectator. Specifically, the montage aesthetic of Resnais’s films address and invoke a subject that is implicated in events that claim global import—a status that motivates the spectator’s awareness of global connectivities.

A word on the term “cosmopolitical”: this label is directly borrowed from the main title of Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins’s edited volume, Cosmopolitics: Thinking and

Feeling Beyond the Nation (1998). As such, it should be distinguished from the more ideologically determinative “cosmopolitanism,” which, in addition to invoking an anti-

Semitic strain of nationalist thought (C.f. Paul Rabinow’s “Representations are Social

Facts”), also has much more straightforwardly affirmative and positive connotations than

“cosmopolitics.” While the subject position I explore in the following chapters is indebted to the affirmation of a universal humanity which forms one of cosmopolitanism’s signature gestures, it is also more ambivalently concerned with the coercive, paradoxical, and epistemologically violent aspects of conceptualizing a universal humanity in the age of global empire. Specifically, the cosmopolitical spectator designates a subject position that tries to affirm human connectivity while also acknowledging the perpetuation of epistemological violence that such a move entails.

This tension is paramount in considering the effacement of historical specificity that occurs in both of the films under discussion—the torsions of allegory, intertextuality, and film form work to inflect the specific texts with an abstracting significance that exceeds distinct boundaries of identity. The consequences for historical specificity are undoubtedly distressing, even as this abstracting move also reveals and foregrounds capitalist modernity’s global logic of expansion and consolidation.

Departing from this central ambivalence, the cosmopolitical spectator originates out of three major ethical and existential poles. It emerges firstly from the discourses of shame, guilt, and complicity arising out of the West’s global crimes against humanity, especially the Nazi Holocaust and the atrocities of colonialism. On this register, viewers who identify as members of the West find themselves in the position of the cosmopolitical spectator when they are explicitly implicated in global atrocities. This feeling of complicity emerges not only from the national, cultural, and social connections between the site of trauma and the interpellated viewer, but also from the awareness of the global frameworks that bind otherwise disparate sites together. In other words, someone hailed as a cosmopolitical spectator feels complicit not only because they are

(for instance) French, but also because they are global subjects who participate— however indirectly and apparently insignificantly—in global capitalism, (neo)colonialsm, and what V.F. Mudimbe calls the West’s will to power (212).

While being implicated in global atrocities may generate a sense of complicity and shame in the interpellated subject, these feelings also foreground the vulnerability and contingency of the individual agent: his or her relative lack of choice in whether or not to be implicated in the emergent global system. Here, Ulrich Beck’s concept of cosmopolitanization is useful: “[T]he becoming cosmopolitan reality…is…a function of coerced choices or a side effect of unconscious decisions…My life, my body, my

‘individual existence’ become part of another world, of foreign cultures, religions, histories and global interdependencies, without my realizing or expressly wishing it”

(19). This register of cosmopolitical spectatorship exceeds the boundaries of choice or responsibility and is therefore felt as an externally imposed effect of transcendent

developments that are far beyond the grasp of the individual. Complicity, for example, becomes something that is simply written into the fabric of one’s social existence, regardless of whether one is involved—directly or indirectly—in the atrocities in question. The enduring legacies of colonialism, for instance—white privilege, neocolonialism, the underdevelopment of “the global South,” and so on—present themselves first and foremost as phenomena for which isolated forces cannot be held solely responsible—they unmistakably function in part through the complex, often inadvertent involvement of the totality of multiple social orders.

This feeling of helplessness is a necessary prelude to the most important dimension of the cosmopolitical spectator: its affirmative embrace of precisely this coerced connectivity in the name of new, radically alternative subject positions. This subject position is universal in its implications and idealist in its articulation—its utopian goal is the formation of an ethical universal without reserve. Unlike the colonial West’s version of the ethical universal, then, the cosmopolitical spectator seeks to expose and deconstruct the false universality of the former in favor of a radically open and inclusive vision of universal humanity by virtue of the common threats posed by major historical catastrophes. As the proceeding discussion hopefully illustrates, however, this intervention comes at a price.

The film articulates this subject first and foremost position through its shocking embodiment of the mass death of the camps. Surely one of the most disturbing images

(and there is some competition) of the film must be the stark sequence of bodies being bulldozed during the Allies’ clearing of the camps. Contrasted with the still photographs which make up a part of the film’s archival footage, the indexical nature of the

photographic image presents the atrocities of the death camps with devastating force.

This scene is complimented by the film’s sustained focus on the camps’ monstrous reification of bodies: images of vast stocks of human hair, bodies repurposed as soap and fertilizer, and piles of skin for fashioning lamp shades and other furnishings.1

Debarati Sanyal provides a vivid interpretation of these images:

Human bodies have become commodities in a mad capitalist phantasmagoria…Yet Resnais’s camera visually returns these commodified remains back to nature…The camera stages a nature morte, in a shocking literalization of the expression, one that poignantly conveys the brute materiality of these remains and yet also gestures to the disquieting possibility of their aestheticization. (155)

This passage references several of Sanyal’s major concerns: it builds upon her claim that the film implicates capitalist modernity in the atrocities of the Third Reich; it articulates her focus on the film’s foregrounding of the corporeality of the camps, and it suggests the complicity of the film itself by its formalization of these images as a consumable aesthetic experience.

The film’s critique of its own formal project invokes the previously mentioned effacement of historical specificity. Annette Wieviorka comments on the enervated result of this effacement: “Auschwitz is more and more disconnected from the history which produced it…More importantly, Auschwitz has practically been set up as a concept, that of absolute evil [so that] the ‘it’ of Auschwitz Birkenau…is crammed full of too little historical knowledge” (quoted in Didi-Huberman, 85). Resnais’s virtuoso compositions implicate the film in an aestheticization of the Holocaust that in certain respects perpetuates this abstracting of the event away from history; in addition, the film as

1 Although much has been made of the notion that the Nazis harvested the skins of victims for lamp shades, no documented case of this crime has actually been confirmed. The other instances of human harvesting—soap, and so forth—are given accompanying images that serve as indexical proof.

commodity reifies historical specificity into a generic vision of human suffering that leaves the ethnic and racial logic of the Holocaust virtually unspoken. In historical context, this gesture reduplicates the genocide of Jews by also removing the

Holocaust—even as the event was still unfolding—from the realms of history and memory. The film therefore commits a symbolic violence in the very articulation of images, causing a profound disjunction in the hailed spectator subject.

At the same time, however, the film’s formal project also raises questions about precisely how to place a catastrophe such as the Holocaust in context, and in so doing to accomplish an adequate memorialization of the atrocities. Emma Wilson provides a vivid account of how the film invites a critique of its formalizing project. In “Resnais and the Dead,” she argues that the film’s aesthetic and thematic project radically questions the legitimacy of representation in the processes of mourning and memorialization:

“These images disturb me…These are images that disarm and unsettle, which challenge us to question whether we can construct a work of mourning and love, a work of restitution” (133). Wilson extends her challenge through her radical questioning of one of the great binaries of modernity: the division between self and other. Citing Judith

Butler, Wilson argues that Night and Fog foregrounds the universal vulnerability of the human body, thereby troubling the division between inside and outside: “Night and Fog finds an aesthetic of incremental horror which locates the body as site of common human vulnerability” (136). In the film’s multiple levels of abstraction and universality (of the Holocaust, of bodies), the crime of genocide emerges as a fundamentally human problem. Resnais’s film therefore addresses a viewer in a newly globalizing space—a viewer whose individual body indexes a global context of catastrophe and danger.

The centrality of the violated human body in Night and Fog is a major lever for the first two poles of the cosmopolitical spectator. As Wilson’s contemplative analysis suggests, the intensely corporeal images of mass death make a universal appeal to our sense of bodily vulnerability and our potential complicity in the improper memorialization of human suffering. The body as an absolutely-inclusive site of human concern also invokes a radical shame at the inability to atone for such unspeakable crimes. We feel this because even as we are thunderstruck by the spectacle of such horror, we are also made aware of our complicity in its commodification as a representation—a series of images that we consume.

A key component in Resnais’s shocking representation of commodified humanity is his revolutionary use of montage—an implementation that indexes cinema’s initially modernist disposition, prior to its appropriation as a vehicle for classical narrative. In

Night and Fog and Hiroshima mon Amour, montage becomes an aesthetic strategy that addresses the spectator’s sense of shame and complicity in the aesthetic reification of human trauma. That said, this initial address is the prelude to interpellating the viewer as a newly aware global subject—one who is invited to explore the previously unseen connections that implicate him in the concentrationary plague.

Joshua Hirsch’s excellent articulation of “posttraumatic cinema” implies how its use of montage makes Night and Fog such an important film in the history of documentary approaches to the Holocaust.2 In contrast to earlier documentary attempts

2 Hirsch’s account also provides a concise critique of the film’s complicity in suppressing the Jewish specificity of the Holocaust. Hirsch summarizes the film’s obfuscating approach: “The black-and-white segments, taken separately, narrate—in a series of ‘chapters’…the rise of Nazism, the creation and characteristics of the camps, and their liberation. They do not, however, refer to the difference between the many concentration camps for deportees in general and the six special extermination camps for Jews. The word juif is mentioned only once, in passing. (Its translation, ‘Jew,’ does not appear in the English subtitles.) Several six-pointed stars can be seen on the clothing of deportees in the film, but their

to reckon with the Holocaust, Resnais’s film eclectically mixes different techniques— both traditional and modernist—in order to interpellate a new viewing position. Hirsch calls this position “a posttraumatic historical consciousness,” and it is central to my articulation of the cosmopolitical spectator (41). Hirsch’s examination of tense in Night and Fog illuminates how the film disrupts conventional documentary form in general, and previous documentary approaches to the Holocaust in particular. In conventional documentary treatments of the Holocaust such as Nuremberg (Stuart Schulberg, 1946), the past is circumscribed within a logic of authorial mastery and strict historical periodization. Through techniques such as the omniscient narrator and the treatment of archival images as straightforward indexes of history, such films treat the past as transparently knowable, specifically to a moral authority identified with the present. The omniscient narrator as moral authority “explains” the significance of the images from a safe and unquestioned remove from the categorically past trauma.

In Resnais’s film, however, the past and the present are no longer so clearly separated, either existentially, epistemologically, or ethically. Resnais’s intersecting of both black-and-white archival film and new color footage of both concentration and death camps (especially Auschwitz-Birkenau) is the film’s major challenge to linear history. Hirsch describes this gesture as a transcription of “the past atrocities of the

Holocaust into the dimensions of present-day Auschwitz” (47). Resnais reverses the temporal logic of conventional documentary by locating the historical trauma of the

Holocaust in the contemporary settings of the now-deserted and moribund camps. What purpose—the identification of Jews for extermination—is not explained. A gas chamber is shown and discussed, but its specifically genocidal function is omitted. This referential fogginess meant that those spectators who already understood the genocidal aspect of the deportation might have taken the film to be addressing both the deportation in general and the genocide in particular. But for the majority, this was not the case” (Afterimage, 31).

is more, Resnais places his camera within the space of Auschwitz-Birkenau, suggesting that the phenomenon of the camps persists into the present-tense of the site of reception. Resnais’s audio-track augments this, as Jean Cayrol’s dialogue warns: “Even a peaceful landscape; even a field with crows flying over; even a road with cars, peasants, and couples passing by; even a holiday village with a fair and a steeple can lead the way to a concentration camp.” In concert with the new color footage of

Auschwitz, the commentary suggests that, far from being safely past, the trauma of the

Holocaust threatens to return at any moment, whether as the result of involuntary memory or because of humanity’s inability to learn the lessons of history. Cayrol’s commentary refers to this principle—the virtual present-ness of the Holocaust—as the

“concentrationary plague,” especially in the following, memorable statement:

Those of us who feign to take hope again as the image fades, as though there were a cure for the concentrationary plague. Those of us who feign to believe that all this happened only once, at a certain time and in a certain place, and those who do not look around us, and who do not hear the cry to the end of time.

Cayrol’s statement implies a powerful indictment of the sanitizing function of conventional documentary, which seeks to establish the Holocaust as an historical relic subject to the reassuring mechanisms of omniscient, linear historical authority. More powerfully, Cayrol’s words also place the spectator front-and-center, forcing them to occupy a position of radical proximity to the horrors of Nazi atrocities. Far from the safe remove of both classical narrative and documentary form, the spectators of Resnais’s film must reckon with their radical connectedness to this appalling moment in human history. We are reminded of our profound bodily vulnerability through the shocking archival footage of the camps, but the new color footage and Cayrol’s commentary also invoke the shame and guilt of seeing these images aesthetically reified as film. On an

even more extreme plain, we are also made aware of our potential involvement in a literal reinstatement of the concentrationary plague, which Cayrol suggests still lives with us, threatening to return at every moment. In its disturbing intermixing of new and archival footage, Resnais’s montage thus generates complex, intersecting associations that foreground the spectator’s connected-ness to multiple and perhaps previously- unseen spaces and temporalities. Resnais’s montage implicates the viewer in a cinematic work that entails both an awareness of one’s complicity and a willingness to continue regardless, aware of the necessity of accomplishing a work of mourning and remembrance.

The force of montage in Resnais’s films—and in dialectical montage as such— lies in its ability to suggest the unfolding dynamism of human memory and imagination—a process that Night and Fog implies as a challenge to Cayrol’s

“concentrationary plague.” This notion of a “concentrationary plague” is the focal point of

Griselda Pollack and Max Silverman’s Concentrationary Cinema: Aesthetics as Political

Resistance in Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog. In the book’s introduction, Pollack and

Silverman provide a compelling definition of their major term: “[W]e are proposing the term concentrationary cinema to refer both to a historically-created and realized system of terror that took place in real locations and to a theoretical concept that emerges from this state of affairs as a new political possibility” (“Introduction,” 4). Pollack and

Silverman suggest that the Holocaust can no longer be mediated as a straightforwardly past event; it must be reckoned with as a dynamic and unfolding force of living history.

Resnais and Cayrol establish the Holocaust as a work of memory, or what Michael

Rothberg, in his articulation of multidirectional memory, calls a “making-present, a

proposition that generates an understanding of memory as something that happens in the present, as a form of labor that is both individual and collective in its makeup” (3-4).

The circumstances of the film’s production and post-production augment this making-present. Resnais and Cayrol were both quite vocal in their motivations for making Night and Fog. Despite the French state’s injunction on any mention of the conflict in Algeria, Resnais and Cayrol nevertheless asserted their film’s connection to the unfolding French crimes against humanity. In a bold condemnation of the French government’s censoring of the French role in the Holocaust—evident especially in a repressed archival photograph of a French officer at the Pithiviers camps—Cayrol insisted that the film “told a story that didn’t only engage the Nazis…but also our own country, for we had no right to modestly avert our gaze before a drama that had contaminated us all” (cited in Sanyal, 165). In the views of the filmmakers, their film did not simply memorialize past atrocities, but also enacted a dialogue on the repressed atrocities of the unfolding present. Making-present therefore has two senses: the past is bought forward and haunts the contemporary site of reception; at the same time, this haunting also invokes present-day atrocities, especially those which society attempts to repress. In Resnais’s films, traumas suddenly erupt in the allegorical interstices of his modernist aesthetic.

Resnais’s and Cayrol’s appropriation of the Holocaust as a way to gesture towards specifically French atrocities was and is deeply problematic. Indeed, it needs to be reiterated that in the original context of these statements, Resnais and Cayrol were among many to contribute to the effacement of the anti-Semitism that motivated the suppression of the Holocaust as an anti-Semitic genocide. Their decision to efface the

ethnic specificity of the Holocaust represents a pervasive tendency in the context of the film’s initial exhibition. Sanyal’s claim about the film’s foregrounding of its own complicity, then, must be extended beyond the aesthetic commodification of the camps to include an effacement of the central feature of the Holocaust’s historical specificity. In the names of “Algeria” and “the concentrationary plague,” the Holocaust becomes an index and cipher for translating other atrocities.

The nature of the film’s complicity raises the question of whether the foregrounding of such complicity can also excuse it. From a contemporary viewpoint, however, the gesture of effacement reflects the cross-referencing impulse that sees the

Holocaust as a symbolic event from which other traumatic histories can be articulated.

While the ambivalence of such a gesture—one that Sanyal and others also locate in

Resnais’s film form—is undeniable, it also serves as a significant device in the interpellation of a cosmopolitical spectator: far from the injunction proposed by Elie

Wiesel (C.f. Against Silence, 158), Resnais sees the Holocaust—among other crimes— as co-implicated in a proliferating series of connected events that tie global humanity together in a force field of guilt, shame, suffering, and solidarity. As the film has travelled and lived through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, this cross-referencing impulse has gained an increasingly relevant political potential.

Seen as an intervention of multidirectional memory, Resnais’s film becomes a work of intellectual and philosophical labor—that is, as the production of memory, identity, consciousness, and so on. Figured as a form of labor, the work of memory in

Night and Fog also invokes the spectator’s status as a subject of capital: a subject, in other words, whose cognitive capacities have been developed and conditioned as

valuable by the processes of industrial, capitalist modernity. As a sign in itself, the montage of the film projects this modernity both through its aesthetic commodification of images and through its invocation of the spectator’s cognitive laboring. We see this first and foremost through the narrativizing impulse of the montage track, or what Emma

Wilson refers to as the creation of spatial and temporal continuity (“Resnais and the

Dead”). As Cayrol’s voice-over describes the deportation process, for instance, the image track cuts synchronously with his recitation of the various deportation sites. The lines “[s]eized in Warsaw, deported from Lodz, Prague, Brussels, Athens…” are synchronized with cuts to archival footage (still and moving images) of deportees and the deportation process. In one notable section, Cayrol delivers the lines “the masses, taken by surprise, by error or by chance, begin their journey to the camps.” The montage compliments this statement with two scenes of archival footage. The first shows a crowd of deportees moving through a street, carrying their belongings. The second image is a high-angle long shot of what appears to be a warehouse interior, packed full of deportees. The complementary relationship between voice and image tracks hails the spectator to produce a cognitive binding if these images; to render them, in other words, into a reified aesthetic experience. The film therefore invokes the immaterial product generated by spectatorial activity in the service of reifying filmic material as “consumable aesthetic experience.” The montage of Night and Fog, in other words, indexes commodity fetishism and the training of the human nervous system as a network for its psycho-dynamic reifications. On this register, Resnais’s film indexes and critiques capital’s mining of the human sensorium—a process that the film’s montage both contests and perpetuates.

The Janus-faced quality of montage in Resnais’s film emerges through a dialectical oscillation between formal disjunction and formal continuity, usually in concert with the film’s famous voice-over. For instance, as the voice-over describes the grimly banal process of establishing the camps, a series of archival photographs detailing different parts of the camps plays across the screen. The coordination of images to the voice-over has a suturing effect, creating a sense of continuity and linearity in line with the narrative progression of the voice-over. In an even more disturbing sequence, the voice-over describes the grim process of internment: capture, transport by train, selection of groups for work or murder, forced labor, torture, starvation, sickness, and finally death. As with the exposition of the camps, a series of archival photographs complement the voice-over. The viewer sees images depicting crowds of prisoners being forced onto trains, images of trains in transit, and so on. The sequence reaches its devastating conclusion with the horrifying process of selection. Wilson provides a significant account of this final, overwhelming sequence:

[W]e see women undressed, sitting on the ground, lined up naked and then running forwards, under the gaze of SS officers. Compositional resemblances between the images—the lines of women creating a segmented image, the contrast of their dark hair and pale flesh, the shadow of features indistinct in the shots—seem futher to attract a sequential reading. (“Resnais and the Dead,” 131)

Wilson provides a telling analysis of the film’s adherence to a certain continuity—this is not the continuity of classical (Hollywood) narrative, but the binding in time of still images linked thematically by their content. In one particularly vivid sequence, Resnais catalogues the grim process of selection in which prisoners are ticketed for labor or immediate death. Wilson analyzes the semblance of sequential ordering created by

Resnais, especially on the level of “compositional resemblances” and subject matter. In

her estimation, this collage-like attempt at narrative ordering invites an impulse to resist the narrative impulse and focus instead on the indexicality of the images—their capturing of a person’s appalling experience at a specific moment. The tension between the epistemological imperatives of narrative and the ethical injunction to stay with the singular sites of suffering indicates the extent to which the film makes complicity a major subject. In addition to thematizing complicity, however, this tension also indicates the ambivalent role of the human sensorium—it’s conditioning as a machine cued to reify images in space and time. Much like the psycho-dynamic conditioning associated with classical narrative, Night and Fog expropriates the human sensorium and its historically- developed capacity to create narrative out of images. Unlike classical narrative, however, the film foregrounds this process through the openly dialectical progression of its montage, inviting the viewer to become aware of the binding process and its implications. Sanyal makes precisely this argument:

[Resnais and Cayrol’s] self-conscious formalism stages continuities between the concentrationary system and the processes of its historical and artistic representation in their converging violence upon the bodies that circulate within these economies. Formalism opens a passage, or complicity, between horror and the everyday by showing the proximities between Nazi extermination and the phantasmagoria of capitalist production. (154)

Sanyal’s interpretation connects the Nazi death machine to capitalist modernity, an idea already reiterated earlier in this chapter. However, I believe the film’s correlating of “horror and the everyday” goes beyond the realm of representation by invoking the cognitive, psycho-dynamic processes through which filmic representations are constituted in the interface between the spectator and the interpellating apparatus. In other words, the link between the concentrationary

plague and capitalist expropriation exceeds the virtual frame of representation and invades the very nervous system of the spectator.

The film contests precisely the narrative tendency of the cinematic apparatus through the formal disjunctions which interrupt the formal patterning described above.

As Wilson’s analysis demonstrates, the disjunctive effect of the images themselves also interrupt narrative progression through the indexical nature of the film’s archival footage.

In conjunction with the montage effect, the horrifying realities of life and death in the camps force the viewer out of any kind of formalizing relationship; we simply stand stricken by the images of death and suffering: piles of severed human heads, the bulldozed bodies of the emaciated dead, the all-but-dead prisoners in the bunks, their skin hugging their bones. These images overwhelm our cognitive capacity to “make sense” of them.

As historical analyses such as Sylvie Lindeperg’s have demonstrated, the film was controversial in France because of an image showing a French soldier participating in the round-up of prisoners at the Pithiviers Camp. He is clearly identifiable because of his Kepi. As is well-known, this image was censored for the film’s original release because it contested the nationalist narrative of unified partisan resistance to the Vichy regime. France’s complicity in crimes against humanity became a national trauma that censorship could only partially repress. Lindeperg’s research also reveals how similar controversies erupted when the film was eventually exhibited in West Germany and the

United States (C.f. “Night and Fog: A History of Gazes,” in Pollack and Silverman). This is a crucial factor in Kristin Ross’s analysis of France’s “Americanization” in the postwar

period and in the wake of decolonization. In Ross’s account, the traumas of the war and the crisis in Algeria were contested by the “utopian” promises of consumer culture:

Immediately after the war a particular fantasy was exported by the United States, along with the gadgets, techniques, and experts of American capitalism, to a Europe devastated by war: the fantasy of timeless, even, and limitless development…[T]he arrival of the new consumer durables into French life…helped create a break with the eventfulness of the past, or better, helped situate the temporality of the event as itself a thing of the past. (9-10)

Consumer capitalism becomes the means to achieve a virtual end of history. This end of history was supposed to be a salve to France’s national consciousness in the face of recent traumas. If France’s socio-economic transition signaled an imminent end to the historical event, Night and Fog serves as a vivid reminder of the still-living forces of history and the ongoing engagement with the multiple temporalities of collective memory. As an event, Resnais’s film is a profoundly radical challenge to a major current of postwar European society.

Ross’s study is one of many that demonstrate how the capitalist dream of commodity fetishism has emerged with particular force in periods of crisis. Ross’s study engages a French crisis, but the metaphors, figures, and fetish objects of this crisis find their analogues in other imperial powers. At the turn of the century, for instance, commodity culture emerged in the British Empire as an antidote to a crisis that bore striking similarities to that of postwar France. In her study of racist iconography and commodity culture in British advertising of the period, Anne McClintock diagnoses imperial Britain in terms that are strikingly similar to Ross’s vision of France:

Soap [for McClintock, the synecdochical fetish of commodity culture] did not flourish when imperial ebullience was at its peak. It emerged commercially during an era of impending crisis and social calamity, serving to preserve, through fetish ritual, the uncertain boundaries of class, gender and race identity in a social order felt to be threatened by

the fetid effluvia of the slums, the belching smoke of industry, social agitation, economic upheaval, imperial competition and anticolonial resistance. (211)

Like the postwar French context, commodities promised a stable, purified social reality that had sublimated historical traumas and upheavals. According to McClintock, soap was figured as the privileged center of this new reality, both because of its place in domestic labor and its association with cleanliness and (racial, ethnic, gendered) purity

(212).

Ross traces a similar ethos of purity and cleanliness in the discourses concerning

French consumer culture in the postwar period. Writing on domestic commodities and the fetishistic role of the automobile, Ross cites Rolande Barthes’s semiotic analysis of the latter. In Barthes’s view, automobile advertising betrays France’s obsession with cleanliness through its vocabulary: the car is “shiny,” “waxed,” and “scrubbed,” expressing the apotheosis of smooth, stainless functionality (cited in Ross, 105). French literary modernism also proves susceptible to this current, as New Novel proponents such as Alain Robbe-Grillet conceptualize the project of postwar French literature as one of “cleansing” the novel of an outdated realism. Ross’s analysis of Robbe-Grillet’s literary manifesto anticipates her exploration of Barthes’s “structural man,” a new social subject defined by the endless, atemporal sequencing of technique, structure, and sequence—a subject, in other words, who is cleansed of content, meaning, and by extension historical time: “[S]tructural man was a disembodied creature, a set of mental processes…Subjectivity, consciousness, and agency…are effaced to the profit of rules, codes, and structures” (161). Here, the cleansing process amounts to a recolonization of the mind, a retraining of the human sensorium’s responses to the social order.

Compare this to McClintock’s interpretation of the role of advertising in the

dissemination of a new capitalist modernity: “Advertising’s chief contribution to the culture of modernity was the discovery that by manipulating the semiotic space around the commodity, the unconscious as public space could also be manipulated” (213). Like

Barthes’s structural man, the interpellated subject of advertising was recomposed from the inside out. A process of psycho-dynamic “cleansing” characterizes consumer capital’s expansion into and reification of the social order. Through commodity spectacle, French and British publics were interpellated as national subjects trained in the West’s racial, gender, and class hierarchies.

I argue that this recolonization of the mind which characterizes Europe throughout the twentieth-century—and especially during the periods discussed here—is invoked in Cayrol’s haunted reference to the concentrationary plague. In conjunction with Resnais’s implication of capitalist modernity in the horror of the Holocaust, Cayrol’s concept therefore addresses a much larger and ongoing phenomenon, of which the

Holocaust is undoubtedly one of the most terrifying and notorious results. A major current of the concentrationary plague is the training of the human mind for precisely the kind of mechanistic sequencing and moral desensitization that made the Holocaust possible. It is on this level that Resnais’s film form gains its radical potential, as both a complicit example of and challenge to capitalist modernity’s schematizing of human consciousness. The posited result of this schematization is a subject interpellated as an eternal (ahistorical) consumer.

The montage of Resnais’s film serves as both an example of but also a challenge to commodity fetishism’s annexation of history. The film actively hails an audience trained in the cognitive labor of imbuing the filmic stream of images with thematic and

narrative meaning. While the film may foreground this interpellation of its audience in a self-conscious way, it nevertheless attests to its dependency on capitalism’s positing of human cognition as labor—that is, as a value creating activity. Through the making- present conceptualized by Hirsch, however, the periodization of historical time is disrupted, which challenges the clean, orderly linearity of conventional historical narratives.

When interpreted as a film in dialogue with the ethical import of commodity fetishism, Resnais’s ambivalent montage becomes legible as an attempt to politicize the film text over and against the inoculating function of the commodity’s seamless leveraging of the social subject’s unconscious. In particular, montage dramatizes powerfully the horrors of the Nazi’s processing of human remains as commodity items.

In one especially chilling sequence, the film shows us archival footage of camp warehouses, in which human remains and confiscated possessions were housed. The images pass from mountainous piles of books and cooking ware to a stark long shot of human hair. The camera lingers in a close-up of one part of the pile, before panning up to reveal a deep focus shot of what looks to be a huge, cavernous room devoted solely to the housing of hair. The voice-over relates that this is women’s hair, and that it is used to make cloth. On que, the camera cuts to a close-up of folded sheets of cloth, their mundane appearance vividly expressing the banality with which the Nazis treated such atrocious appropriations of human remains. The cloth is only a prelude to even starker images of horror. The montage continues with a panning shot of millions of human bones—processed as fertilizer, according to the voice-over—before cutting to a vast garden . The montage sequence concludes with an appalling sequence of

dismembered human body parts: decapitated corpses, limbs, and heads. The first shot of this grim final sequence is what appears to be a room full of standing meat lockers. In the background, a group of men open one of them, which prompts the voice-over to declare “[f]rom the bodies, words are insufficient…” A quick sequence of shots exposes the afore-mentioned human remains before the voice-over, seemingly paralyzed by the images, concludes: “from the bodies they make soap.” This statement prompts a cut to an image of vats of raw soap, a set of hands reaching from screen left to scoop out a dollop, before cutting to a final image of dimpled bars of soap.

The ambivalence of the montage emerges from the tension between the aesthetic and sequential function of the montage—it’s narrative function and illusion of continuity—and the ethical imperative to memorialize the appalling processing of human bodies by the Nazi death machine. In this way, the spectator is pulled in two directions: hailed as an acculturated consumer of images but also as an obligated witness to the horrors of the death camps. The processing of human remains as commodity items also invokes industrial capitalist mechanisms, especially the modern factory. The final images that punctuate the concluding parts of each sequence—the folded cloth, the garden, the soap—show us the end result of such reifying mechanisms. The montage simulates the sequential, linear logic of both the factory assembly line and chronometric historical narrative, and in doing so yokes the horrors of the Holocaust to the formal patterning of modern industrial production. The final piece of this montage is the audience itself, figured as the grotesque consumer of these human remains as commodified images and imaged commodities. In this example, the simulation of sequential time has the effect of implicating the viewer’s habitus in that of the film’s,

again working to destabilize the clean distinction between past and present. This sequence among others links the rationalizing mechanisms of the Holocaust to the habituating factors that inform the viewer’s psycho-dynamic training as a subject of consumer capitalism, and by implication as a potential perpetrator of the concentrationary plague.

I am also driven to link the film’s images of soap to the colonial discourses surrounding cleanliness and the purifying function of domestic commodities. Although this linkage must admittedly be forced in some respects, nevertheless there are multiple factors that tempt me in this direction: we have Resnais and Cayrol’s insistence on linking their film to Algeria, the censored specter against which the new French consumer culture organized itself; we have the metaphor of cleanliness propagated by this consumer culture, a metaphor connected explicitly to the domestic site and actualized in the commodity items of the latter, of which soap is treated by both Ross and McClintock as its apotheosis; we have the film’s metaphor of “processing,” a metaphor that implicates not only the processing of commodities but also the processing of the film as commodity by the spectator’s historically-developed cognitive faculties; finally, there is the contingent historical fact that soap was a fetishized product in the national context in which Night and Fog would initially have circulated. What is more, the post-structuralist turn has taught us that any textual detail, no matter how circumspect, invites a host of unintended lines of flight. Indeed, this insight is one of the major levers for the cosmopolitical subject position I am trying to articulate.

In the spirit of allegory, I take the soap as symbolic of the Western subject’s impulse to purify itself and thereby maintain the binary of self/other through which

(neo)colonial identity maintains itself. Germany’s atrocious attempt at self-purification— through the mechanisms of the final solution—becomes, through the figure of soap, analogous with France’s attempt at self-purification through the simultaneous

“processes” of consumer culture and colonial repression. It should be said, of course, that the psycho-dynamic function of purification compensates for the exploitive arrangement of an emergent neocolonialism, in which the former colonies found themselves in a state of economic dependency on France. Just as the Holocaust represented a horrific attempt to purify the national body, so does France’s consumer culture ironically invoke the official suppression of torture and concentrationary horror in

Algeria.

The allegorical montage aesthetics of Night and Fog inform both the form and content of Resnais’s Hiroshima mon Amour. Night and Fog challenged the conventions of documentary by destabilizing linear time and its colonizing function; Resnais’s first feature film treats classical narrative cinema as its bogey, using the aesthetics of montage as an invocatory challenge to the hegemony of continuity editing. This formal challenge gains especial force in the film’s continued emphasis on the double significance of human cognition: in the film, Her and His cognitive labor interrupts formal continuity and exposes the disjunctive traumas that industrial, capitalist modernity has produced. At the same time, however, the unequal status of the “product” of their labor—the fact that Her memory and catharsis is privileged at the expense of His— implicates the film in a Eurocentric exoticization of the other. Finally, the film also suggests that Her memory work is also implicated in a larger narrative of the West, one that His involvement works to deconstruct and expose as a false narrative of Western

exceptionalism. While Night and Fog explores the horrific reification of bodies by the

industrial machines of the Nazi Holocaust, Hiroshima mon Amour explores the

aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima as an event that is vulnerable to the reifying

processes of subjective memory and forgetting. As we will see, the film also views

memory and forgetting as parts of the West’s reifying of otherness in its attempt to

shore up its identity and continue its exploitation of the formerly colonized world.

While Resnais’s first feature film mines new subjects in the fields of modern capitalism and globalization, it also maintains the central importance which Night and

Fog placed on the human body as a focal point of both cinematic reification and cosmopolitical connectivity. The film immediately foregrounds the body—or, more appropriately, bodies—as a central preoccupation. In what is probably the film’s most famous scene, the viewer first encounters a medium shot of two embracing torsos, their heads and lower bodies cut off by the camera frame. During the course of this long take, these torsos are showered with what variously appear to be “ashes, rain, dew, or sweat, whichever is preferred.” Marguerite Duras’s original script describes the intended effect:

“The main thing is that we get the feeling that this dew, this perspiration, has been deposited by the ‘atomic’ mushroom as it moves away and evaporates” (15, italics in original). As the voice track begins, the film cuts away to multiple images (archival footage and photographs) of the devastation of Hiroshima, especially its aftermath. The viewer must endure still and moving images of mass death and devastation, deformed and suffering patients, and the grimly fascinating relics of the explosion on display in a

Hiroshima museum. The viewer feels an imperative to look—to endure the horror rather than looking away, almost as a form of atonement for having not lived through this horror

with its victims. To ensure the viewer connects these images to the initial shot, the montage regularly cuts back to the embracing bodies. During the montage, a male and female voice argue; the female voice swears that she has seen “everything” in

Hiroshima, while the male voice repeatedly insists that she has seen “nothing.”

In its sustained attention to the atrocities of the recent past, Hiroshima mon

Amour continues one of the lines of flight pursued by Night and Fog: Through the device of the double voice-over, Resnais places the montage of mutilated and distorted bodies within a diegetic space of contested interpretation. The ambiguity of the voice-over—the mystery surrounding who the speakers are in the diegesis—and the cryptic nature of the montage invoke the spectator’s cognitive labor, which is typically suppressed by the conventions of continuity editing. Furthermore, the double voice-over maintains the ethical and epistemological circumspectness of Cayrol’s commentary by also foregrounding the lack of consensus regarding the images, especially whether or not they can function as adequate representations of such monumental human suffering.

The oppositional interaction of His and Her voices suggests that, rather than distinct characters, these speakers represent two extremes in an irresolvable debate about the possibility of documenting historical catastrophes and both an ethically and epistemologically legitimate way. What is missing in the extreme positions is the unspoken gray area in between the strict “I saw everything” and the equally strict “you saw nothing.” It is this unspoken ambivalence that interpellates the spectators, who find themselves navigating the mores of this debate as the montage of disembodied human torsos unfolds. In concert with the commodifying representations of the image track, the voice-track functions as a didactic reminder of the interpretive processes underpinning

film viewing. In Brechtian fashion, the film’s opening alienates us from an easy apprehension of the filmic text, insisting instead on conceptualizing film viewing as a complex and calculated activity that does not simply happen automatically.

This allegorical gesture is a prelude to the film’s critical exploration of the role of

the human sensorium in postwar global capitalism’s shockingly swift evolution. The

ambivalent commodification of the two bodies which the montage achieves is the base

from which the film explores the male and female protagonists’ implication in the value-

productive work of memory—an abstract labor that gains neocolonial implications. What

is more, while the film is set in postwar Hiroshima, the Nevers story also suggests that

France is also a major focal point of Resnais and Duras’s collaboration.

The film’s implicit critique of modern France hinges throughout on the central

characters. The narrative follows an unnamed French woman and Japanese man who

are having an affair during the two-day period in which the woman—an actress—is

shooting scenes in Hiroshima for a film “about peace.” Both characters agree that the

affair must end once Her time in Hiroshima is concluded. However, their growing

connection makes this an increasingly dreaded eventuality. As the affair develops, the

woman recounts the story of Her home village of Nevers and the forbidden affair with a

German soldier that took place there during World War II. The man becomes

increasingly interested in hearing this story, both as a way to become more intimate with

Her and to extend their time together. Eventually, the film becomes a surreal parable of

memory’s occult ability to transfigure the present by bringing the past to bear on it.

Although we don’t actually see the woman depart, it is strongly suggested that She

leaves Hiroshima, thus ending the affair. The narrative is structured around two time-

lines: the present-tense of the affair in Hiroshima, and the past-tense of Her affair and disgrace in Nevers. Over the course of the film, these two timelines become increasingly confused.

While the absence of proper names for either protagonist most obviously suggests the ostensibly universal import of the film, it also suggests that the specific characters in themselves are not as important as their allegorical significance.

Specifically, Resnais’s film presents an adulterous pair whose relationship puns ironically off French print culture’s reinvention of the heterosexual couple as the focal point for the new consumer culture. By making the couple interracial and locating the film in Japan, Resnais and Duras contest the West’s narrative of self and other, and they also insist on everyday life’s global significance, over and against commodity fetishism’s positing of the everyday as the focal point of the consumer subject’s fantasmatic isolation from social reality.

The film’s preoccupation with the quotidian is quickly made apparent. In an anticipation of Godard’s “pillow talk” scenes, the entirety of the narrative centers on an extended and constantly interrupted conversation between the protagonists—a conversation that takes place in both public and private spaces. The local settings of this conversation complement the global resonances of the film’s plot with an equal emphasis on the immediate contexts of subjective perception and experience; the local and the global are intertwined in a tense contiguity. More specifically, the local constantly serves as the spectral impetus for the female protagonist’s agonized account of Her past.

The spectral properties of the everyday first emerge in the aftermath of what we assume to be the couple’s first sexual encounter. She is framed in a medium shot drinking coffee and looking out of the hotel window at the landscape. Eventually, She turns around and contemplates the still-sleeping figure of Her lover. Initially smiling, Her expression changes when the camera cuts to a close-up of His hand, which occasions a cutaway to another hand, this one belonging to the prone body of an unknown man, his face covered in blood. A woman desperately kisses his face; the scene is held briefly before cutting back to the hotel, but the spectator recognizes the woman as the film’s female protagonist. This pattern repeats itself throughout the film: either as the result of déjà vu or through His insistent promptings, the woman remembers the trauma of Her past. This motif of the quotidian opening out onto historical traumas—traumas that are both local and global—locates trauma itself in the present tense of everyday life, suggesting that the film’s temporality is constitutively out of joint. As the film develops, past, present, and future become increasingly co-present to each other, even as She mourns the loss of Her memory and the inevitability of forgetting.

In concert with the disjunctive montages that compose Her memories, the more conventional compositions of many of the present-tense sequences function as a formal dialectic of past and present; this dialectic is a major engine for the film’s critique of the ethics of film form, especially the continuity editing practices associated with mainstream narrative film. As Wilson points out in her analysis of Night and Fog,

Resnais’s composition switches between the collage-aesthetic associated with modernist cinema and the illusion of continuous space and time associated with linear narrative (“Resnais and the Dead,” 133). A similar formal patterning characterizes

Hiroshima mon Amour. On the formal level, this is the most evident way in which

Resnais’s most famous documentary haunts his first feature film.

A telling example of this tension between linear narrative and atemporal montage occurs just after the female protagonist’s initial memory of the trauma in Nevers. Once the man wakes up, the film switches to a formal patterning that more or less conforms to the dictates of spatial and temporal continuity. We view the male protagonist in a long shot on the bed, and His look off-screen occasions an eye line match to Her; the high- angle framing corresponds to His position relative to Her as She looks down at Him. It is a conventional point-of-view shot in every way. Once She kneels down to serve Him some coffee, the film establishes a shot/reverse-shot axis, and an over-the-shoulder view of Her maintains spatial orientation and continuity. Throughout this sequence

(even including Her disturbed gaze at His hand), He and She are unerringly separated on opposite sides of the frame; He on the left, and She on the right. This spatial continuity continues once the film fades into a scene of them showering together: the camera is positioned directly behind His head in a close-up as He walks towards Her.

Again, He is positioned to the left of the frame, while She appears to the right. As they talk, He crosses behind Her to occupy the right side of the frame, with Her now occupying the left. The film fades to black, and then fades in to a long shot of them on the balcony that again maintains the positioning of the previous shot: She appears on the left, and He on the right. The entire stretch from the bed to the shower to the balcony features a formal patterning that is in stark contrast to the scenes of traumatic memory, which become more and more pronounced as the film goes on. Resnais’s

famous—and notorious—use of the jump cut becomes pervasive as Her memories intrude every more insistently.

The scenes of conventional linearity (typified by shot/reverse-shot patterns) invoke the spatial and temporal logic of industrial modernity: the linear sequencing of images and the illusion of continuity so central to mainstream commercial cinema finds its analogue in the sequencing of commodities within the fabricated continuity of modern capitalism’s public sphere. In Kristin Ross’s account, this sequencing logic directly contested the radical import of the past—a past dominated by traumas that were propagated in the name of Western progress and expansion:

Capitalist modernization presents itself as timeless because it dissolves beginning and end, in a historical sense, into an ongoing, naturalized process, one whose uninterrupted rhythm is provided by a regular and unchanging social world devoid of class conflict…[T]he arrival of the new consumer durables into French life—the repetitive, daily practices and new mediations they bought into being—helped create a break with the eventfulness of the past, or better, helped situate the temporality of the event itself as a thing of the past…Modernization promises a perfect reconciliation of the past and future in an endless present, a world where all sedimentation of social experience has been leveled or smoothed away. (10-11)

A major aspect of the film’s critique of capitalist modernity therefore hinges on de- differentiating the realms of leisure and labor: the film’s ongoing conversation takes place in zones associated with both leisure and labor: cafes, restaurants, hotel rooms, film sets, public protests, a museum, and so on. As the mise-en-scene of the characters’ traumatic dialogue, these spaces become haunted by the trauma of the past in much the same way that She is, and they also serve as the major settings for the collaborative labor of memory. The zones of public and private thus become lightning rods for the specters of the past. The initial cutaway to what we will later learn is Her dead German lover is the first of many scenes in which the domestic zone of

heterosexual congress becomes tainted by the traumas of capitalist modernity. The film’s Japanese setting is therefore haunted by the symbolic function of quotidian consumer objects that reference a social and economic paradigm which was already figured as global. Regardless of setting, the film’s treatment of the quotidian as the site for memory’s traumatic eruption contests a narrative of modern time that is unquestionably of France and the West, but also of import to the entire world as the potential domain for postwar capitalist expansion. Figured as a form of labor, the memory work of the two protagonists is constituted by the mechanisms of industrial modernity, even as it also interrupts the fantasy of seamless linearity so central to commodity fetishism.

The film’s famous opening montage suggests this through a sequence of long shots of different spaces of the city that begins with images of a tourist bus and a female tour guide speaking to the passengers. As the female protagonist’s voice continues to speak on the sound track, the ensuing shots of Hiroshima are framed on the level of both sound and image by Her experience as a Western tourist. Significantly, the first shots we see are of ruined buildings and rubble. She speaks of “the obvious necessity of remembering” as these images play, and then ominously suggests that “It will begin again…200,000 dead and 80,000 wounded in nine seconds. Those are the official figures. It will begin again.” As this ambivalent statement is spoken, the montage moves from images of devastation to scenes that appear to show contemporary

Hiroshima, in a state of repair after the bombing. This suggests on the one hand that the threat of another catastrophe like Hiroshima will recur, but it also invokes the repetitious pattern of trauma, as the “necessity of remembering” forces one to return again and

again to the traumatic experience. At first, then, the images and voice track insist on both remembering the bombing and on placing it in its proper context. Eventually, however, the montage cuts back to an image of the anonymous bodies in coital embrace, and this image begins a sequence of a tourist bus’s route through Hiroshima’s bombing sites. This sequence is rendered through forward tracking shots that again show us different views of the Hiroshima cityscape. She speaks the following lines as the images play:

I meet you. I remember you. Who are You? You’re destroying me. You’re good for me. How could I know that this city was tailor-made for love? How could I know you fit my body like a glove? I like you. How unlikely…How all of a sudden…You’re destroying me. You’re good for me…Please, devour me. Deform me to the point of ugliness. Why not you? Why not you in this city and in this night so like other cities and other nights you can hardly tell the difference?

These lines, delivered as they are prior to the establishment of the protagonists’ identities, are incredibly cryptic, but they retroactively gain tremendous import for the affair which follows. The ‘you’ of the monologue retroactively attaches to at least two different signifieds: it is the Japanese lover, but also the dead German soldier. Even before the establishment of any of the crucial narrative details which follow, the conflation of His identity with that of Her dead lover has already began, and the city of

Hiroshima becomes so “like other cities…you can hardly tell the difference.” Of course, the indexical images of the city which play along with this statement contest this effacement of specificity and place. However, the sequence of tracking shots are framed by images of a tour bus of Hiroshima’s atomic sites and a tour guide cheerfully speaking to the bus passengers on an intercom. The tracking shots of Hiroshima are thereby framed within a logic of voyeuristic tourism; this framing device supplements

Her voice-over by enclosing Hiroshima within the psycho-dynamic perspective of a

tourist who will make this city the scene of Her private, fantasmatic trauma. In other words, Hiroshima is reified as a sublimated object for a Western subject.

As with Resnais and Cayrol’s reification of the Holocaust as an allegorical focal point for Algeria and capitalist modernity, then, Hiroshima mon Amour is similarly complicit in its reification of Hiroshima—and the Japanese lover—as conduits for a critical exploration of involuntary memory and trauma. The dialogic encounters between the two protagonists increasingly emphasize the Japanese man’s acquiescence to the

French woman’s traumatic recall of Nevers. What is more, the film never attempts to recount the man’s own memory of the war, instead focusing exclusively on His supplemental support for the woman’s memory work. As Nevers impinges upon and dilutes the historical catastrophe of Hiroshima, the film’s exploration of memory and trauma makes the city and its settings metonymical representations of the postwar world’s imminent placement within exploitive mechanisms of globalization. The specificity of Hiroshima is attenuated in the montage’s aesthetic, which reifies the film’s mise-en-scene as an abstracted global space in which a Eurocentric vision of the centered Western subject has already achieved symbolic and literal hegemony.

The film’s treatment of its Japanese protagonist is similarly complicit in the reification of historical specificity, but it also foregrounds this complicity. In its privileging of the female protagonist’s past at the expense of that of her lover, the film invites its spectator to consider how the effacement of the Japanese man’s own testimony reflects the effacement of Hiroshima by the Nevers flashbacks, and therefore how the film also reifies Hiroshima as a vehicle for a broader critique of commodity fetishism and capitalist continuity. The French woman’s own reification of Hiroshima as an object of

tourist apprehension—a series of installations in a museum that she may consume at leisure—in the film’s beginning foregrounds the film’s open critique of its own complicity even further. The montage aesthetic conspires with the woman’s memorial labor to fragment Hiroshima and insert the fantasmatic memory of Nevers.

The sequence of His and Her second sexual encounter, at His home, provides a major example of how the film is both complicit in but also resistant to the effacement of

His historical experience, as well as the specificity of Hiroshima. Contra the

Westernized hotel room of their first encounter, His home is a Japanese style apartment, with sliding Shoji doors and floor mats instead of European furniture. In a shot/reverse-shot pattern of their initial exchange, Resnais places Her against a bookshelf, with the rows of Japanese titles clearly visible. A picture of what appears to be a statue of the Buddha also appears in the background. As they begin to kiss, the film transitions to the aftermath of their lovemaking: a medium two-shot of them embracing on a Japanese style bed mat. It is here that She begins her memorializing of the event in Nevers in earnest, surrounded by multiple signifiers of native Japanese culture. Throughout the sequence, Resnais consistently intercuts between flashbacks of

Nevers and the present, reminding the viewer of the setting of Her memory work. In this way, His cultural and historical specificity informs the space even as he increasingly makes himself a helpmate in Her traumatic remembrances.

The film’s complicity in Her reification of Him and Hiroshima becomes representative of the ambivalence of the cosmopolitical spectator. In its obsession with universal connections and global schemas, the hermeneutic subject of the cosmopolitical spectator executes an abstracting dialectic that mimics the logic of

Western, neocolonial modernity. The other side of this coin, however, is the cosmopolitical spectator’s emergence through the disruptive singularity of personal experience in the face of world history. Even though the memory images of Hiroshima mon Amour are tainted by a Eurocentric reification, the film’s foregrounding of personal memory as such becomes a way to contest the reductive logic of conventional historical linearity, challenging history with a capital ‘H’ with the “history from below” of the individual historical agent. If the film chooses a Eurocentric vessel to express this idea, this should not prevent us from seeing its potential application above and beyond the film text. In its associational logic, the involuntary memory of the female protagonist becomes expressive of any historical agent’s disruptive, dialogic encounter with coercive ideologies and institutional repression.

Duras’s script indicates the tension between specificity and abstraction. Her synopsis for the film foregrounds her script’s challenge to the straightforward presentation of the commonplace. In the world of her film, the everyday becomes an allegorical focal point: “Nothing is ‘given’ at Hiroshima. Every gesture, every word, takes on an aura of meaning that transcends its literal meaning…Hiroshima will be the common ground…where the universal factors of eroticism, love, and unhappiness will appear in an implacable light” (9-10). This last point is especially important, for it highlights the universal gesture that motivates the film: in a world where capitalist modernity is hollowing out all alternatives to it, the everyday takes on a new significance. Duras’s assertion that Hiroshima will function as a common ground suggests a rather conventional, even bourgeois, view of universal principles, but it can also be read as a commentary on the leveling out of the world accomplished by

industrial modernity: in a world increasingly defined by capitalist logics of time and space, the everyday spaces of Hiroshima become emblematic of a state of being that characterizes the globalizing world as such. Hiroshima as proper name is potentially figured as exchangeable with France, Nevers, etc. While to a certain extent complicit in this conflation, Resnais’s film also connects this equivalence to the fallible subjective memories of the female protagonist, who can be viewed as making Hiroshima the fantasmatic playground of her personal quest for self-actualization. In this way, the film maintains a critical gap between the female protagonist’s perspective and that of the audience. As the proceeding discussion hopefully makes clear, however, the proper names “Hiroshima” and “Nevers” are not simply exchangeable; rather, their connectedness relates to the idea of non-identity as a place from which to construct connectivities. I argue that difference as a universal factor—the idea that, in colloquial terms, “we are all different”—both binds us together while also maintaining a paradoxical distinction that safeguards singularity.

This exchangeability of common names—and, by extension, historical events and situations—is one of the great sources of concern for Resnais scholars. Wilson, again, provides a succinct summary of this concern: “One of the risks of the film is the way it appears to allow the trauma of Nevers [the private trauma of the French woman] to take precedence over the mass horror of Hiroshima. This appears confirmed specifically in the way in which the film pays little or no attention to the Japanese man’s recollection of Hiroshima, to his perspective” (Alain Resnais, 53). If Nevers simply becomes substitutable—even identical—to the mass-scale trauma of Hiroshima, then

the film would indeed be guilty of an unpardonable obfuscation. Eventually, however,

Wilson appeals to a more nuanced understanding of the film:

The film shows two events, and places, shadowing each other: parallels and echoes proliferate, not in an attempt to stress equivalence, but to show how subjective perception influences views of both personal and public histories. The woman arguably finds her own history in Hiroshima: the relevance of Hiroshima to her love story is a delusion, but one portrayed in the film with sensitivity. (54)

The film is therefore really about the non-identity of the two events; that is, it demonstrates that the conflation of Hiroshima and Nevers is imperfect. As a film about

“two events…shadowing each other,” Hiroshima mon Amour dramatizes how neither term can be reduced to the other, even as abstracting impulses of memory and montage work to fragment and interconnect the two settings. Within non-identity, then, there is contiguity, albeit a contiguity born of subjective memory.

Scott Nygren’s analysis of Hiroshima mon Amour in his study of Japanese cinema provides a major articulation of the non-identity that haunts the film. Nygren reads Hiroshima mon Amour as an inverted rashamen: “a love story between a man from a culture implied to be superior with a woman from a supposedly inferior society”

(187). By making the union between a European woman and a Japanese man, the film problematizes the subordination of an oppressed other performed by conventional rashamen films. Just as profoundly, Nygren traces the film’s challenge to Western

Orientalism through its modernist aesthetic and foregrounding of memory as partial, incomplete, and compromised. Specifically, the film moves away from Orientalist representations of Asia and towards an exploration of what Nygren calls a “modernist limit.” This limit point—generated by film form and the fragmented memory work of the protagonists—exposes the West as a finite and historically situated entity, rather than

the privileged bearer of universal reason, knowledge, and enlightenment. In Nygren’s terms, the film exposes and explores the non-identity of the West and its universalist conceits:

Hiroshima mon Amour is neither the truth nor the falsification of Japan, but engages the figure of Japan as it circulates across cultural discourses. The film both recognizes and misses significant features of a Japanese context in a complex play of insight and blindness. As such, it marks the process of how knowledge is necessarily produced within discursive limits, and never as a transcendent universalism. (188).

Exposed as discursive, the codification of Asia is foreclosed by the limits of the West, which is incapable of actually reckoning with Asian cultural differences, much less with the figures of the East that inhabit Western discourses. Because “Asian representations remain mute” within Western discourse…Asia remains foreclosed from Western thought and we encounter ‘nothing but the West” (189). Nygren places the film in a larger argument about Eastern discourse and its profound challenge to the Western cogito and the metaphysics of presence, but for my purposes his analysis highlights how Her remembrances become legible as Western attempts to conceptualize an epistemological limit for which the East is the ultimate figure. Nygren’s analysis highlights the profound discontinuity between the figures of East and West in the film, and by extension the discontinuity between Her story and the trauma of Hiroshima.

Nygren’s concluding remarks are significant here: “Nevers/Hiroshima proposes a specific exchange of representations to imagine atrocity and trauma across cultural difference…Hiroshima mon Amour acts as a Western Rashomon, producing a break in historical discourse provoked by conflicted and unresolvable narratives of past trauma”

(191). The film attempts a dialogue across cultural difference, but one that is haunted by the East as modernist limit of Western discourse.

In concert with the anonymity of the film’s protagonists, the contiguity generated by Her traumatized remembrances implicates the viewer in a work of memory that is all of a sudden global in import. This is a crucial dimension of what I am calling the cosmopolitical spectator that I believe this film hails. The anonymity of the main characters indicates the universal import of the plot and its themes—memory and trauma—but it also suggests that these anonymous figures symbolize, for lack of a better option, the newly connected status of the finite human agent in the wake of capitalist modernity. The film’s opening montage, in which abstract bodies and scenes of suffering Hiroshima victims are intercut, dramatizes the global interconnectedness— concrete and abstract—of persons in the aftermath of World War II. The dead of

Hiroshima, of Auschwitz, and of Algeria haunt the interstices of the montage, while the ash, rain, and/or dew that sprinkles His and Her bodies functions as a brutally homogenized signifier of the exterminated bodies produced by industrialized mass murder. The overall effect encourages a sense of global solidarity with the anonymous dead, and the connective tissue of this solidarity is again the vulnerable human body that serves as the film’s major sign of universality.

At the same time, however, this opening scene also stages the difficulty of such global solidarity. This difficulty is likewise suggested by the montage aesthetic and by the initial withholding of who the speakers on the voice-track are. The indeterminate relationship between the voice-track and the image-track foregrounds the montage as a contingent aesthetic gesture, and it therefore foregrounds the orchestrated fragmentation of diegesis and spectatorial knowledge which suspends the spectator’s comprehension. Maureen Turim’s reading of this scene articulates the implied

separation of the characters, a separation that becomes more legible once the flashback structure of the film is instituted: “[w]e can retrospectively hear the opening dialogue as the poetic abstraction of a possible dialogue between the two lovers that is at the same time ‘impossible’ in the manner of Duras’s fiction—too abstract to be real”

(211). The montage aesthetic and the labor of memory therefore also suggest an unbridgeable separation: between the protagonists, between spectator and text, between signifier and signified, and so on. In this respect, again, Resnais’s film is very much about non-identity, in that the experiences of the protagonists are intermingled without ever becoming totally assimilated to each other. Non-identity is crucial to an understanding of the cosmopolitical spectator—in fact, it forms one of its principle antinomies: As a universal constituter of experience, historical difference is also the common principle through which anyone and everyone engages with their own relationship to the world and to each other. In other words, it is by recognizing difference as universally constitutive that the cosmopolitical spectator comes into being.

The film’s projection of a global consciousness is all the more radical in that it is grounded in an ongoing critique of specifically French crimes against humanity. The film reflects France’s complicity in both the Holocaust and the ongoing suppression of

Algeria. The film accomplishes this primarily through the female protagonist, whose body and personal history index a specifically French history of violence. Although

Resnais’s film is not mentioned in his study, the centrality of a female character reminds one of Mark Betz’s exploration of the symbolic role of women in postwar European cinema. Betz’s analysis treats female characters as focal points for national cinema’s tense exploration of the attractions and anxiety’s attending the repositioning of racial,

gendered, and national identities in the era of decolonization. For Betz, women in these films stand for the national body—that is, for the Eurocentric self—but they also stand for the other by virtue of their gender. This doubled identity is the pressure point for postwar European art cinema’s negotiation of Europe and its others (C.f. Betz, Beyond the Subtitle).

The female protagonist of Hiroshima mon Amour plays a strikingly similar role.

She symbolizes Frenchness and French national identity, but her status as a woman also renders her as other within the androcentric economy of the French public sphere.

As an actant, she is therefore able to fulfill several important thematic roles in the film.

First of all, her Frenchness inflects the personal story of Nevers and invites the viewer to read it as a national allegory. On this register, psychoanalytic dream theory’s concepts of condensation and displacement provide useful tools for analysis. She is a condensation of several different thematic vectors: the fetishized female consumer subject of the new France, an incarnation of French national identity, a spectral other to the latter’s androcentrism, and a symbol of French complicity in crimes against humanity. She is also an emblem of the Western self, measured against Hiroshima as a spectral other that returns the former’s own monstrosity to the surface of history.

The story of Nevers features a notable displacement when read from the viewpoint of recent French history. The female protagonist’s punishment—her confinement, beating, and especially the shaving of her head—references the actual practice of ritualistically punishing female collaborationists (C.f. Beevor, “An Ugly

Carnival”). In this respect, the film invokes a specific historical case that demonstrates

France’s misogynistic reaction to collaborationism—as is so often the case, women

become scape goats of the national body. At the same time, however, the film’s allegorical structure and abstracting montage also suggests that this representation of a specific phenomenon may also be read more generally as symbolic of French complicity in the Holocaust—that is, as symbolic of the Vichy regime’s collaborationist affair with

Nazi Germany.

The scenes of Her degradation in the basement of her parents’ home augments this commentary with two important details. When she is first confined, she desperately claws the stone walls of the basement, causing her nails to splinter off and leaving bloody scratch marks. As Sanyal points out in her analysis, the image of these marks references similar images in Night and Fog, where the camera shows us images of claw marks on the walls of gas chambers. At the same time, Her hair has been shaved off as punishment for her transgression. While this again references a real form of punishment visited upon women accused of collaborationism, Nygren points out that it also makes her resemble a prisoner of the Nazi death camps. Through these competing details,

She is figured as both a victim and a perpetrator of atrocities: she is the suffering body exterminated in the gas chambers, the victim of misogynistic nationalist punishments, and a signifier of the French Nation’s complicity in crimes against humanity. The religious undertones of this sequence invite such a reading: the stony basement reminds one of a medieval dungeon, while Her bleeding nails and shaved head suggest the mortifications of the flesh that attend punishment for heresy. She is sinner and saint, victim and perpetrator, self and other.

The signs of French complicity do not only invoke the Holocaust, but also Algeria.

As the metaphorical figure of the tortured body, She invokes the French use of torture to

suppress the Algerian resistance movement. On this level, the Nevers story is especially provocative because Her torture at the hands of the town folk—and her own parents—is definitely not a matter of gathering intelligence, the common justification for the use of torture. Rather, it is an explicit attempt to dominate and humiliate; in short, it is a concerted effort to isolate and dehumanize Her. Kristin Ross’s account of the

French debate on torture is both insightful and chilling in this regard:

Sartre argues that what is being fought out in the torture chambers is the whole question of species; only one of us is a man. In other words, at precisely the moment that the colonized demand, through their solidarity within a collectivity, the full status of “human,” they must be made to designate themselves as humiliated, broken, less than human, animals. Roger Trinquier [a French officer during the Algerian war] also admits that information gathering is secondary to the true purpose of torture. For him torture…was…a means of destroying, in each fallen individual, the sense of solidarity with an organization and a collectivity. (115-116)

Her embodied suffering in the basement of Nevers hereby becomes symbolic of one of the innumerable torture chambers in which the Algerian body was made to confirm

Imperial France’s racist ethos.

Read as a national allegory, the story of Nevers is a focal point for the film’s exploration of the ethics and politics of forgetting. Her railing against the imminent forgetting of her German lover in the course of time becomes a commentary on

France’s own failure to account for the crimes of the Vichy regime and the willful forgetting of its role in the Holocaust. This same argument can be extended just as forcefully to the crimes in Algeria, which French censorship was in the process of

“forgetting” even before the events were concluded. On this register, Resnais’s disjunctive montages insist on the spectral return of historical trauma against the forced forgetfulness of capitalist and nationalist renderings of linearity and chronometric progress. The originating germ for this spectrality is again the finite body, whose

mortification and suffering indexes the exterminated legions of the twentieth-century. It is no accident that the most vivid remembrances of Nevers occur while both characters are in a state of undress, often post-coital. Duras’s intermixing of death and Eros becomes a fortuitous gesture, forcing the spectator to reckon with the sensual body’s undeniable role in historical remembrance and interpretation. Like a Proustian scene of involuntary memory, the carnal touch instigates Her traumatized memorializing. This is another crucial dimension of the cosmopolitical spectator; unlike the dematerialized, even ethereal, spectator subject of classical narrative cinema, the cosmopolitical spectator is possessed of and by a body, one that She shares in common with an abstract humanity. The cosmopolitical spectator is first of all a collective subject position: it is an historically situated site for global humanity’s paradoxical commonwealth of identity and difference. As an example, the spectators of Hiroshima mon Amour are simultaneously hailed as complicit French subjects and as the suffering bodies of global humanity’s oppression under the forces of capitalist modernity. In other words, like Her, they are both victim and perpetrator, self and other, different and the same.

The foregoing analysis demonstrates how Resnais’s film engages with atrocity and trauma across multiple cultural registers, and especially those concerning the larger discursive entity of the West. Cathy Caruth’s excellent analysis of Hiroshima mon

Amour extends this critique by investigating the multilingual valence of the film’s dialogic encounters, not only through the two protagonists, but also the transient intrusions of others. In one especially notable scene near the film’s conclusion, a Japanese man approaches the female protagonist in a café named Casablanca. Assuming she speaks

English, the man starts to make small talk in an attempt to flirt with her. However, his language is stilted; as Caruth points out, he sounds as if he has memorized the lines from a handbook. In this phonetic rendering of a language that is alien to both the man and the female protagonist, the film effectively others both the English language and by extension the English-speaking audience. This by itself does not implicate the West as such, but the detail of the café’s title—Casablanca—provides a provocative occasion to implicate the United States and Hollywood in the film’s allegorical critique. Caruth makes much of this gesture, reading it as an explicit reference to the 1942 Hollywood film. She further suggests that the introduction of English in concert with a meta-textual reference to one of classic Hollywood’s most iconic films enacts a destabilizing counter- narrative of that film’s representation of the U.S.—instantiated by the character of Rick

(Humphrey Bogart)—as a liberating force for justice. Contra this propagandistic version of events, Caruth sees Resnais’s film as a reflection on America’s political and ethical

“blindness” regarding its own complicity in both the Vichy regime’s collaborationism and the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan:

In its transposition to the café in Hiroshima, the story of Casablanca thus resonates with…the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945…Located in post-Hiroshima Japan…the American representation of liberation from the enemy is returned in the form of its own blindness to the literal realization of the logic of liberation by which the understanding of one’s own national identity has taken place through the forgetting, and obliteration, of the other. (48)

This is a deafening stroke in the film’s transnational critique of the (neo)colonial West’s dehumanizing presence on the world stage. Figured as complicitous across national boundaries, a spectator of the West is thus implicated in global crimes against humanity, his/her national identity destabilized within a textual economy of violence, erasure, and interconnectedness.

The multiplicity of readings that Resnais’s film gives rise to—indeed, the multiple readings that are possible within almost any conceivable film—is significant not only because it foregrounds again the collective dimension of watching Hiroshiima mon

Amour, but also because it demonstrates the absolutely necessary role of singularity.

That is, it is in part through the multiplication of readings that the cosmopolitical spectator emerges and becomes legible. While not reducible to anyone reading, each site of interpretation constitutes a difference that is also connected to a larger context of shared signs and meanings. As with so many other crucial conceptual effects, the roles of montage and memory cannot be understated. Maureen Turim again articulates this multiplicity and its import in her reading of modernist uses of flashback in film:

[S]ome modernist flashbacks present brief images whose signifiers lack verbal redundancy that fixes their meaning. This tendency towards a style that works on repetition and reference without redundancy of coding, especially as concerns verbal cementing of signifieds and signifiers, constitutes the spectator as participant in the formation of the text. The more references a spectator brings to the decipherment of visual images, the more information these images will relay and deflect into new configurations. (214)

Turim’s analysis demonstrates how the modernist aesthetic of postwar art cinema figures spectatorship as a form of labor; this labor produces not only specific decipherments of the film, but also invokes historical experience and thereby multiplies the textual work into new directions and lines of flight.

By foregrounding spectatorship’s status as labor—that is, as collective—Resnais and Duras’s film anticipates one of twenty-first century political theory’s most influential conceptualizations: the multitude composed by capital, explored so precisely by Michael

Hardt and Antonio Negri in Multitude (2004) and Commonwealth (2009). Hardt and

Negri set their definition of the multitude directly against exclusive identity formations,

especially those generated by nationalist narratives. For them, the multitude is a radically inclusive entity that defies borders of any kind, because borders are precisely what compromise the multitude, turning it instead into a closed unit (people, a nation, etc.). The multitude’s very existence is defined by the radical and extending connectivities that characterize global capitalism’s expansion throughout the world.

Because these connectivities are always shifting in response to modern capitalism’s unceasing development, they resist being pinned down by traditional narratives of collective identity. Like the logic of capitalism, the multitude is an always evolving phenomenon whose ongoing drive is the production of new and alternative subjectivities. The authors establish this drive through Foucault’s concept of bio-power, or the power over life that drives modern regimes of discipline and domination. Hardt and Negri speak here of two divergent tendencies in what Foucault calls the microphysics of power: “Foucault’s attention is focused primarily on the power over life—or, really, the power to administer and produce life—…But there is always a minor current that insists on life as resistance, an other power of life that strives towards an alternative existence” (Commonwealth, 57). Hardt and Negri coin the term “biopolitics” to distinguish this minor current that resists the tendencies of “biopower.” It is this current of resistance that characterizes the multitude. As such, it is not reducible to any traditional ordering criteria, whether it be based on gender, race, class, heritage, etc.

The multitude refers fundamentally to those who instantiate this current of resistance, and this possibility inheres in the totality of the global order of capitalist empire.

While Hardt and Negri stress the multitude’s global reach, they also make clear that its manifestations are subject to specific contexts and contingencies. This means

that the current of resistance that seeks alternative subjectivities is necessarily localized; it must be culturally and historically specific. In other words, an instantiation of the multitude in France will look necessarily different than in instantiation in Senegal. A radical connectivity and enthusiastic will to association also defines the multitude. While the student protest movements of 1968 were, first of all, local developments with their own unique makeup and factors, they were also a global phenomenon characterized by mutual influence and interconnection.

The questioning of closed identity formations and the recognition of transcultural phenomena define the cosmopolitical spectator. The argument Hiroshima mon Amour makes about French national identity and neocolonial complicity is obviously contextual and contingent on French history, society, and culture, but it also finds its ethical force in an opening outward onto a globalizing world whose parameters were being renegotiated, and which were uniquely vulnerable to contestation. The cosmopolitical spectator is therefore a subject position characterized by an awareness of one’s connections to a complex world system. This awareness will not necessarily lead to the radical resistance that Hardt and Negri describe, but neither can it simply be dismissed as a routine interpellation by the cinematic apparatus. Indeed, the cosmopolitical spectator hailed by Resnais’s film suggests that interpellation itself is never ideologically routine, because it always entails an invitation to viewers to identify with a collectivity.

However exclusive and nationalistic this collectivity is, it nevertheless indexes the inherently collective nature of spectatorship, and therefore contests the psychodynamic isolation described so extensively by 1970s psychoanalytic film theory.

The conclusion of Hiroshima mon Amour provides a fascinating commentary on the impossibility of standing with and representing the dead of history, those specters annihilated in the wake of capitalist modernity’s colonizing march. Facing each other for perhaps the last time, He and She give each other the proper names of their respective homes: He becomes Hiroshima, and She Nevers. Duras’s note in the script offers a compelling reading of this moment: “He looks at her, she at him, as she would at the city, and suddenly, very softly, she calls him. She calls him from afar, lost in wonder.

She has succeeded in drowning him in universal oblivion…They look at each other without seeing each other. Forever” (83, italics in original). Is this final scene a dystopic vision of the mind’s inability to retain the memory of history’s lessons, or is it instead a utopian image, in which a realization of universal humanity supersedes the boundaries of race, gender, nation, etc.? I contend that it is neither and both. It is utopian because it realizes and celebrates the inherently collective and universal import of the category of humanity; by dissolving individual identity in the present, the collective ghosts of past, present, and future become legible to both of them. On the other hand, the dangers of a total oblivion are well described by Duras, for to lose sight of singular identity entirely is to lose one of the constitutive elements of the call to justice described by Derrida. This is the project of the multitude as described by Hardt and Negri: to do justice to singularities while insisting on the collective makeup of the multitude in the era of capitalist empire. Resnais’s film and Derrida’s commentary remind us that this is not a straightforward project, but requires a reckoning with the antinomy of the multitude and its paradoxical makeup.

Resnais’s work in both of the films dealt with in this chapter institutes what I have described as a cosmopolitical spectator-subject. As stated previously, this subject is not identical to the historical viewer, for whom a realization of his or her global connectedness would not necessarily result in their radical consciousness. As with the psychodynamic subject of classical narrative cinema, it remains fundamentally a matter of the interpellating functions of the apparatus and the rhetorical torsions of the film text.

Viewers may variously identify with and therefore consent to the films’ interpellating functions, but such an identification will only ever by partial and provisional. As legible within this economy, however, the cosmopolitical spectator indicates postwar art cinema’s interest in exploring the radical import of the category of identity in the new era of capitalist globalization.

The chapters that follow analyze films that attempt to testify to and show solidarity with this hermeneutic subject. In chapter 2, Alexander Kluge’s science-fiction films raise questions about the expropriating powers of late capitalism in the postwar context, thereby building off of Resnais’s insights into “the concentrationary plague.”

Kluge develops the cosmopolitical spectator hailed by his films as a challenge to the

West’s reformulation of itself amidst the crises of decolonization and industrial atrocity.

Taking as his particular focus both Germany and Europe, Kluge examines the human mind’s enslavement to the principles of capitalist accumulation, but challenges this with an account of the cinema’s capacity to index and reinvigorate the radical capacities of human cognition conceptualized as a form of bio-power. Kluge’s development of utopian film hinges on human cognition’s inherently radical properties, especially its ability to synthesize the materials of history into new assemblages that challenge

capitalism’s annexation of historical time and experience. By developing the time of

Kairos—the fortuitous time of imagination—in contrast to capitalism’s chronometric time,

Kluge envisions cinema as the medium most capable of communing with the specters of history, and especially those anonymous dead that haunt the postwar present and render it constitutively out of joint. In his argument for a utopian cinema, Kluge develops a postcolonial spectator-subject whose cosmopolitical scope challenges the West’s exclusive identity formations. As with Resnais, the radical import of this interpellation hinges on the radical antinomy of an other that is both different and the same, a conduit for the multitude’s radically inclusive intervention in historical evolution.

CHAPTER 3 EXTRATERRESTRIAL BIO-POWER: ALEXANDER KLUGE’S UTOPIAN SPECTATORSHIP

The previous chapter analyzed how Resnais’s Night and Fog and Hiroshima Mon

Amour interpellated a cosmopolitical spectator through their formal and thematic explorations of crimes against humanity and capitalist modernity. As developed through the films’ pioneering use of montage, the singularities of name, place, and history become intertextual conduits of an emerging cosmopolitical consciousness, transgressing national, cultural, and linguistic borders. This consciousness—a collective anxiety generated by the global forces of capitalism and colonialism—haunts the site of reception, which is figured against Hollywood’s isolating psycho-dynamics in favor of a collective engagement with global trauma. This invocation generates a spectral site of critique which judges Western atrocities from the standpoint of an emerging cosmopolitical subject. Through its foregrounding of the interpretive process of spectatorship, Resnais’s films explore the new possibilities for identity and solidarity generated by the postwar, postcolonial crisis of Western epistemologies, especially those associated with cinematic practice and its historiographical significance.

The present chapter focuses on Alexander Kluge’s exploration of spectatorship, this time focusing on two minor science-fiction films from the early 1970s, a period by which West Germany had been integrated into a global economy as part of the capitalist

West’s cold war with the Communist bloc. As such, West Germany—with its

Americanized industrial economy and reformed democratic government—was now an important symbol of Western capitalism’s ambition to achieve global hegemony. It is in the context of the Cold War and West Germany’s ambivalent status therein that Kluge’s

foray into science-fiction gains its significance, specifically by inviting his audience to go journeying through the intertextual networks of his films.

Of the three directors covered in this study, Kluge provides the most extensive articulation of spectatorial labor. Over the course of his voluminous body of work—films, books, short stories, television programs—Kluge’s utopian project treats spectatorship—as well as the interpretive activities associated with reading—as an historically-developed labor capacity; in doing so, he posits the interpretive work of film viewing as a form of historical agency and—potentially—radical contestation. In other words, Kluge claims spectatorship as a major locus of human bio-power that emerges from multiple zones of global space. Kluge’s articulation of a cosmopolitical spectator is grounded in his unique working method, or what Thomas Elsaesser calls a “network”

(Verbund). That is, a multi-media authorial process conceptualized as an ongoing, hybrid dialogue with the multifarious forces of living history (24). This working method exemplifies the cosmopolitical spectator’s own status as a permeable focal point for multiple interpretive threads and associations.

Spectatorship as a network grounds Kluge’s claims for the emancipatory status of cinema; by extension, it also motivates his repeated invocation of the medium’s connection to “the film in the spectator’s head.” This concept receives one of its most memorable treatments in his essay “Utopian Film”: “Since the Ice Age approximately…streams of images…have moved through the human mind, prompted to some extent by an antirealistic attitude, by the protest against an unbearable reality…This is the more-than-ten-thousand-year-old-cinema to which the invention of the film strip, projector, and screen only provided a technological response” (“Utopian

Cinema,” 54). Kluge thus asserts that film and humanity are ontologically linked by virtue of the inherently cinematic structure of consciousness, especially as instantiated by modernist practices of montage and collage—formal strategies through which

Kluge’s films invoke the streaming images of human history. What is more, by linking this stream to the concept of protest, Kluge claims the filmic montage of consciousness as a fundamentally revolutionary capacity. Accordingly, he also posits human emancipation as the basis and purpose of cinema, or what Christopher Pavsek calls its

“original vocation.” Pavsek’s The Utopia of Film: Cinema’s Futures in Godard, Kluge, and Tahimik (2013) represents the ur-text for my project, as it provides one of the most extensive accounts of how Kluge sees spectatorship as an ongoing form of utopian labor motivated by a profoundly human desire for change in the face of unbearable realities. Accordingly, Kluge presents his spectator with underdetermined, unfinished streams of images through which he/she might imagine different potential futures—for the world and for West Germany. The activity a Klugean spectator must engage in is a form of labor that testifies to the influence of capitalist modernity; however, it also indexes spectatorship’s status as an historical activity that invokes the living and dead labor of previous generations. Spectatorship therefore has a fundamentally material dimension to it; it functions because of historically developed capacities (memory, concentration, the capacity for inference, etc.).

The radically transformative quality of human consciousness has been eloquently developed by several Kluge scholars. Devin Fore’s introduction to History and

Obstinacy, for instance, contrasts human consciousness from other types of intelligent organisms, and emphasizes the necessarily unfinished nature of the former: “[F]or

humans, who lack the innate programming of other animals, sociality and shared existence must be practiced and performed, again and again…We are works in progress forever engaged with our own self-fashioning” (27). Human experience’s essentially historical nature dictates that human identity is always provisional and subject to change; humanity is not solely determined by its immanent onto-biological or genetic components, but must continually make meaning from the materials generated by its historical activity. In a similar vein, Christopher Pavsek explores Kluge and frequent collaborator Oskar Negt’s debt to the Kantian schema of consciousness, which asserts humanity’s capacity to synthesize sensual and intelligible intuitions through the mediating force of the imagination. In Pavsek’s analysis, the codetermining functions of sensuous intuition and conceptual representation in consciousness relate directly to filmic spectatorship:

Cinema, for Kluge, thus has a particular affinity with the human mind…just as…Kant identifies a particular human capacity that mediates between the realms of sensuousness and understanding, namely the power of “imagination” (Einbildungskraft), so too does Kluge identify an essentially analogous capacity of the human mind…Kluge labels this capacity…Phantasie, a term that translates equally well as fantasy, fancy, or imagination. Phantasie is the central term whereby Kluge conceptualizes and assesses the relative autonomy of spectatorial activity. (160)

The above quotation indicates how Kluge posits spectatorship—or at least the cognitive activities associated with it—as a universal human activity. As mentioned previously,

Kluge’s extensive theoretical writings have provided by far the most extensive account of cosmopolitical spectatorship, because he treats all spectatorship as necessarily cosmopolitical: that is, as a permeable network implicated in a larger assemblage of systemic processes and influences.

Kluge’s appropriation of the Kantian schema is central to his attempt to articulate the radical quality of historical experience, which is produced by the interaction of the sensual world and the rational and imaginative faculties. It is this network of forces which compose the enduring human stream of cinematographic consciousness described in “Utopian Cinema.” The Kantian schema is therefore a fundamental component of viewing Kluge’s films. More specifically, Kluge’s interest lies in foregrounding the cognitive activities of spectatorship and the imaginative engagements which they imply. This imaginative engagement shares with Resnais’s an interest in returning to the haunted specters of the past. In the context of the films under discussion, these specters were the failed leftist utopias generated by the wave of protests and student movements which culminated in 1968 and the increased industrialization of the West German economy. Just as importantly, there was also the legacy of West Germany’s attempt to mourn and move on from the Third Reich—an attempt that many leftists had seen as inadequate. A profound sense of existential paralysis haunted the nation, which would culminate in the German Autumn.

Kluge’s films are thoroughly in dialogue with these forces, but his preoccupations also extend into the more abstract territory of Western identity as such. That is, Kluge sees a profound disjunction between the hopes and dreams conceptualized by the

West’s enlightenment impulses and the atrocious results which it eventually produced.

In Kluge’s films, the cosmopolitical spectator is torn between the ambivalent heritages of industrial mechanization and enlightenment thinking; these forces are deeply intertwined, but also antithetical in many respects. Specifically, Kluge’s devotion to the universal humanity conceptualized by Kant seeks to recapture the radical kernel of

enlightenment thinking that capitalist modernity has reified as a mechanism for domination. This look backward into the suppressed dimensions of the enlightenment accompanies Kluge’s interest in the divided legacy of silent cinema. As with the enlightenment legacy, the silent era manifests the collective bio-power of spectatorship through its address to a diverse and proliferating public sphere.

Miriam Hansen analyzes Kluge’s debt to silent film, especially its variety format and exhibition aesthetic, which in Hansen’s other work provide a space for the expression of marginalized ethnic and gendered identities. In Kluge’s terms, what early cinema therefore enables is an alternative manifestation of Erfahrung, a form of experience opposed to the bourgeois public sphere’s ordering of social relations and perceptions. In the bourgeois public sphere—a concept which both Kluge and Hansen borrow from Jürgen Habermas—a normative framework grounded in the patriarchal nuclear family organizes social experience according to the gendered binary of private/public and its yoking of public activity to private relations and leisure culture.

Hansen’s extensive analysis of early North-American silent film links this public sphere to the emergence of classical narrative cinema, in which the public and collectivist dimensions of mainstream narrative film are effectively suppressed in favor of the isolated, psycho-dynamic subject conceptualized by apparatus theory. Through this historical and ideological transition, early silent film gains an unrealized potential as a focal point for the articulation of alternative social identities.

Although much different from the early twentieth-century American context, the

West Germany of the early 1970s nevertheless evokes the collectivist purview of early silent film through the emergence of what Negt and Kluge—in their The Public Sphere

and Experience (1972) call the new industrial public spheres of the mass media. Unlike the bourgeois public sphere, which presented itself as a realm above the worlds of commerce and the marketplace, the new industrial public spheres are fully and openly yoked to mass forms of production and commodity culture. This situation produces a space for the potential emergence of Negt and Kluge’s concept of a “proletarian” public sphere. This alternative public sphere distinguishes itself by its radically different organization of Erfahrung:

Negt and Kluge…assume a dialectical conception of experience…as that which mediates individual perception with social contingency and collectivity, conscious with unconscious processes; experience as the capacity to see connections and relations (Zusammenhang); experience as the matrix of conflicting temporalities, of memory and hope, including the historical loss of these dimensions. (393)

The specific mass cultural forms that attain new significance in 1970s West Germany— especially television—intrude upon areas of social experience that were previously private and unmined by capitalism, but in doing so these spheres also reintroduce the contradictory and collectivist dimensions of consumerism that were suppressed by the bourgeois public sphere and its ideal realm of public/private.

If we can trace equivalences between the ideological imperatives of the early

American and post-war West German situations, it is not only because longer developments associated with capitalist modernity have repeatedly raised similar questions (and posed similar answers) about public identity; it is also because the very question of identity under capitalism becomes something that increasingly occupies a world-historical position. Indeed, one could say that however differently modernity is engaged from culture to culture, the central focus remains the dynamics of power over the processes of subjectivization and social identity. The constant expansion and

maintenance of modern power relations exacerbates the gap between collective human desires and the symbolic, institutional forms for their realization/regulation. As this question of power relations endures, however, it is also true that new kinds of connections, overlaps, and equivalences arise; these in turn provide new opportunities for alternative self-fashioning on multiple fronts.

Kluge’s interest in human bio-power and cognition indicate the extent to which

West Germany’s debate about film and the public sphere was unfolding within a newly cosmopolitical context. By emphasizing the universal capacity of human beings to synthesize historical materials through and as the montage of consciousness, Kluge not only recovers early silent film from a different historical and national context; he also indicates the extent to which West Germany was inflected by a transformed international reality. In this new international context, the labor of imagination played a prominent role the in highly public debates concerning West Germany’s place within a newly connected world and the transitioning entity of Western civilization.

The globally-implicated world of German cultural production—both pre-and post-

New German Cinema—motivates Kluge’s interest in science-fiction. In their appropriation of an intergalactic setting, both films under discussion explore the dynamics of bio-power and capitalist modernity as inherently trans-cultural, trans-natural phenomena. The plots of both Der groβe Verhau (1971) and Willi Tobler und der

Untergang der 6. Flotte (1972) concern multiple sites of linguistic, cultural, and national being. At stake, especially, are the dynamics of the new European identity generated by the recuperative discourses of the former colonial powers. This new identity especially concerned the cosmopolitical significance of “the West” as a binding category of

international identity. Indeed, Kluge goes the furthest in articulating and critiquing the concept of the West and its neocolonial ambitions.

The notion of Western civilization obviously precedes postwar constructions of globalization, but it receives a crucial gloss therein. In addition, the integrative and exclusionary functions of the debates surrounding West Germany’s international status may be usefully compared to those of the West German public sphere. If, on the national level, the bourgeois model of public discourse perpetuates patriarchal social and class relations in the name of a universalized male subject, the international level adds a neocolonial dimension: that of a universalized Western identity. As with the classical bourgeois public sphere, a constitutive exclusion undergirds this identity construction. Patrick Thaddeus Jackson’s analysis of the postwar construction (1945-

1963) of Western identity makes an invaluable contribution to understanding the constellations which constituted this exclusion. In Jackson’s analysis, post-war debates surrounding the European Recovery Plan (ERP) and of Germany’s place in an anti- communist front were organized around an “occidentalist” rhetoric that asserted

Germany’s essential cultural belonging to a meta-geographic Western civilization. This framework reconfigures the West as a unique and distinct cultural entity. This version of world civilizations contrasts with the “civilization-in-the-singular” discourse that prevailed during World War II, in which the allied powers (including China and Russia) constructed themselves as a single world civilization defending itself against the forces of fascist barbarity. In the years following Germany’s defeat, the occidentalist framework traced by Jackson yokes civilization to the specific cultural character of the West and affirms West Germany’s place in a narrative of Western unity and progress.

While this reframing ostensibly had the effect of granting a similar distinctiveness

(and thus autonomy) to civilizations that fell outside of the West’s meta-geography, it also claimed the latter as the essential cradle of freedom, justice, and human dignity.

That is, by virtue of Western civilization’s cultural and religious heritage, the values of civilization as such were also posited as originally—and therefore essentially—Western

(Jackson, 72-112). Although other cultural practices could be recognized in this framework, it also created a unilateral vision of history which measured progress according to Western criteria. This logic appears in glaring clarity in the following argument by South Dakota representative Francis Case, who in 1947 argued for a halting of the dismantling of West Germany’s industrial plants on the grounds that it flew in the face of the ERP’s major goal:

I hope that out of this situation [the U.S. occupation of West Germany] there can come the development of the free states of Europe, which will include Bavaria, Hesse, Württemberg-Baden, Westphalia, and the other old states of Germany, along with Belgium, Luxemburg, the Netherlands, and France, and thereby build a bulwark for western (sic) civilization to hold the line until mankind, some way, with more wisdom than now seems apparent, finds a way for all the peoples of the world to live together in peace. (Cited in Jackson, 171)

The above justification makes Western civilization the necessary prerequisite to historical progress towards world peace, a protector of universal human values until the rest of the world can catch up. In this way, “the West” simultaneously presented itself as a particular historical entity and as the universal substance of civilized humanity. This strategic conflation bears structural resemblances to the bourgeois public sphere’s universalizing gesture. The global economic policies of integration and restructuring that attended the ERP and its policy descendants in the ensuing years realigned the global topography according to these coordinates, at least as far as policy debates within this

new meta-geographic space were concerned. West Germany in the 1970s, then, reflects this recent transformation in the meta-geography of the West.

As postcolonial analyses point out, the universalization of Western civilization is not only a strategic shift geared towards contesting the international spread of communism, nor is it solely motivated by capitalism’s expansionist imperative (although it is both of these things). The West’s global shift also indicates a profound crisis in modern bourgeois subjectivity stemming from the decolonization movements of the late

1950s and early 1960s. Previously defined by the structures of colonial hegemony, decolonization ruptured the imperialist dream of universal reason. The multiple valences of this crisis are at the core of Europe’s paradoxical self-construction in the decades following the end of World War II.

Germany’s status in the postwar context of decolonization is especially significant for understanding the West’s identity crisis. Although Germany never had the colonial prospects that England and France could claim, the Third Reich’s singularly rational- scientific barbarism struck a devastating blow to the Enlightenment narrative of reason, progress, and civilized humanity. In what Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno famously termed the dialectic of enlightenment, the symbolic and material forces of

Western civilization had not culminated in universal rational humanity, but instead in the unprecedented horrors of the Holocaust. In concert with the failures of colonialism, this proved devastating to the meta-narratives of the old imperial powers, who found themselves simultaneously mourning and reconstituting their symbolic identities. V.Y.

Mudimbe brilliantly sums up the fundamental antinomy at the heart of bourgeois colonialism’s dialectic of enlightenment:

With the blessing of the highest intellectual and religious authorities, the expansion of Europe overseas parallels that of slavery and its practice in the name of both civilization and Christianity. It is in the same name that Europe implements the rules of colonialism, and…produces from within its own historical and cultural framework a number of troubling formations and among them nazism [sic]. (212)

Citing Aimé Césaire’s diagnosis of bourgeois humanism’s fundamental sickness,

Mudimbe asserts the common logic attending slavery, colonialism, and Nazism. The implicit link between these historical disasters is the capitalist mode of production.1

While Césaire refers to a “Hitlerism” that haunts the inner core of bourgeois humanism, the latter is coterminous with the structures of modern industrialized capitalism.

Césaire’s polemic thus diagnoses the West’s identity crisis in both economic and psycho-dynamic terms (C.f. Discours sure le Colonialisme (1955)).

Devin Fore’s ethnogeographic diagnosis of Germany (prior to the East/West split) outlines a crucial psycho-social transformation that anticipates the discourse of the

West as it managed its post-war crisis:

As a largely landlocked nation whose imperial ambitions had always been limited…compared with those of its neighbors to the west, Germany was of necessity one of the first to redirect the expansionist energies [of capitalism] inward, toward the populace. This “blockaded nation” was forced to become a social laboratory of introjected imperialism long before other European nation- states. (20-21)

Fore’s analysis claims Germany as a prototype for the internalization of capitalist expropriation that would typify Europe in the immediate postwar years and onward. In other words, the former imperial powers turned inward in their quests for both

1 This claim appears to efface the issue of Stalinism and Communist crimes against humanity. While it is beyond the scope of this project, I would like to at least gesture to Marxist arguments that claim the USSR, rather than functioning within a proper communist paradigm, was in fact an example of bureaucratic state capitalism, in which the state takes on the role normally occupied by private forces. Tom Lewis makes precisely this argument in “The Politics of ‘Hauntology’ in Derrida’s Specters of Marx.” In Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx. Ed. Michael Sprinkler, 134-168. New York: Verso, 1999.

neocolonial legitimation and late capitalist exploitation. Like the French consumer culture analyzed by Ross and explored in Hiroshima mon Amour, Western modernity reconstituted itself by colonizing the emerging structures of postwar subjectivity, especially the psycho-dynamic spaces of the new media public spheres. Within these zones of mass culture, the schemas of classical narrative function as mediums for the colonization of subjectivities. This colonizing imperative occasions Kluge’s programmatic account of utopian spectatorship. In constructing filmic counter-narratives of spectatorship, Kluge radically re-articulates the traditional enlightenment concepts of universality and emancipation.

The ambition of Kluge’s project appears even more clearly when we consider the historical endurance of bourgeois humanism. This mysterious staying power can be traced to bourgeois humanism’s ability to generate historical principles. Christopher

Pavsek’s excellent definition of a “principle” bears repeating here. In Pavsek’s interpretation, a principle is both “a punctual and singular event” and “a permanent feature of the landscape of social production” (151-152). In Kluge’s intervention, this hegemonic status is one of classical narrative film’s most daunting challenges to the utopian vocation of cinema. As a principle, classical narrative cinema endlessly interpellates viewing subjects through its hegemonic narrative codes and modes of address. As Hansen’s account of early cinema indicates, however, classical narrative is not the only cinematic principle, and the turn to early cinema as a focal point for alternatives to the bourgeois classical model has similarly influenced subsequent polemics. In Pavsek’s cogent analysis, Kluge becomes one of the cinema’s most persistent apprentices to this pre-classical cinematic principle.

Kluge’s ongoing investment in an alternative form of spectatorship appears especially urgent when we look at the context of West Germany in the early 1970s. One of the sea changes in modern capitalism around this time was the expansion of capitalism’s value forms to previously protected realms of activity and experience.

Through the new status of private, ‘affective’ labor in the context of the women’s movements and the increased economic emphasis on consumption over production, human activity itself was posited as value-productive. It is this transitional moment—a moment which was latent in the initial stages of primitive accumulation—that signals the new status of human bio-power in the imminent emergence of late capitalism. Kluge’s momentous collaboration with Oskar Negt in History and Obstinacy (1981), then, represents his most ambitious attempt to reckon with human labor as a defining historical concept. At decisive points in this text, spectatorship especially accrues a cosmopolitical significance, emerging as a uniquely radical assemblage of human bio- power.

In their Marxian analysis of capitalist structures of domination, Kluge and Negt extend the concept of labor beyond its incomplete treatment in Marx’s major writings. As is so often the case, Pavsek provides a useful explication of this extension. The following passage is excerpted from a summary of the political project of both The

Public Sphere and Experience (1972) and History and Obstinacy:

In the “Early Writings,” Marx outlines an anthropology most explicitly based on the subject as a laboring, creating, and producing being; in the Grundrisse…Marx theorizes the organic unity of the various spheres of the capitalist mode of production…and prioritizes the moment of production, thus subsuming all of the other moments within the production process. It is precisely this political economy of labor power which would have been the necessary groundwork for a theory of proletarian public sphere and thus of a proper marxian (sic) politics…Negt and Kluge…wanted…to

expand political economy to encompass the “real experiences of people” in just such a manner. (“Redemption of Labor,” 146)

In providing a political economy of labor power—more or less synonymous with

Foucault’s notion of bio-power—to complement Marx’s analysis of capital, Negt and

Kluge follow the underdeveloped train of thought that sees all moments of the capitalist process as a totality in which production is the omnipresent factor. Foregrounding the inherently productive nature of human activity, including consumption, performs the crucial move of exposing the increasingly symbolic and immaterial nature of capitalist production as it moved towards its post-Fordist and neocolonial phases. Pavsek concisely describes the world-historical import of this gesture: “In this schema, even ideology can be thought in terms of production, as being produced by living labor…the expansion of the term labor is intended to focus our attention on those aspects of labor power which escape determination by the economic” (Ibid, 147). In History and

Obstinacy, Kluge and Negt develop the concept of obstinacy as the foundational principle of this escape. In doing so, they posit a primal utopian impulse grounded in protest as the lever of labor power.

Negt and Kluge’s development of labor power’s political economy includes a telling consideration of national identity, and German identity in particular: “For roughly two thousand years, humans have toiled away at a product on a site that would later be called Germany. This product is German history” (History and Obstinacy, 235). In their analysis, German history—and by extension national history in general—not only comprises the conventional chronological sequence of major events as narrated by mainstream historical accounts. In addition, and more primarily, national history is a fundamentally utopian concept generated by human labor power, itself motivated by the

frustrated and impossible hopes of previous generations. Although this utopian impulse was complicit in the disasters of German history, Negt and Kluge insist on it as the primary motive for pursuing alternative forms of collective identity. Anton Kaes’ explication of the original German publication of History and Obstinacy (Geschichte und

Eigensinn, 1981) pinpoints the resistant impulse of this unrealized Germany:

Kluge and Oskar Negt hold two contradictory notions of Germany: on the one hand…Germany [is] a “gigantic kitchen” in which collective work has ceaselessly produced historical changes; on the other hand, they speak of Germany as an “illusion”: “Germany…exists only as something imagined, as a collective prejudice…” Kluge and Negt postulate the “most bitter antagonism” between the result of history, this Germany as it exists now, and that Germany for which people have indefatigably worked without achieving it. (134)

For Negt and Kluge, the imaginary status of national identity not only indicates humanity’s investment in an illusory ideological construct, but also its insistence on the unbridgeable gap between human desire and actual reality. As such, national identity not only indexes the catastrophes of modern German history, but also the spectral promise of an emancipatory alternative that constantly threatens to exceed the unbearable realities of capitalistic relations.

Negt and Kluge’s counter-narrative of labor power gains an explicitly cinematic dimension in the newly translated version of History and Obstinacy. In my reading, this dimension also has a cosmopolitical significance by virtue of its propagation of a radically historical spectatorship that exceeds conventional symbolic boundaries. In the following quotation, the authors develop a speculative observer of history whose capacity to grasp totalities is antithetical to the inexorable onslaught of modern chronometric time:

Imagine an observer who sees 1,000 years just the way that the everyday eye surveys an hour of time. The total dead and living labor that was

active has the status of an observer in possession of such a view of history. If I see a city such as Mainz, for example, from the observational standpoint of this historical view… [The events comprising its] transformation all move together into a movement that transpires historically and realistically. I see this as a film. (History and Obstinacy, 263)

Although the diametrically opposed temporalities of Chronos (sequential irreversible time) and Kairos (the disjunctive, non-linear time of fantasy and protest) do not appear as explicit concepts, the above quotations nevertheless lay out one of the foundational antagonisms of Kluge’s critical project. Against the orderly successive march of history as dictated by the relations of domination emerges the contingent personal time of imaginative resistance from below. Chronos and Kairos accordingly indicate not only differing conceptions of time, but also different perspectives on the unequal power relations of (German) history. Chronos is “history from above” as dictated by institutional interests, while Kairos is “history from below” as experienced and engaged by marginalized subjects. As such, they imagine radically different versions of social identity.

Kluge’s development of Kairos bears striking similarities to Hardt and Negri’s development of the multitude’s temporal structure. Hardt and Negri invoke Kairos as the temporal instantiation of the multitude, “the opportune moment that ruptures the monotony and repetitiveness of chronological time…” (Commonwealth, 165). The time of the multitude develops a spectral counter-narrative to the West’s unbroken line of historical progress towards rationality.

The omnipresent potential of Kairos leads Negt and Kluge to invest in tracing the subterranean contours of a counter-narrative whose prehistoric character is grounded in obstinacy as a universally shared labor capacity. Far from the ban on meta-narratives

instituted in critical theory’s postmodern turn, obstinacy’s cinematic stream of images functions as a world-historical account of the primary forces of human revolutionary potential as such. Obstinacy, then, becomes the basis for the contingent commons of human agency, and a fundamental component of collective humanity.

Kluge’s forays into science-fiction demonstrate a sustained concern for how human agency is compromised by capitalist modes of production. Both Der große

Verhau and Willi Tobler take place in and around the fictional Krüger 60 star system in an era of endless civil war and commercial competition. The major players of both films are the Suez Canal Corporation (SCC), which exercises an intergalactic monopoly and regulates all commercial activity; Admiral Bohm and his 6th Fleet, apparently in the employ of the SCC; and Paula Stihi, although she does not have a speaking part in Der große Verhau. Her character is especially crucial to the analysis that follows, as she provides one of the films’ major instances of ethnic and gender difference. As we will see, these differences provide a transient but unmistakable counterpoint to the grim monotony which otherwise typifies Kluge’s outer space.

Der große Verhau focuses heavily on the tyranny of the SCC; indeed, all of the major characters introduced in the film suffer directly or indirectly as a result of the corporation’s monopolistic practices. Willi Tobler, meanwhile, foregrounds the endless civil war through its perpetually migratory title character, whose attempts to find security are constantly foiled by a disruptive miasma of nebulous competing interests, official incompetence, and galactic battles. Taken in concert, both films reflect Kluge’s preoccupation with capitalism’s erosion of experience and the provisional status of life in

the context of modern warfare, and both pursue this preoccupation through the focal points of individual and collective labor power.

In addition to the characters and other plot devices, the form of Kluge’s films is central to their invocation of collective labor power and its utopian potential. Through the modernist forms of montage and collage, Kluge’s films treat spectatorship as a major instantiation of this revolutionary force, as Anton Kaes’ own definition of a Klugean spectator makes clear: “It is up to the viewer to piece together the various parts, a process that liberates the imagination but also demands considerable associative aplomb and a willingness…to collaborate in the construction of meaning” (115). The unfinished presentation of Kluge’s cinematic fragments spurs the viewer to participate in his/her own self-fashioning by actively participating in the synthesis of the film. This intervention into the (for Kluge) deeply related practices of spectatorship and self- fashioning as laboring activities attains a cosmopolitical significance by virtue of its insistence not only on the communal province of shared human capacities, but also on the meta-narrative of human protest as the underpinning of labor power. In a move that forecasts Hardt and Negri’s multitude of the poor, Kluge and Negt perform a massive

Zusammenhang of human revolutionary activity. History and Obstinacy’s political economy of labor thus traces a circuitous line of revolutionary promise through multiple historical and geographic sites. Grounded in the human capacity for reason and self- direction, this revolutionary promise is fundamentally informed by the classical discourses of the enlightenment.

Despite the voluminous scholarship on Kluge, neither of these films has received extended attention from scholars. Richard Langston briefly references Willi Tobler as

one of Kluge’s explorations of the battle of Stalingrad, but his chapter otherwise focuses on Schlachtbeschreibung (translated as The Battle in 1967)—Kluge’s novel on Hitler’s

Sixth Army in Stalingrad—and on Kluge’s “cultural windows” for German television (C.f.

Visions of Violence (2008)). John E. Davidson, meanwhile, references the film in an essay on Kluge’s cinematic treatment of time, memory, and history. But again, his analysis focuses elsewhere (C.f. “A Kind of Species Memory” (2011)). There are clear reasons for this: both films are rather amateurish, and appear almost as cinematic sketches done in preparation for a more finished work. Films such as Yesterday Girl

(1966) and The Patriot (1979) are unquestionably more “polished” and complete on the level of form, ideas, and execution. The fact that even Kluge’s best known films were not initially met with the same enthusiasm as those of Fassbinder, Wenders, and

Herzog has marginalized these films even further.

That said, it is exactly because of their amateurish and unfinished quality that both films provide such a valuable focal point for my analysis, for in the schematic treatment of characters and settings, we see Kluge’s collage-aesthetic in its rawest form, unalleviated either by a clearly-worked out formal plan or a finished exploration of themes. In the heterogeneous assemblage of sixteen-millimeter shots, trick- photography, slap-dash intertitles, archive footage, and magazine materials, Kluge’s films provide a rich interface of raw material through which the spectator may apply his/her imaginative faculties. By framing these assemblages within the science-fiction genre, Kluge foregrounds the disorienting nature of modern capitalist relations and their attendant constructions of history, identity, and otherness. On the register of history, especially, these films may be viewed as among Kluge’s most vivid challenges to the

chronometric telos of modern capitalist time, in which past, present, and future are captured within multifarious relationships. The interface of dialectical montage and the cognitive capacities of the audience generate one of the most notable instantiations of the cosmopolitical spectator.

In the extended analysis of both Der groβe Verhau and Willi Tobler which follow, the spectators’ ability to make connections across (global) space and time should be understood not only as their freeing from the bonds of classical cinematic narrative, but also as the prelude to a new relationship to world history. It is first and foremost by breaking the chronometric logic of mainstream historical time that Kluge is able to invoke and hail his audience as potentially utopian spectators. Although it is focused on the modernist practices of the early soviet filmmakers, Mike Wayne’s commentary on the political significance of montage is also relevant to Kluge: “[t]he emphasis which montage placed on the construction of meaning…suggested an analogy with the external world: that it too was a construct, that it too was assembled and could…be reassembled along new lines…it also drew the spectator’s attention back to the artistic medium itself and its own processes of assembling” (27-28). Herein is a crucial dimension of utopian spectatorship: its positing of film-viewing as a participatory form of labor capable of making and remaking not only representations of the historical past, but alternative futures as well.

The following analysis switches seamlessly between the two films, so a summary of both films is crucial to avoid confusion. Der große Verhau follows several character storylines, all of which deal in one way or another with the transience and provisionality of modern social relationships under capitalism. The Johnson and Denares families, for

instance, are engaged in an ongoing search for work; Admiral Bohm, the comically inept leader of the 6th fleet, wishes for an end to the alienating results of his endeavors and their endless bureaucratic portals; the space smugglers Vincenz and Maria Sterr forge and destroy multiple alliances as they forage for useable materials; space pirate

Douglas struggles with intermittent employment for a failing corporation and eventually goes mad, and “the Last American” appears at the end to extol the virtues of the present system, only to be accidentally blown up by the 6th fleet. Willi Tobler, meanwhile, traces its title character’s fateful tenure as the major press agent of the 6th

Fleet, and the eventual disintegration of both the fleet and his dreams of a utopian security. Unlike Der große Verhau, Willi Tobler does not cross-cut between disparate storylines, focusing more exclusively on characters associated with the 6th Fleet and its activity.

As is common with Kluge’s narratives, the films offer us none of the typical codes of identification. The characters are all poorly rendered, appearing more as generic social types than as fully-fleshed out characters in the realist tradition. The events of the narratives are presented second-hand, often through intertitles that variously represent non-diegetic commentary or the internal thoughts of the characters. The films composed entirely of extended montage sequences of amateurish special effects, cramped sequences detailing the characters’ banal activities, grainy photographic images in color and black and white, details from illustrated science-fiction serials, the afore-mentioned titles, and poorly drawn topographies of the Krüger 60 star system. Confronted by both a disorienting style and minimally sketched characters, the viewer initially finds himself unmoored and grasping for purchase. It is a feeling not unlike that of the various

characters, whose storylines do not always appear to be connected by anything other than the impersonal institutional forces under which they must all try to survive. As the spectator explores Kluge’s films, the characters drift through the opaque surfaces of outer space. On both sides of the spectatorial encounter, a state of migration prevails.

While allowing the spectator to experience the feelings of alienation and isolation that attend such a state, the schematic nature of Kluge’s films also motivate him/her to engage in meaning making more imaginatively. As such, new possibilities for counter- syntheses are generated which allow the spectator to pursue lines of inquiry in contingent and unpredictable directions.

In the absence of conventional anchors of identification, viewers must instead rely on their capacity to construct and create connections, both between the different narrative elements and beyond them using the knowledge of their historical contexts. In

John Davidson’s formulation, the film presents its viewers with “pieces in the free surface of connections that in the cinematic cosmos serve as raw material for the labour of individual fantasy production of emotion” (“Species Memory,” 26). The viewer is thereby invited to engage in alternative kinds of imaginative labor. It is in this contingent process of association that the film emerges as an ongoing process, one produced collaboratively by filmmakers, spectators, and social context. To say this is to rehearse one of the commonplaces of narrative scholarship, from psychoanalysis to

Neoformalism: the film itself is not a closed whole, but is dependent upon the imaginative efforts of the viewer for its legibility. Indeed, the intertextual imperative at work in Kluge’s films is such that their inherent incompleteness becomes a perpetually open invitation for the viewer to bring external material to bear. In conjunction with the

eternally “homeless” characters of both films, this open intertextuality invokes the contingent networks that compose modern ethnoscapes. In doing so, it foregrounds the collectively shared capacity to interpret and intervene.

A provocative starting point for beginning this work is the place names of the film’s planets and star systems. The Johnson and Denares families, for instance, introduce the narrative as they attempt to escape the planet Japetus. One possible association for this name is the nineteenth century Danish scientist Johannes Japetus

Smith Steenstrup, whose research focused on the “Postglacial” or Holocene geological epoch, which continues to the present and includes the origins of humanity (C.f.

Cowles, “Vegetational Cycles”). This reference invokes the dizzying age of the earth and the comparatively miniscule totality of human activity thus far, from the development of simple tools to the most advanced modern technologies (C.f. Battarbee,

“Holocene Climate Variability”). Placing the film’s activity in such an inclusive contextual horizon raises questions about the proper purview for the film’s interpretation. It especially reminds one of Kluge’s frequent invocation of the centuries of accumulated labor power contained within the major disasters of modernity.

The extended climatological warmth of the Holocene contrasts with the film’s frigid setting. Krüger 60, for instance, is made up of three planets, one of which is defined as “icy” (eisig), and the other two as “inhospitable” (unwirtlich) and “artificial”

(künstlich). This constellation alludes to Kluge’s frequent use of climatological metaphors in tracing human development:

Significant attributes, without which humanity would not have survived, emerge from the Ice Age. For example, the distinction between hot and cold that is so important for warm-blooded animals: it is the foundation of

100

all FEELINGS. In this respect one can say that we human beings come from the cold. (Cited in Pavsek, Utopia of Film, 239)

Pavsek reads this pseudo-scientific description as analogous to utopian cinema’s ability to excavate a “world of warmth” from the coldness of modernity’s calcified second natures (240). This feeling is augmented by the film’s reference to Bohm’s 6th fleet as

“cold-blooded” (kaltblütig). This proves to be a major interpretive key, as all of the characters are variously defined by the “cold” mechanisms of the Suez Canal

Corporation. Coldness, then, expresses the rigid and immobile identities that institutional forces perpetuate. A viewer familiar with Kluge’s work will be cued to the possibility of a “warmer” alternative to the dominant coldness of the film. As Inga Scharf asserts, this coldness is closely associated with inertness and stagnation (45-83). An introductory shot from Willi Tobler builds upon this metaphor: the camera lingers on a close-up view of primate skulls, invoking not only prehistoric human evolution but also late capitalism’s infiltration of the innermost recesses of the body.

In invoking humanity’s prehistoric past, Kluge also references our many possible futures.

Most generally, futurity designates an abstract critical tool through which multiple functions of the future in cultural productions may be explored. The term has many other valences, but recent scholarship connects it to the current era of globalization and world-scale integration. Leslie Adelson, in particular, explores futurity in the context of

“an interconnected and precarious world” (213). In Adelson’s analysis, the current era of globalization opens up new possibilities for considering the role of futurity in Kluge’s work. In Adelson’s analysis of Kluge’s recent prose fiction, futurity is the condition of possibility of meaningful historical experience (Erfahrung). In my reading, this treatment

101

of futurity is deeply related to the indeterminate status of human history, because futurity is the rubric through which the future as such can be made and transformed.

While the current twenty-first century context undeniably foregrounds this indeterminacy, I claim a similar status for West Germany’s development from the postwar period into the early 1970s. As with his work in the twenty-first century, we can pinpoint futurity as a major component of Kluge’s work during this period, and for a similar reason: because the disjunctive transitions which West Germany experienced throughout this period foregrounded the contingency of historical development even as it was typified by global capitalism’s ceaseless expansion.

In the globalized world, the future is not merely a concept, but also what Arjun

Appadurai calls a “cultural fact,” and its use indicates that the abstract “capacity to aspire” has become an “unevenly distributed good” under the prevailing international division of labor (289). Appadurai’s intervention stresses both the materially felt effects of the future and its historical character as an imaginatively appropriated phenomenon.

Adelson’s approach to Kluge’s prose similarly treats futurity as something accessible to human agency; that is, as an experience that can be had in the present. In my interpretation, this makes sense only if we understand what experience means for

Kluge: the dynamic synthesis between historical materials and the living labor capacities of human agents, for whom the interface between the objectified labor of texts and their own living labor becomes a site of futurity rather than reification. This is precisely the significance of science-fiction for Kluge, for no other genre so systematically concerns itself with the status of the future and the ambivalent possibilities therein.

102

Futurity is a particularly useful tool for analyzing Kluge’s films because of its utopian potential as a tool for conceptualizing radically different versions of human identity. Although more recent work on futurity focuses on Kluge’s short stories, I see a similar potential for spectatorship in Der groβe Verbau and Willi Tobler. In these films, it is in the encounter with the earthly differences of the postwar world that potential sites of Erfahrung erupt. These differences are conceptualized within the context of a provisional and transient social world, and the possibility of Erfahrung depends upon the future possibility of an impossible encounter with the non-Western other, a figure perpetually foreclosed by the discourses of the West. The West’s meta-geographic framework and its ethnic identity constructions emerge with particular force in both of these films, especially concerning their fascination with the newly permeable networks that make up the postwar world.

The metaphoric values of warm and cold correspond to the tense relationship between the utopian longing for a better future and the unbearable present that generates such longing. In the case of the Johnson and Denares families, this tension is expressed in their desperate search for an “edge of industry” (Rand der Industrie) beyond which they might find some form of happiness and security. To their dismay, they discover that the expropriated universe “is expanding more quickly than they can travel.” The film shows us cramped group shots of the families together in their tiny ship, featuring women and children who engage absent-mindedly in forms of affective labor, with one young mother in particular attending to her children with a half-hearted smile on her face. She is set off from the rest of the group by virtue of her vibrantly red coat, and the camera cuts into her as she engages with the children. The “warmth” of her

103

attentions, however, barely competes with the cool color gradations of the camera lens, the drab colors of the other characters’ attire, the depressingly claustrophobic group shots, and the intermittent scenes of the cold inhospitableness of space.

Over-determined by the nomadic character of life in space and the provisional nature of personal relationships, Kluge’s diegetic ethnoscapes are typified by a perpetual impermanence: the settings of both films have a distinctly “unfinished” appearance. The interiors of space crafts, for instance, look almost like construction sites that may have been abandoned, and the lack of consistent settings which might anchor the viewer spatially augments the sense of impermanence and provisionality. All of the characters seem to be in a constant state of travel. Just as significantly, their attire—trench coats, dark monochrome palettes, and uniforms—is redolent of both the petit-bourgeoisie classes and the radical student movements. Kluge’s intergalactic dystopia can thus also be read as an ethnoscape reflecting the state of Europe’s frustrated revolutionary longing.

While both Der große Verhau and Willi Tobler are composed of recognizably

German cultural referents (stills from science-fiction serials such as Perry Rhodan,

World War II footage of German soldiers, and references to figures from German folklore), they also approach the idea of Europe, notably through the medium of language. Over the course the films, the bureaucratic professionals of the 6th Fleet and the various corporations speak in German, English, and Italian. Despite the presence of multiple languages, however, a common ideological frame of reference prevails. The dialogue is frequently delivered in a bland monotone, as if the events being described or reported are of no consequence. When the film introduces new characters, they are

104

consistently first identified by their professional titles; the film emphasizes their bureaucratic function and downplays their individual personalities. The introduction of security chief Schröder-Mahnke (Hannelore Hoger) is typical. Viewed in a grainy black and white long shot and sitting rigidly in a chair, Schroder-Mahnke describes her position and responsibilities: “I am the onboard security chief Ms. Schroder-Mahnke. I’m in charge of the 192 security staff who guard the ship’s 7000 crew members. Our motto is: Negligence aboard the ship is almost impossible.” As she delivers this last bit of dialogue, the film cuts to an overhead view of the ship moving through space, as if to emphasize its symbolic supremacy over any specific human actor. This is just one of many scenes that reflect upon the colonized subjectivities of late capitalism’s professional classes, especially the mid-and-upper-level managerial classes that proliferate in the post-war period. The presentation of character types under standardized capitalist relations makes a stinging critique of the hollowed-out entrepreneurial spirit informing bourgeois social relationships.

Kluge’s polemic against the conventional model of spectatorship references this symbolic development in its description of the viewer’s perpetually nervous condition under capitalist relations:

The spectator must sit in the movie house or in front of the TV set like a commodity owner: like a miser grasping every detail and collecting surplus value on everything which has any value…So uneasy this spectator- consumer, alienated from his own life so completely like the manager of a supermarket or department store who – even at the price of death –…will not stop accumulating the last scraps of marketable goods in the storeroom so that they may find their buyers. (“Film and the Public Sphere,” 38)

This is indeed how the military and corporate professionals of the film behave—as anxious speculators forever engaged in encoding the materials of outer space

105

according to predetermined measures of value, even at the cost of physical harm.

Through the multi-lingual contexts of its characters, the film suggests that this entrepreneurial spirit increasingly characterizes Europe as a whole.

The fate of a new ship for the fleet, the En Cascade, dramatizes the deleterious effects of this entrepreneurial spirit nicely. Even before the ship has finished crashing as the result of an unknown malfunction, the Engineer Admiral is already making notes and planning to improve upon the ship’s construction: “This acid test facilitates the gathering of experience for the building of the next ship.” Absurdly enough, he makes these notes while still aboard the crashing ship, suggesting that the impulse to calculate has become the driving force of his life. The ship’s failure is foreshadowed in an earlier scene focusing on Admiral Bohm’s interactions with the builders. This scene also articulates the foiled utopian dreams underpinning the construction of the ship. One of the engineers (speaking in English) opines: “We, the engineers…have worked for several years. We have constructed some subtleties. We would prefer to bury this splendid ship for future archeologists to have the opportunity of discovering it.”

Constructed for posterity, the ship is also immediately relegated to the planned obsolescence of endless innovation.

The deflating experience produced by this arrangement is made clear by Admiral

Bohm’s feelings regarding the ship. Filmed in a close-up, he pensively reflects on his participation: “If I have…taken over the leadership of this venture and this object, it is due to the irrational hope that what we know from experience and have to expect won’t occur in this case.” Later, when the ship appears to have a successful test run, the

Admiral is filmed in a high-angle long shot laughing in disbelief over the ship’s ability to

106

fly. The utopian longing for something different, however, is short-lived. After the ship’s destruction, Admiral Bohm is approached by a corporate agent who wants to buy the scrapped remains. Despite the failure of the venture, and the obvious lack of safety and happiness that has attended its construction, the characters behave as good capitalist subjects, already speculating upon the potential value of raw materials for further production. The projected necessity of this decision indicates the characters’ subjection to the diegetic ideoscape, their visual capacity overdetermined by symbolic relations of value: “The collective production of goods develops images of exchange value…When the sense of having takes hold of the eyes, they actually see value, instead of concrete objects.” Despite their clear dissatisfaction with the results of such decisions, the film’s professionals cannot seem to help reinvesting in the symbolic structures that are the source of their discontent. Throughout both films, Kluge’s characters find themselves constantly alienated from the imagined results of their historical striving.

Despite the grim results of his characters’ efforts, Kluge’s work suggests that the impulses motivating these efforts contain a utopian kernel that may yet be realized. This kernel is again connected to Kluge’s investment in the Kantian schema of cognition as an index of global humanity’s capacity to resist the present in the interest of constructing a new and better future. As motivated by the Kantian schema, Kluge’s work is thus driven by his adherence to classical enlightenment values, especially humanity’s capacity for the interrelated concepts of reason and imagination. Unlike the meta- geographic narrative of “the West” described above, however, these enlightenment values are no longer determined by their exclusive belonging to a particular ethnos.

Instead, these values are the domain of universal humanity’s capacity to imagine

107

alternatives, even when historical catastrophe forces this impulse into the domain of the unconscious. Pavsek states Kluge’s radical enlightenment position nicely:

This suppressed dream of reason, despite its failures, despite being obscured to the point of fading from our awareness, continues to press its demand underground and in unconscious form. In other words, the unconscious in Kluge is…where reason resides when it cannot realize itself in reality. (The Utopia of Film, 168)

In my reading, this passage bears directly on Negt and Kluge’s conception of

“Germany”: far from the conventional notion of self-present and complete identity, Negt and Kluge’s vision of Germany refers to the suppressed emancipatory ideals generated by the diverse historical agents who recognize in it the promise of a new vision of human freedom. Germany no longer designates a literal place, but a concept accessible to collective agency no matter its ethnic, cultural, or geographic origins. Circulating within increasingly permeable international networks, the concepts of Germany, the enlightenment, the public sphere, and so on can be engaged in new and unpredictable ways. Kluge’s rethinking of Germany thus represents his investment in the enlightenment’s suppressed dream of radical revolution and human equality. Negt and

Kluge treat this utopian dream as an historical principle capable of reemerging at any time and place, and in any language. This promise depends upon the constantly renewable resource of labor power, which can affect historical change for better as well as for worse.

In defining “Germany” as an historical assemblage of human labor power, Negt and Kluge treat it and its attendant properties as mobile and contested signifiers. This not only indicates the authors’ sustained challenge to conventional models of national identity, but also the international context of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), whose policy makers saw an urgent need to reconstitute their country’s symbolic

108

reception before other world powers and former colonies. It was this notion of projecting

German national identity in a redefined global horizon that eventually led to the official funding and promotion of New German Cinema (NGC). As John E. Davidson’s

Deterritorializing the New German Cinema argues:

The push toward a new West German cinema arose from the desire to create and disseminate an effective Selbstdarstellung [self-representation] throughout the world…These politicians felt that film was the medium to reconstruct and project an image of the FRG as ‘Germany,’ but one removed from the troubling historical resonances of the term. (44)

Although the politically radical projects of NGC would appear to be unlikely candidates for such self-representation, Davidson in fact sees their deconstruction of German identity as paradoxically complicit in the official narrative—generated by German intellectuals and policy-makers, and heavily influenced by North American reception of

NGC—of Germany as an internal “other” whose status as a Western identity was marked by a spectral difference.

In Davidson’s view, this projection reinforces the emerging neocolonial framework of the newly integrated North Atlantic bloc: “NGC can be seen as consistently involved in re-creating an ‘othered’ German identity in order to integrate

Germany into the West more fully and resolidify the West in the face of continuing crisis”

(9). In Davidson’s view, then, any consideration of the political impact of specific films must also take into account this larger projection of German otherness, in which the ostensible deconstruction of German identity colluded in the perpetuation of the West’s economic and cultural hegemony.

Although Kluge is notably absent from Davidson’s study, much of his work appears to participate in the effacement that Davidson describes. Indeed, few other artists have been as concerned with disrupting the notion of a discrete, homogeneous

109

German identity. It must also be noted that theorists have often critiqued Kluge for his tendency to conflate significantly different kinds of historical experience, especially concerning the disasters of World War II and the Holocaust. That said, Davidson himself is at pains to emphasize that the neocolonial projection of NGC he analyzes does not simply diffuse the radical arguments of specific NGC films, and I would argue that the international reception of NGC that he analyzes is still only one possible reading, however normative and hegemonic it may be. No discourse, no matter how powerful, can foreclose alternative readings of texts, especially in a context in which international networks were providing new opportunities to engage in counter-narrative imaginings.

One must certainly take the neocolonial context of NGC into account, but in what follows I argue that this context is precisely what occasions a radical reading of Kluge’s work, especially his two science-fiction feature films from the early 1970s. In these films, the question of German identity is not only haunted by the divided legacies of the West, but also by the anticolonial forces of independence and decolonization.

The figure of “the Last American” in Der große Verhau makes the film’s interest in the neocolonial entity of “the West” clear. The Last American appears shortly before the film’s close, and his brief role places the U.S. as the major symbolic locus of the big mess that unfolds before the viewer. He appears suddenly near the film’s climax to relate the history of the U.S, which is treated as coterminous with the history of the present intergalactic crisis. The following monologue is given just prior to his ship’s destruction by one of Krüger 60’s fleets. The character is filmed in a close-up while directly facing the camera as he speaks:

Funny story, but you may not believe it, because it was very primitive in the old days. America started from three little boats that came from Italy.

110

They sailed around the East coast, and then they came to America and settled. About three hundred and fifty years later, they started to cross the great desert, not knowing where they were going, exploring the West. And what do you think? They found a new land. Later, they discovered the West, started the gold rush, we have a great population there, and later on, we started the great exploration into outer space which they have today. Fantastic, isn’t it? But that’s the way it was. It continued that way for a long time. But now we have the great exploration of today. You wouldn’t believe it, but it’s true! That’s what happened. So it continues. We’re going on to outer space. Fantastic! You can’t believe it, can you? But that’s the way it was. So it continues. Here we are today!

The appearance of the Last American and his stunning historical summary provides a major piece to the film’s meta-geography, making the argument about ethnicity explicit.

Speaking in the first person plural, he collapses the multilingual world of the film into one grand historical narrative of Euro-American progress and development. The destinies of Europe and the U.S. are retroactively bound together in a narrative characterized by exploration, commerce, and colonization—an ethnos contained within the common legacy of the enlightenment and its consequences. The progression of the

American’s narrative from East to West and from “They” to “We” makes his story’s binding impulses clear.

The Last American’s use of personal pronouns further indicates the symbolic function of his narrative. Repeatedly using the first person plural, it is unclear whether he is referring to fellow Euro-Americans, fellow Western subjects, or to humanity in general. The ambiguity of the “we” indicates the universalizing impulse of the narrative, in which the distinct historical events of European exploration and expansion become the defining forces of human historical progress. Similar to the universalizing impulse of the bourgeois public sphere, the above formulation also propagates a teleological progression in which each event causes the next in an orderly cycle of capitalist development. The alienating function of this scene is suggested by the American’s

111

constant use of the second person to address his audience, thus dissimulating the consensus of his version of history. In other words, he constructs the consensus of the narrative, rather than merely describing it. The uses of “they,” “you,” and “we” are thus both central and recalcitrant to his story. Moving seamlessly from the “outside” (“they,”

“you,”) of his narrative to its inside (“We”), the character unconsciously acts out the representational antinomies of late capitalism’s reification of history. The pronouns are both the primary material of this reification and the unruly signs of a consensus that can never be final, because viewers are driven to ask whether or not the Last American’s story can possibly include them, given the ironic counterpoint provided by the hopeless condition of the films’ other characters.

This scene’s use of a direct-address close-up is typical of both Der große Verhau and Willi Tobler. Facing the camera and speaking in the second person, the Last

American breaks one of the foremost rules of classical narrative: the injunction against acknowledging the viewer’s presence. This move denies the viewer the imaginary privilege of invisibility. The direct address hails a self-conscious historical subject who may or may not identify with the Last American’s history of events. At the same time, however, it also implicates the viewer in the diegesis, and thereby suggests the common state of identity in both its diegetic and spectatorial sites. This is particularly true of Willi Tobler’s constant reports on the 6th fleet in the form of direct address. By repeatedly attenuating the dividing line between spectator and diegesis, Tobler’s reports suggest that the predetermined propaganda script he is working from may not be all that different from the pre-programmed practice of spectatorship that Kluge attacks so vividly as an entrepreneurial paradigm. By the same token, however, the alienation effect of

112

direct address becomes a measure of the viewer’s capacity to imagine alternatives to institutional norms. The foregrounding of spectatorship as a form of interpretive labor exposes the film as an assemblage of historical materials subject to the viewer’s creative syntheses. It also suggests that, like the fragmented collage form of the film, the viewer’s own symbolic identity is similarly underdetermined and subject to intervention.

The cosmopolitical nature of such creative syntheses becomes especially clear when we consider the figures of the Suez Canal Company and the recognizably Asian character, Paula Stihi. Very much like the proper names of Hiroshima Mon Amour

(“Nevers, France,” “Hiroshima, Japan,” and the unspoken relevance of “Algeria”), these figures function as proper names whose singularities open out onto historical sites of contingency; sites which the spectator is invited to explore and interpret. In this respect, the Suez Canal Corporation fulfills a major thematic function: it invokes the barbarity of the West’s will to power and the imperialistic avarice informing its dream of reason. It is therefore one of the most powerful levers for the spectator’s intertextual play with the question of historical identity.

Referencing the actual construction of the Suez Canal, the title of Kluge’s intergalactic monopoly also symbolizes a major principle of capitalist modernity: the endless incorporation of new frontiers. Conceptualized as a grand integrating network for the international coordination of culture, commerce, and diplomacy, the canal was the object of both material and symbolic investments. Involving the French and British

Imperial powers, the Ottoman Empire, the Egyptian government, and untold legions of anonymous human labor, the Suez Canal is an awe-inspiring example of labor power

113

processed and reified in the name of progress and rationality. As the following passage indicates, it was also a focal point of the enlightenment’s quest for human perfectibility:

A vision of progress energized [Fedinand de] Lesseps, a vision that East and West could be joined, and that the union of the two seas and the two worlds would allow the energies of mankind to flourish as never before…Nature would be harnessed for the betterment of all. Disease and ignorance would be no more. Where superstition and archaic religion had once kept people fearful and timid, science and industry would allow human beings to claim the birthright of Eden. (6-7)

Histories of the Suez Canal describe the grim reality unfolding for the sake of this utopian vision. The canal was built by forced labor and fueled by entrepreneurial greed even as the rhetoric justifying its construction emphasized human happiness and fulfillment. The control of the canal by private colonial interests further dissimulated its promise, and it was only in the mid-twentieth century that Egypt finally claimed it. The

Canal thus invokes a range of national and cultural alliances, but properly belongs to none of them by virtue of its inherently supra-national character and history—its construction was an international cooperative effort, and it was built for “humanity” even as it served the interests of only a privileged few. Originally conceptualized as an opening into the East, and a way for the West to expand its power and influence, the canal also became a focal point of nationalist struggle as Egypt attempted to control its destiny and the nature of its integration into the West.

Like the failed promise suggested by Kluge’s 6th Fleet, however, the Canal’s construction eventually signaled only further disappointment and misery for its Eastern participants:

The canal’s inauguration in 1869 was supposed to herald better days, but for Egypt that did not happen...By the grace of Suez, French shareholders and English politicians became rich, powerful, and feared. Situated at the center of the British empire, the Suez Canal became an excuse for imperial expansion, and then a cause of imperial overstretch… [T]he day

114

the canal opened was not the culmination of a dream but the death of one. (Karabell, 9)

Kluge’s use of the Suez Canal name thus invokes East and West, forced labor, imperialist exploitation, and the failed dreams of history and the enlightenment. It brings an explicitly anti-colonial and anti-imperialist framework to both films, and also suggests the changed nature of both in the neocolonial context of the postwar period. While the dominant languages of the films, their ethno-centric casting, and the German intertitles suggest that the hailed spectator is a fellow Euro-American subject, the free play of associations established by film form invoke the utopian spectator rehearsed above, and even hint at the possibility of a non-Eurocentric viewing position. Defined neither by the last American’s meta-geographic narrative nor by the entrepreneurial spirit enslaving the film’s bourgeois professionals, the spectator’s ethnic and ideological identity remains partially autonomous from the late capitalist logic of the diegesis.

He/she is instead hailed by the radically inclusive purview of Kantian cognition, in which the sensual and imaginative capacities of humanity produce an intertextual liminal zone of fantasy production. The film’s dramatization of private/public and labor/leisure continues to play this imaginative labor out as both an alternative to and a component of the prevailing political economy. In reference to the Suez Canal, this alternative entails a problematization of the Western self and its Eastern other by invoking the competing historical perspectives informing capitalist modernity.

In the figure of Paula Stihi (Natalia Bowakow), Kluge conjoins the utopian possibilities of the private/public dynamic with the exploration of self and other. Paula is initially introduced in Der groβe Verhau, but she only appears as one character among many, sitting silently within the film’s frequent long shots of its claustrophobic interiors.

115

She is set apart from the other characters not only by virtue of her silence, but also by her recognizably Asian features. She is not introduced by name until Willi Tobler, where we learn that she is the major of the 6th fleet, but also a double agent who reports to its unspecified enemies. As is typical of Kluge’s treatment of his female characters, when

Paula finally does speak, it is only through intertitles. In stark contrast to her male crew members, she remains a silent body whose thoughts and feelings are externalized only as script. In conjunction with her Asian features, her silence resonates with postwar

Europe’s suppression of ethnic and sexual difference.

Paula is featured near the end of Willi Tobler. Introduced by a red intertitle that gives her name and rank, the film cuts to a long shot of her sitting up on a couch, bathing her feet in a small tub next to a coffee table on which various beauty products are placed. Her nakedness and the domestic paraphernalia clearly symbolize that she is in a private space, a point further marked by the absence of other characters in the long shot. In a close-up, the camera pans up and down her body in a high-angle shot as she bathes her feet and the puts on makeup. From here, the film cuts to a montage in which intertitles present Paula’s thoughts interspersed with extreme close-ups of her highly made up face staring directly into the camera. In these close-ups, she invokes the seductive femme fatales of so many commercial thrillers, and the heavy eye makeup accentuates her apparent status as an exotic object of desire. The intertitles cumulatively present the following statement: “I am an agent…I disclose what I learn…to the enemies (Gegner) of the Admiral.” The identities of the Admiral’s enemies are never revealed, and the question of Paula’s allegiance is confused even further

116

when more intertitles report that she is in love with the Admiral, that he knows her true identity, and that he has chosen not to report her.

As the montage unfolds, we see Paula and the Admiral making love in an upright position, kissing each other rather perfunctorily. The film cuts to an intertitle explaining

Paula’s feelings for him, but the script has been hand-written over a pornographic photograph of a women whose lower body is provocatively exposed, thus further suggesting the character’s subjection to a visual economy of hetero-normative pleasure.

In a striking contrast, however, the film cuts to another close-up of Paula, but this time in black-and-white and without the garish make-up. Instead of the seductive and exotic persona of the previous shots, here she appears ambivalent and introspective, glancing off to the left side of the frame and appearing slightly uncomfortable with the camera’s attention. A series of intertitles reveals the Admiral’s protective affection for her, and we then see her in one final black and white close-up smiling pleasantly. It is perhaps the only sequence of either film in which something resembling an aura of warmth and intimacy prevails.

Paula’s treatment in Willi Tobler references a similar sequence in Der groβe

Verhau, in which the space pirate Douglas, an employee of the struggling Joint

Galactical Transports Company, “enjoys” a brief vacation with the otherwise absent

Fraulein Sylvia Szeliga, who may be a paid sex worker. As with the Admiral and Paula’s encounter, Douglas and Szeliga are filmed in a small private space. We are first introduced to Szeliga in a medium shot displaying her lying on a bed. Her blouse open and exposing her breasts, she lethargically dribbles an unmarked bottle of bluish liquid on her chest. This activity develops in a montage sequence, and eventually gives way

117

to Douglas and Szeliga in a long two-shot. Both characters are lying down together, but instead of making love, Douglas watches passively in the background while Szeliga tears pillows apart and pours jarred fruits and honey into the billowing pile of feathers.

Szeliga plays with the messy concoction of feathers and liquid almost absentmindedly as Douglas watches. Neither character’s expressions clearly indicate what their attitudes are to this surreal activity.

In both of these sequences, Kluge explores different valences for the utopian potentials of the private space of the bourgeois public sphere. Despite the increasing colonization of social relationships by logics of value, these scenes present the domestic space of leisure as a comparatively autonomous zone for the propagation of fantasy. Although both sequences are very different in tone (the eventual warmth of

Paula and the Admiral’s scene contrasting with the more ambivalent surrealism of

Douglas and Szeliga), both present a sustained encounter with fantasy and alternative sensual production. In the case of Paula, the intertitles expressing her thoughts constrain her (because she is not able to actually voice them), but they also suggest the uneasy place that private thoughts and feelings occupy in a capitalist framework.

Although the industrial public spheres of late capitalism depend upon such private feelings, they are also sources of tension by virtue of their recalcitrance to straightforward codification and measurement. On this register, the device of the intertitles dramatizes a representational schema’s mere approximation of inner thoughts and feelings. This space between the titles’ inscriptions and their unrepresented origin maintains a realm of maneuver for the private activity of fantasy production. This maneuverability is even more evident in the Szeliga scene in Der große Verhau

118

(summarized above), in which the apparently nonsensical nature of her activity—its

‘unproductive’ output—also maintains its mystery in the face of capitalist codification. In

Szeliga’s case, especially, I read her incomprehensibly sensual activity as symbolic of the arcane work of imagination, whose labor can only be imperfectly captured by expropriating forces.

Kluge further dramatizes the private sphere’s vulnerability when Szeliga and

Douglas’s encounter is suddenly interrupted by an intertitle reading “the corporation!”

Suddenly, the Suez Canal Company intrudes upon the space of leisure and brings its imaginative play to an end. Soon after, another intertitle reports that the forces of the

SCC have emerged victorious “[a]fter seven revolutions” and “six galactic wars.” The

German word “Gesellschaft,” translated as “corporation” by the subtitles, presents a range of meanings that deepen the relationship between the private space of fantasy and the public space of the corporation. Gesellschaft can also mean “society,”

“companionship,” “fellowship,” and “company,” depending on usage and context. This lexical ambiguity suggests the similarly complex relationship of private and public in the industrialized public spheres of bourgeois modernity. As Negt and Kluge maintain throughout both The Public Sphere and Experience and History and Obstinacy, private and public are not simply complementary zones, nor are they merely antagonistic to each other; rather, the private space of family and romantic partnership is the major processing plant for human labor power, and thus also the necessary prerequisite to capitalism’s primitive accumulation. To the extent that the private, domestic realm is disavowed as a source of value, its utopian potential will constantly be distorted and closed off by the bracketing mechanisms of the bourgeois public sphere. It is only by

119

passing into the collective realm of society at large that private labor can be recognized as such, and thereby propagate alternate relationalities (Zusammenhang). By problematizing bourgeois humanism’s strict boundary between private and public, Der

Große Verhau’s scene featuring Szeliga’s private labor thereby questions the gender binary that underpins patriarchal capitalist relations. The “Gesellschaft” title designates not only the public sphere’s hostile expropriation of imaginative labor, but also the always-already internalized mechanisms of primitive accumulation, and in doing so insists on the gendered nature of such labor.

Heidi Schlüpmann’s analysis of Negt and Kluge’s treatment of feminine labor in

The Public Sphere and Experience represents a major interpretive key to the “Paula” and “Szeliga” scenes. For her part, Schlüpmann is skeptical of Kluge’s conception of feminine labor because of its apparent essentialization of femininity; that is, Kluge appears at points to treat such labor as inherently feminine, rather than a matter of ideology and constructed gender identity. This is certainly a tendency in Kluge’s work, but I take the emancipatory potential of feminine labor to actually be syecdochically expressive of the emancipatory potential of human labor as such. For Negt and Kluge, the realm of the domestic is potentially emancipatory by virtue of its inherent resistance to the public sphere of alienated labor:

According to [Max] Horkheimer, the bourgeois family is the agent of submission to total domination, but it is also the site of humanity, even containing the potential for resistance. It owes this emancipatory potential to the work of women…Where Horkheimer…speaks of the ‘principle of love for the whole human being,’ Kluge speaks of the mode of production that is aimed at the satisfaction of needs by means of “concrete, actual use values. (73)

In Schlüpmann’s summary of Kluge’s position, this feminine mode of production is emancipatory because of its propagation of the singular labor of affection and maternal

120

comfort, but it is also stagnated by the exclusionary mechanisms of the bourgeois public sphere, which refuse to recognize it as a form of labor. Contemporaneous with Kluge’s foray into science-fiction, this utopian version of private “feminine” labor is clearly at work in both films. In both cases, however, the promise of such feminine labor is undercut by the mechanistic professionalism that otherwise dominates these films. Both protected and distorted by its imperfect relegation to the private sphere, the utopia of feminine labor is therefore at best transient and paradoxical, although it does suggest a sphere of play that is similar to Kluge’s conception of spectatorship.

The foregrounding of gender—if not sexual difference—in the films is noteworthy for several reasons. First of all, it invokes Kluge’s controversial theorization of a superior feminine mode of production that underpins and is suppressed by the bourgeois public sphere. What is more, in neither sequence is the concept of femininity categorically yoked to maternity, a definite source of concern for feminist readings of Kluge’s work. In place of a conflation of feminine and maternal fantasy production, these scenes instead reflect on the larger question of gendered affective labor in the postwar context. It must therefore be said that both scenes, although they explore notions of feminine labor, maintain Kluge’s tendency to subjugate a specifically feminist analysis to the Frankfurt

School’s Marxist framework. As the above summary hopefully demonstrates, however, feminine labor specifically and human bio-power as such are intimately linked: the affective labor usually associated with women in the public sphere powerfully expresses the obstinate resistance of human labor capacities to the unbearable realities generated by modern history.

121

Just as private, “feminine” labor’s radical potential is simultaneously preserved and foreclosed, so too is the radical potential of Paula’s status as non-Western other.

As a focal point for the spectator’s synthesizing play, Paula offers a potential challenge to the West’s self-construction. The ambivalent history of the Suez Canal adds to this interpretive line of flight, as an intertextual specter of Eastern otherness emerges to counteract the reifying role of “German” non-identity. The weaknesses of this intervention are also its strengths: it depends upon the imaginative labor of the spectator to create connections and go traveling in search of alternatives to the prevailing symbolic order—without this labor, such gestures could easily pass unnoticed. Kluge’s gamble is that the spectator will be seduced into the labor of fantasy:

“A continuous shifting of perspectives is typical of phantasy. In phantasy I can transport myself to Africa without effort or I can imagine myself involved in a love scene in the middle of the desert—all this happens as in a dream” (“Film and the Public Sphere, 43).

In the neocolonial context of Kluge’s statement, the choice of Africa is not incidental, for the Western tradition has a long history of constructing that continent as the primitive opposite of European Christian Reason. The place called Africa does not only designate a specific geographic location, but a meta-geographic concept that both threatens

Western modernity and legitimates it as a degraded and unhistorical other. Through this reference, Kluge invokes a non-Western presence whose own history cannot simply be ignored, even if it may be effaced. Indeed, one might say that Kluge’s films invite us to consider the possibility of the subaltern spectator, especially one emerging from the postcolonial framework of the West’s symbolic foreclosure of the global South. As such, the West’s consciousness is split not only by its own barbarities, but also by the

122

emergence of the non-Western post-colonial subject’s will to historical agency and radical contestation. This gesture creates a devastating disjunction in Western identity, and it is therefore a prelude to new formations of anti-colonial and anti-capitalist solidarity.

As these films both demonstrate, however, Kluge’s exploration of the permeable ethnoscapes of modernity is framed by a foundational discourse of the human, one in which a Marxist anthropology of labor power explores specific identity formations within an enlightenment perspective. This is nowhere more evident than in Kluge’s investment in the Kantian schema of human perception, and by extension his allegiance to the enlightenment’s foundational account of human autonomy and freedom. As usual,

Christopher Pavsek provides an elegant summation:

It is in this potential to promote the mind’s autonomous movement that cinema finds its most compelling vocation and project. This project is at one with that of the enlightenment more generally, and it is part of the utopia of film that cinema…can fulfill that program, one which Kluge understands in classically Kantian terms. (The Utopia of Film, 158)

Despite the barbarity of the West’s will to truth/power—the threatening counterpart of the enlightenment’s utopian project—Kluge still sees the principles (in the sense discussed above) of autonomy and reason as worthy objects for the instantiations of protest, even as he grounds these principles in a materialist conception of history.

Cinema becomes one of the most resonant synecdoches of this project when it articulates an autonomous Kantian spectator, one who is figured not as an isolated individual, but as a member of what Bernard Stiegler, referencing Kant, calls “a public that reads” (40-47). Redolent of Habermas’ ideal conception of the classical public sphere, a reading public refers to the collective capacity to perform creative syntheses overtime. Such syntheses depend on the labor characteristics (to use Kluge’s

123

materialist terminology) developed by modern capitalist technologies, especially print capitalism in the European and American contexts. Both constrained and enabled by history, the collective capacity for imaginative syntheses becomes the measure of

Kluge’s emancipated spectator. While reaching back into the primeval recesses of the past in search of revolutionary alternatives, Kluge’s modernist project also promises itself to the future; it insists on humanity’s capacity to change the course of history, and in doing so to participate in the making of a different future. This means that expropriating forces—capitalist and otherwise—will always distort the impulses of obstinacy and protest, even as they constitute them as historical objects. At the same time, the historical nature of consciousness ensures that it must always open towards a future, as well as the promise of a new and different synthesis. As Adelson reminds us, this promise depends upon consciousness’s willingness to engage in the labor of imagination. As I have explored it, this promise may be instantiated anywhere, whether in Europe, Africa, or elsewhere.

The labor of imagination and its global purview is the major departing point for the final chapter, which examines Ousmane Sembène’s cinematic practice as a concerted effort to develop collective forms of agency in the service of a new and better future for Africa. With Resnais and Kluge, Sembène focuses on the global significance of capitalist modernity and neocolonialism. By foregrounding the historical contingencies of film form and African narrative traditions, Sembène also follows Resnais and Kluge in proposing human cognition as a living process of engaging with and transforming the future. Whereas Resnais and Kluge deconstruct the borders of Europe in favor of a radically inclusive global subject, however, Sembène insists on the borders of African

124

cultural identity as a necessary precursor to social change. Within the continental purview of this spectral narrative of identity, Sembène envisions an African solidarity that embraces both difference and equivalence, and in doing so conceptualizes an

African multitude against the expropriating mechanisms of neocolonialism and global capitalism.

125

CHAPTER 4 OUSMANE SEMBÈNE’S PEDAGOGICAL FILM PRACTICE AND THE MAKING OF AN AFRICAN MULTITUDE

In the previous chapter, I analyzed how Alexander Kluge’s foregrounding of cognitive labor opened a space for the spectator’s autonomous play of associations among seemingly divergent historical situations and materials. This radical refiguring of spectatorship invoked the colonial underbelly of the West, thus inviting a postcolonial critique of Western national identities and their binaries of self/other and East/West.

Against such binaries, Kluge posits the Kantian schema of cognition—figured as an assemblage of labor capacities—as a radically universal framework in the postwar, postcolonial context. The labor capacities associated with cognition not only challenged the West’s self-construction as the privileged domain of reason, but also exploited modernity’s inadvertent creation of labor as a spectral commonwealth of modern human subjects under capital—a commonwealth, moreover, that exceeds national and cultural borders. In other words, Kluge treats labor as the driving force of globalization and its cosmopolitical makeup.

The notion of labor as commonwealth provides the starting point for this chapter, in which I claim that Ousmane Sembène’s cinematic practice hinges on an understanding of human subjectivity (the historical byproduct of labor) as a similarly shared province. While Kluge foregrounds this province by shattering cinematic narrative into the fragments of his modernist collages, thereby enabling the spectator’s free play of associations, Sembène emphasizes African oral conventions as a common framework for intervening in the (counter) production of radical subjectivities. Like,

Kluge, Sembène’s cinematic project is fundamentally future-oriented: the emphasis is not on what African subjects are, but on what they can become. His appeal to oral

126

convention is an important part of a larger creation of new forms of engaging with the postcolonial context of independent Senegal. This idea of the new prefigures Hardt and

Negri’s multitude, which is similarly based on its radical capacity for self-fashioning.

In keeping with Marxist and Fanonist perspectives on anti-colonial resistance,

Sembène treats revolutionary struggle as a necessarily collective endeavor.1 In a profound challenge to essentialist and metaphysical accounts of African national identities, Sembène approaches subjectivity as a contingent and necessarily unfinished historical process. On this register, his famously antagonistic relationship with Léopold

Sédar Senghor, independent Senegal’s first president, is a major focus of this chapter.

Rather than treating the two men as opposites, however, I attempt to account for how the contexts in which they both worked compelled them to develop similar—which is not to say identical—ideas concerning the role and status of African identities in general and Senegalese identity in particular. What is more, both men also conceptualized

African identities as constituted by multiple, competing registers. Eventually, although

Sembène rejects a straightforwardly essentialist vision of identity, he nevertheless invokes native African traditions in his work—a move that indicates his debt to Senghor.

As will be seen, however, Sembène employs such mechanisms as a necessary predicate for the radical questioning of identity that characterizes his films. What results is a tension between the didacticism of plot and the experimental approach to form. In the analysis that follows, I claim that we can see this paradoxical tension playing out in the two films that effectively bookend Sembène’s directorial career: Mandabi (1968) and

1 The above claim refers specifically to Fanon’s analysis of national consciousness in The Wretched of the Earth, which emphasizes the living history of a people as the necessary focal point for the anticolonial struggle. The native intellectual who wants to participate in such a struggle therefore has to move beyond a fetishization pre-colonial African cultures and into the dynamic and radically new situation of the people in its present context. This imperative is an important dimension of Sembène’s work.

127

Moolaadé (2004). Through the dialectical interplay of didactic plot and experimental form, a radically new subjectivity emerges as a revolutionary force.

The tension between didacticism and experimental form is a pivotal part of the oral conventions which underpin Sembène’s cinema. Numerous scholars have noted

Sembène’s self-styling as a “screen griot”; a cinematic equivalent of the traditional storyteller of native Senegalese tradition. The moments of Brechtian alienation in his films can therefore be considered as invocations of the enunciatory position of the storyteller. Sembène foregrounds the authorial force motivating the film work, and in the cultural context of Senegal such gestures become legible as cinematic instantiations of orality and oral narrative. In the establishing moments of Mandabi, for instance, A Wolof guitar plays on the soundtrack as a montage of the Dakar city outskirts introduces the protagonist. Through the reference to native musical accompaniment in concert with the film’s montage, the narrative gesture as such is foregrounded. This happens even more overtly near the beginning of Xala (1974), in which the credits are accompanied by a vivid oral narration of a parable that introduces some of the central themes of the film.

Through multiple formal devices, Sembène emphasizes the enunciatory aspects of narrative, which are particularly evident in oral storytelling, since the narrator is a necessarily overt and filtering presence in a way that is quite different from the conventions of classical Hollywood cinema.

The “orality” of many of Sembène’s films is an important aspect of his challenge to the spectator: to rethink their identities and to participate in the radical invention of something new—an alternative to the quagmires of postcoloniality. A brief summary of

Senghor’s profound influence on Africa’s postwar transition out of colonialism proper

128

demonstrates how important his work is for a consideration of the question of identity in

Sembène’s films, specifically in their exploration of the complexities of Senegalese postcolonial identity. Prior to his emergence as independent Senegal’s first president,

Senghor was at the forefront of debates concerning representation and citizenship during the disorienting transitional process of decolonization, prior to the emergence of

African nation-state paradigms. Throughout the postwar years (1945 until the decline of the talks by the late nineteen fifties) both French and African leaders were working to revise the Empire’s relationship to its former colonies. In concert with many other

French West African politicians, Senghor proposed a federalist solution in which a multinational state structure would replace the unilateral power of the French Empire. A critical component of this process entailed extending the rights of French citizenship to

Africans. From the start, Senghor and others pushed for universal citizenship.2 A major

2 It is difficult to overestimate Senghor’s—or Senegal’s—role in this process. Not only did Senghor exercise considerable influence as a member of the first constitutional drafting committee (the Commission Constitutionelle, which convened in December 1945), but his native country of Senegal provided a crucial precedent for extending the rights of citizenship to colonial subjects. As Frederick Cooper relates, the “Four Towns” (Quatre Communes) of Senegal had been granted the rights of citizenship in 1848, and this model provided the framework for conceptualizing a universal Franco-African citizenship (8). A major turning point of the commission debates occurred when Senghor submitted a report on the status of the French Union in the constitution. Citing the 1848 government’s granting of citizenship to the “Four Towns,” Senghor invoked the spirit of the French Revolution and posited the universal extension of citizenship as the implicit raison d’être of the decree of 16 pluviôse an II (1794), which had formally abolished slavery in the empire (80-81). Of particular import was Senghor’s inclusion of a citizenship clause in which he proposed that all former subjects of the empire should be represented with the strategically broad label of “citizen,” thus leaving unmarked the exact quality (whether French or not) of such citizenship. In Senghor’s view, this provided enough room for maneuver for former colonies “to take themselves, according to their wishes and their own genius, toward either assimilation and integration [into the French Empire] or association and federation” (cited in Cooper, 81). In Frederick Cooper’s terms, the drafting committee’s unprecedented task was “[t]o codify a France that respected simultaneously difference and equivalence” (81). Among many other factors (foremost among them the intransigent racism of French colonial officials), it was precisely the irresolvable complexity of this issue that eventually led to the failure of the federalist effort and the transition of many of the former French African colonies into independent nation states. The status of African identities, especially their autonomy and uniqueness, proved to be too complex a challenge because it could not be decided what kind of language or legislation would safeguard African cultural identity while also providing the full rights of citizenship.

129

sticking point, however, was precisely the issue of safeguarding the former colonies’ right to self-determination—whether and how much to integrate themselves into the

French empire, both culturally and politically. Universal citizenship provided representational equality, but also raised the threat of assimilation into a generic French identity. The question of autonomy was therefore central to the debates, and it was an important element in their eventual failure. Foremost in Senghor’s mind, specifically, was the issue of Senegal’s capacity to determine its future.

The preceding summary demonstrates Senghor’s nuanced grasp of the political import of identity and the question of representation. In the following analysis, I hope to show that it is precisely this question that animates Sembène’s films. While the entrance of Senegal and other West African territories into nationhood effectively ended the debate about French citizenship, the complexity of African identities and their relationship to this dilemma is on full display in Sembène’s work. Like Senghor before him, Sembène invokes collective identity as a dynamic and hybrid process, or what

Senghor famously referred to as a métissage.

The relevance of the debate on identity becomes evident once we analyze the plot of Mandabi. Often considered Sembène’s first feature-length film, Mandabi follows

Ibrahima Dieng (Makhouredia Gueye), an out-of-luck resident of post-independence

Dakar, who desperately tries to cash a money-order so that he can pay his debts and reestablish his social standing. During the film, a series of bureaucratic barriers repeatedly frustrate his attempts to access the money. The film culminates in the money-order’s theft by a corrupt businessman and Dieng’s resigned realization of the corruption of post-independence Senegal. Through an allegorical approach to both form

130

and content, Sembène examines the contradictions of modern Senegal. In his treatment of these issues, Sembène articulates a vision of identity that insists on the solidarity of the Senegalese community even as it also engages with the fundamental differences that disrupt seamless narratives of identity.

The major source of tension pivots on Dieng’s inability to access the rights of

Senegalese citizenship, specifically because of his lack of access to the French language (the official language of the Senegalese state). That said, it would be reductive to conclude that the provision of paperwork and access to an education in writing and reading would address the problem that Dieng faces in the film, which is not simply a matter of access to the rights of citizenship, but also how such access might be reconciled with his singular status as a Muslim and native member of Senegal.

Throughout the film, the homogenizing function of Senegal’s neocolonial bureaucracy foregrounds the vulnerability of singular identities to the standardizing impulses of civil representation. The major trope for this questioning is the inadequate paperwork that

Dieng does possess: a document listing his name and approximate birth date. The inadequacy of the document provides the motivation for his hapless venture into the hub of Dakar’s public sphere, and in the process it also comes to symbolize the ambivalence of civil identity and its relationship to the question of difference. A major device in this development is Sembène’s sustained use of tracking long shots, in which Dieng’s wandering figure both stands out in its singularity and threatens to be subsumed into the homogenizing currents of urban space. As a symbol of his immersion into this socio- political space, the money order and the inaccessible birth certificate represent both the threat and the promise of Senegalese civil identity. In this respect, the film’s tragicomic

131

ending, in which Dieng despairs over the corruption of neocolonial Senegal, also represents the potential success of Dieng’s inadvertent journey towards political and philosophical consciousness. This claim will be developed at length in the ensuing analysis of the film.

Sembène’s investment in hailing a popular audience sets him apart from Kluge and Resnais, and accounts for his singular usage of thematic and narrative conventions alongside more radical techniques. As scholars such as David Murphy and Sada Niang have suggested, Mandabi explores the question of Senegalese identity not only through its critique of neocolonialism’s disfigurement of traditional African practices, but also through its use of native Senegalese folk tales and cultural conventions. Murphy, for instance, reads Mandabi as a cinematic “trickster tale,” borrowed from Wolof storytelling traditions. What begins as a conventional trope, however, quickly becomes a unique strategy for critiquing the desperate context of post-independence Senegal. Rather than simply reproducing the successful and cunning trickster, Sembène condenses the trickster and his victim into the character of Dieng, creating what Murphy calls a failed trickster: “In Sembene’s film, the ‘universal’ tale of clever ‘trickster and hapless victim…becomes a profoundly social and political story of poverty and paranoia”

(Sembene, 87). While Murphy emphasizes Sembène’s unique spin on the trickster tale,

I also want to emphasize that Sembène’s recourse to a traditional Senegalese folktale indicates his interest in using the already-established resources of indigenous oral practices. While encouraging his audience to participate in the remaking of Senegal’s future, Sembène also expands his audience by appealing to established narrative conventions.

132

Niang’s analysis emphasizes the importance of traditional Wolof gender roles in understanding Mandabi . Dieng, for example, presents himself as the responsible and authoritative patriarch, able to guide his family through the proper observance of Muslim conventions while exhibiting the austerity and wisdom befitting his position. From the start, however, this self-representation is exposed as a failed performance:

Viewed from a traditional Wolof grid, Jeng’s [Dieng’s] ‘maleness’ is cracked by habits and acts not usually associated with manliness…in the very first scene of the film where the gentle coddling of a well-shaven face provides him with the utmost pleasure…Jeng displays a propensity for personal gratification and luxury, which is the source of comic relief.

In his initial presentation as a character invested in personal gratifications, Dieng’s self- styling as a proper Muslim patriarch is compromised. Dieng is repeatedly shown in these early scenes to be prey to a sensual enjoyment and self-indulgence that are unbecoming of a devout Muslim.

In Niang’s reading, Sembène’s invocation of traditional gender roles is an important satirical device: Dieng’s inability to convincingly perform proper male and

Muslim identity indicates both the instability of that identity and its inadequateness in the face of postcolonial Dakar. As with the reworked Trickster narrative, Sembène strikes a balance between appealing to established conventions—a traditional folktale and gender roles, respectively—while also critiquing such conventions and advocating for change. This is what I mean when I say that the film’s didactic and experimental registers are in tension with each other; however, it is a productive tension which interpellates a critical spectator.

Mandabi immediately presents the conflicting registers that inform Sembène’s aesthetic project. The film’s introduction is again relevant here. In the opening moments,

Wolof guitar music plays over a series of establishing shots of Dakar. As the camera

133

tracks from an elevated position downward into the life of the city, a dynamic sequence of middle and long shots of ordinary Senegalese going about their daily business unfolds. The center piece of this montage is a stationary shot of two women walking towards the camera frame, followed by a cut to a view from behind them as they walk away from the camera eye.

Attentive viewers will have noticed that, despite resembling a match-cut, the two shots do not compose an unbroken sequence in cinematic time and space. In the first shot, we see two women with loads balanced on their heads, while the following shot shows us three women in different clothing. In this establishing sequence, prior to the explicit introduction of characters or plot points, Sembène foregrounds the enunciatory nature of his film, alerting his audience not to take conventional cinematic grammar for granted. The opening also establishes a major theme of the film—the idea of multiple contexts and perspectives which are co-present in the heterogeneous setting of Dakar.

By presenting radically different views in concert with the simulation of a match-cut,

Sembène suggests the multiple competing contexts that are suppressed in mainstream narrative cinema, especially that of the Hollywood tradition. At the same time, the match-cut’s illusion of continuity is not simply effaced by this gesture; rather, its co- presence with the montage effect of the shots suggests a film that depends upon convention even as it challenges it. This sequence therefore serves as a synecdoche for the project of the entire film, which seeks to reconcile convention and critique in the service of a radically new vision of Senegalese identity.

Manthia Diawara provides a deft explication of Mandabi’s opening moments. His analysis will prove highly consequential when considering the film’s climax:

134

It is as if film time were equal to real time, unlike the pace of Western cinema which is driven by the levels of conflict in the narrative. Here, the pairing of images and scenes seems to dictate the pacing of the story and to consolidate the suturing of the viewer in the film. The shot of women carrying calabashes and walking toward the camera is a mirror image of the shot of the three women walking away from the camera. It is a repetition with a narrative difference. We are under the illusion that the camera is following the same four women, but we are actually being introduced to the women of the community; we are being dragged into the world of the film. (African Film, 38)

In Diawara’s analysis, these introductory scenes suture the viewer into the abstract concept of the community itself; therefore, Sembène’s compositions are not solely concerned with challenging dominant narrative approaches, but also with establishing the collective focus of the film. This collective focus extends beyond the diegesis into the actual Senegalese audience, who are invited to apprehend the fictional diegesis as both an address and a challenge to their own collectively-constituted identities.

Community and collectivity motivate both the plot and narrative structure of

Mandabi. In general, I believe that this preoccupation accounts for the complex—and apparently contradictory—interaction of didactic and experimental registers of

Sembène’s films.

The character of Dieng is the focal point of these competing registers in Mandabi.

Almost from the start, he is characterized by the distinct contradictions that typify his identity. The first level of this contradiction concerns the gap between the persona he advertises—both to himself and others—and the actual identity which personality and circumstances dictate for him. As Niang describes, Dieng tries to present himself as a proud and authoritative Muslim man: devout, wise, generous, and responsible. He consistently exposes himself, however, as religiously uninformed, pompous, and feckless. His chronic inability to match his persona is a major source of the film’s

135

satirical humor; it is also an opportunity for Sembène to explore the dilemma of Dieng’s subjectivity in a corrupt neocolonial context. Dieng’s ineffective performance of Muslim and Masculine roles (patriarch, elder, etc.) indicates not only the hypocrisy of the character, but also the divided nature of his subjectivity; this division corresponds to his alienation from the collective dimensions of the Senegalese public sphere and its bureaucratic structures. More fundamentally, however, it shows how Dieng’s recourse to traditional gender roles and religious faith provide no help when faced with the hybrid spaces of Dakar. This again emphasizes how Sembène invokes and utilizes convention in order to show its helplessness in the face of the complexities of the postcolonial context.

Dieng’s itinerary over the course of the film dramatizes this helplessness.

Beginning within the narrow concerns of his immediate neighborhood, the film sends

Dieng on a disorienting trip to multiple bureaucratic agencies. As his mission is consistently stymied, Dieng’s personal world is interrupted by the multiple valences of

Dakar, in which the negative experiences of institutional corruption and neocolonial appropriation also become important opportunities to engage with and discover the collectivist life of Dakar’s public sphere. Dieng constantly misses these opportunities, necessitating the film’s didactic climax. Until then, Dieng remains alienated from the collective vitality surrounding him. Murphy’s excellent analysis of both the film and the novella suggest the nature of this alienation:

[Mandabi]…marked a physical and spiritual movement away from the traditional, village-based society…to the corrupt and paranoid world of the city…Sembene presents Ibrahima Dieng as a product of the values of ‘traditional’ society but these are shown to be impotent in the face of the values of the dog-eat-dog capitalist system, slowly taking control of Senegalese society. (Sembene, 74)

136

Murphy’s analysis is insightful as far as it goes, but his reference to “traditional, village- based society is misleading. The compound that Dieng inhabits is not straightforwardly removed from Dakar; rather, it is on the outskirts of the city. This spatial metaphor suggests the marginalization of Dieng, but also the marginalization of the highly- codified ethnic and religious identity he has established for himself. As Murphy’s analysis points out, this identity proves “impotent” when confronted by neocolonial

Senegal.

The metonymic connection between Dieng’s isolation and the plight of Senegal is suggested through the frequent long shots that track Dieng as he moves through the crowded urban space. As Sada Niang points out, Dieng’s movements are characterized by straight lines and rigid horizontal movements, as opposed to the circular movements typifying his wives in the space of his compound. Through long tracking shots, Dieng is shown moving obliviously through Dakar’s crowded public spaces as he single-mindedly proceeds to the necessary bureaucratic financial centers. These long shots take on an almost uncanny effect through the simultaneously present and absent quality of the Dakar cityscape. The teaming setting of Dieng’s trek is certainly present for the viewer, who notes the busy activity surrounding the protagonist; however, this collective activity is also absent as far as

Dieng’s perception is concerned. Except for panhandlers who interrupt him, he impulsively moves without pause to his predetermined destination. These tracking shots become an initial strategy for suggesting the dynamic and collectivist reality repressed by Dieng’s materialistic pretenses. The fact that the spectator is cued to the communal context of which Dieng remains unaware also indicates the film’s collective

137

construction of its audience, who are hailed as potential members of this spectral community.

The spectral membership in Senegal’s public sphere is also a source of threatening tension, as indicated earlier. While the collective milieu of Dieng’s journey provides the promise of a collective vision and solidarity, it also represents Dieng’s possible subsumption into the neocolonial mechanisms of modern Daker. The panhandlers and bureaucrats that Dieng encounters represent this threatening possibility: as allegorical figures, their transient appearance represents the disastrous consequences of Senegal’s neocolonial society. As both threat and promise, however, the Dakar public sphere invokes and addresses an audience for whom Dieng’s story is of immediate and practical relevance. In other words, Dieng not only represents a failed trickster and buffoon, but also an invitation for Senegalese audiences to reflect upon their own place in the contradictory world of modern Senegal. The typicality of the

Dieng character is a major element for this: his Muslim faith, his lack of employment and considerable debt, and his failed aspirations are addressed to an audience for whom such issues are a living reality.

Through both narrative structure and normative social conventions, then,

Sembène demonstrates his investment in constructing a satirical critique that is accessible to a general Senegalese audience. His concern for the popular is on full display in the following passage, where Sembène privileges a collective interpretation of his audience—a collective to which he also belongs: “[W]e Africans must express our culture, our concerns. We must look after our authenticity, not be afraid of showing what is ugly and refuse to pander to people. Our duty is to show how we are, and saying

138

what we can change here or there” (cited in Busch and Annas, 56). This is surely one of the motives underpinning the film’s establishing montage: to hail an audience capable not only of interpreting a social context, but also of intervening in it.

The critical reaction to Dieng’s portrayal indicates its radical challenge to mainstream sensibilities. Senegalese censors at the time were scandalized by

Sembène’s unflattering portrayal of his protagonist. A major point of controversy hinged on Dieng’s behavior at the film’s beginning. After receiving a shave, Dieng returns to his rural home to find that his wives have prepared a large meal. As with the shaving scene,

Sembène films his protagonist in vivid close-up, feasting exuberantly (see Figure 5-1) before being massaged by one of his wives; as she ministers to him, he moans and grunts in overstuffed discomfort. This is probably the film’s most notorious representation of Dieng as a sensual and childish man who cannot measure up to the dignified criteria comprising proper Muslim manhood in Senegal.

While this scene was allowed to remain part of the final cut, the film’s acknowledgment of the grosser dimensions of human sustenance remained controversial. The reason for this disagreement between Sembène and the censors becomes more legible when we consider the colonial framework through which African subjects had been so invariably portrayed. Ironically enough, Sembène’s framing of

Dieng resembles similar shot structures in the ethnographic films of Jean Rouch, whom

Sembène famously accused of filming Africans like insects (“You Look at Us as if We

Were Insects,” in Busch and Annas, 3-7). Indeed, this sequence appears to construct

Dieng precisely according to the colonialist line: at first sight, Dieng presents as a straightforward representation of the childish, sensual African subject. Filming Dieng in

139

such a way while he is in the compound---a space associated with his failed attempts at a traditional Muslim identity—suggests that even the margins of Dakar are haunted by

Senegal’s postcolonial complexities. The borderline space of Dieng’s compound is no guard against the physical and psychic dependence that neocolonialism fosters.

Murphy’s analysis reinforces this through his emphasis on the commercial exchange that is taking place between Dieng and the man who shaves him. Indeed, the fetish of money haunts even the performative establishing shots of the narrative (87-88).

Through such devices, the urban periphery overlaps with central urban space and the two influence each other in complex ways.

Fredric Jameson’s famous analysis of Sembène’s work in “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism” provides a useful interpretation of pre-colonial or traditional elements of African history invoked by Dieng’s compound. Jameson’s interpretation points out that Sembène consistently invokes pre-colonial African resistance from “a historical perspective which with few exceptions is that of failure and ultimate defeat” (91). Rather than straightforward representations of an uncontaminated

African society, Jameson sees this invocation of the pre-colonial as an attempt to explore the ways in which African traditions are transformed and often distorted by colonial interventions. In The Money Order (the novella on which Mandabi is based), for instance, the Muslim value of alms-giving serves as the catalyst to the local community’s ferocious bid for a piece of the protagonist’s illusory wealth. In such examples, “tradition” becomes a complicit player in neocolonial relations, fully assimilated into the systematic degradation of post-independence Senegal.

140

While he maintains a critical distance from questions of identity and subjectivity,

Sembène’s repeated emphasis on culture and authenticity suggests his investment in the notion of truth as a relevant category for evaluating appeals to Senegalese identity.

By referencing concepts such as truth, culture, tradition, and so on, Sembène appeals to normative models of identity even as he also invites his audience to question them.

Such normative appeals indicate the influence of Léopold Sédar Senghor. Although

Sembène and Senghor have typically been presented as polar opposites, recent work has focused more closely on the surprising similarities between their thought systems.

Dieng’s deflating experiences with Senegal’s bureaucratic public sphere, for instance, invoke the complexities associated with representation and identity that were so central to Senghor’s postwar activity. As such, the film’s common thematic concerns invites a comparison with the postwar debates over Francophone West Africa’s development.

Just as Dieng’s problems stem from institutional barriers, for instance, they are also deeply connected to the issue of representation, both culturally and politically. Dieng’s lack of an official identity card can be read allegorically as a charged invocation of this issue.

Dieng’s first encounter with the bureaucracy demonstrates the relevance of considering Senghor and the immediate postwar context of Senegalese history

(rehearsed earlier). Because he cannot read French, Dieng must pay 50 cents to an employee (played by Sembène) who can read his nephew’s letter for him. Once the letter is read, Dieng and a friend—who has accompanied him in hopes of receiving a loan—proceed to the post-office counter, where Sembène introduces a recurring formal patterning. Dieng’s interactions at the counters of Senegal’s bureaucratic institutions are

141

consistently composed along a shot/reverse-shot axis; in addition to this formal patterning, the device of the counter as a physical border between the characters emphasizes the symbolic exclusion of countless Senegalese citizens. In the post-office scene specifically, Dieng and his friend are framed in a two-shot while the employee is framed in a close-up, his dark sunglasses acting as one more border between himself and the public he ostensibly serves. Significantly, this close-up is introduced when the employee asks for an identity card, which Dieng does not have. In this sequence and the ones that follow, Sembène employs a typical shot/reverse-shot patterning to develop his argument about alienation and bureaucratic corruption.

Murphy again provides an incisive summation of these scenes and their significance:

As this scene demonstrates, the city is…a place in which the written word is used virtually as a means of social exclusion…Dieng’s inability to read or write French excludes him from the bureaucratic modern world…Ibrahima Dieng simply cannot understand how bureaucracy works. This system of forms and official papers is totally alien to him. (“Culture, Development,” 11)

The hegemony of the French language and the symbol of the identity card invoke the failed dream of an inclusive Franco-African federalism that Senghor and others fought so ardently for. In being barred from both the French language and the instruments of legal representation, Dieng is shown to be virtually nonexistent as far as the mainstream

Senegalese public sphere is concerned. This scene again demonstrates the profoundly institutional and collective nature of Dieng’s crisis; it also suggests that this crisis goes far beyond considerations of individual foibles or false-consciousness.

Looked at from the standpoint of the debate on citizenship, the neocolonial setting of Sembène’s film becomes a stunning allegory of the failures of independence

142

haunting neocolonial Senegal. Dieng is barred from representation because of his inability to access the legal registers of Senegal’s public sphere, suggesting his inadequate integration into the newly formed Senegalese bureaucracy. At the same time, however, the question of how to integrate him into such a structure raises an equally onerous possibility: that Dieng and others might lose the singularity of their cultural identities. The coldly unsympathetic African bureaucrats and businessmen in the film—dressed in European clothing, speaking French, and wearing forbidding dark glasses—suggest an opposite but equally disastrous outcome. In this and the ensuing encounters, the seemingly impossible balance between “equivalence” and “difference” emerges.

In addition to Murphy’s binaries of present/absent and silent/vocal, then, I would also suggest the related and more abstract binary of inclusion/exclusion for a consideration of the allegorical role of bureaucratic institutions in Sembène’s films. In

Mandabi, especially, bureaucracy invokes both the conventional notion of exclusion and the failed promise of its opposite. In these scenes, Dieng is caught in an unresolved interstice between the mores and conventions of his self-styled traditional identity and the postcolonial hybridity of independent Senegal. In the underdetermined zone between these two poles, Senghor’s slogan of “assimilate, don’t be assimilated”—so central to the debates on citizenship—indicates Sembène’s solution to this problem. In the absence of institutional mechanisms of inclusion, the only recourse left to

Sembène’s characters is to insist on their own (however compromised) capacity for self- fashioning. It also becomes a way of evaluating the bureaucratic institutions in the film, which demonstrate that Dieng’s subjective paralysis is no anomaly.

143

Senghor’s involvement in the citizenship debate and his subsequent political writings demonstrate a neglected aspect of Négritude: its eclecticism and flexibility in the context of major social and political upheavals. In contrast to Senghor’s claims for an African solidarity predicated on the static category of race, his actual theory and practice presents a much more protean and historically contingent version of the concept. As Irving Leonard Markovitz points out, Négritude as a movement did not remain inert, but evolved to suit the complex needs of living history:

The evolution of negritude progresses through three general historical periods. The first begins with the gathering of young black intellectuals in Paris in the thirties…During this time, Senghor belonged to a group of students…who were still seeking their personal identities. The second period runs from the war until Senegal’s independence in 1960…At this time African leaders dealt with the central problems of establishing national identities and defining the relationship between the overseas territories and France. The third period follows independence. Negritude grew into an ideology for unity, economic development and cultural growth. (16-18)

Within this framework, Senghor’s activities during the federalist debate also reflect a change in the politics and practice of Négritude. Senghor’s philosophy remained to a certain extent a metaphysical (i.e., racially based) theory of African identity, but it also established a base from which to approach Francophone Africa’s changing relationships to Europe and the rest of the world. In the aftermath of both World War II and independence, Senghor began to emphasize the fundamental role of cultural mixing

(métissage) in both the theory of Negritude and in its programmatic practices. As

Souleymane Bachir Diagne asserts, “It is…important to remember that the concept…forbids thinking of Senghor’s philosophy as a simple metaphysics…underneath what we may call Senghor’s ‘strategic essentialism’ the discourse of hybridity is always at work, rendering fluid the identities on display” (15).

144

Diagne’s reference to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s famous formulation pinpoints the practical import of Négritude, which is its functional adaptability in the face of changing situations.

Diagne’s explication helps us to grasp a fundamental similarity between

Sembène and Senghor: their common appeal to both the pedagogical and performative registers of anti-colonial critique. Senghor’s writings on Négritude represent a sustained attempt to think both registers in coexistence. To be fair, the metaphysical strains of

Négritude (its racial logic, its universalizing tendency) are vivid and undeniable. That said, while the numerous critiques of Négritude’s essentialist current are both justified and necessary, it is also true that the concept’s relationship to race is not categorically clear. In Discours devant le Parlement du Ghana (1961), for instance, Senghor attempted to meet these critiques by insisting that the privileged term in his theory was not race, but culture: “[Négritude] is not the defence of a skin or a colour…Négritude is not even attachment to a particular race…Négritude is the awareness, defence, and development of African cultural values.” Senghor’s emphasis on culture and its self- conscious appropriation suggests a contingent and historical understanding of African identities. Senghor makes this explicit in the same document: “I shall begin by answering those who claim that Négritude is…a false myth…Négritude is a myth, I agree. And I agree there are false myths, myths which breed division and hatred.

Négritude as a true myth is the very opposite of these” (96-97). What is striking about this defense is that Senghor, far from insisting on Negritude’s essentialism, instead emphasizes its constructedness—its status as narrative—and its functional usefulness for promoting solidarity. One can find many similar passages in Senghor’s writings, and

145

while they do not negate the metaphysical dimensions of his version of Négritude, they do suggest that the term has multiple valences, and that Senghor was hardly unaware of this.

The undervalued nuances of Senghorian Négritude provide a useful starting point for conceptualizing Sembène’s own approach to the complexities of African history and identities. Specifically, Sembène shares with Senghor the political and cultural necessity of constructing robust African identities in the face of classical colonialist discourses of African primitiveness. The efficacy of such identities depended equally upon two contradictory impulses: first of all, there is the need to construct a pre-colonial

African past to challenge dehumanizing colonial descriptions. Such a move conceptualizes African history through a positivist lens. That is, African history and culture can be discovered and categorically known. The second impulse qualifies the first by focusing on the construction of meaning itself in order to emphasize the malleable nature of African history and social relationships; it treats Négritude as a willfully imagined construct for the strategic fashioning of historical agents. The dialectical tension can be glibly expressed as a tension between history as positivist fact and history as subjective “truth.” It is this undecidable relationship between the two poles that imbues Négritude with its efficacy. The most vivid example of this can be found in the relationship between Senghor’s poetry and prose. While his political writings and speeches affirm an objectively shared African heritage, Senghor’s poetry foregrounds his imaginative effort at conceptualizing this past; as such, it challenges an abstractly ahistorical notion of Négritude and insists on the centrality of Senghor’s own

146

contingent historical experience. That this experience became a hegemonic way of framing African identities indicates the potency of Senghor’s intervention.

Senghorian Négritude’s eclecticism and self-reflexivity demonstrates a structural similarity to Sembène’s approach to a cinematic construction of radical Senegalese identity. In both cases, a paradoxical interrelation of essentialism and contingency—or what I earlier referred to as pedagogical and performative tendencies—characterizes the intervention into the debate on Senegalese identity. A sketch of Senghor’s approach to African cultures and art makes this connection even clearer.

As many scholars have already demonstrated, culture plays a central role in

Négritude’s dialectic of fact and truth; Senghor posits this dialectic as the central force through which authentic African identities may be fostered. Recent Sembène scholarship has similarly focused on the central importance of the idea of culture in his work (both literary and cinematic). The emphasis on culture as a focal point of resistance and agency again aligns Sembène’s project with Senghor’s. Both men, for instance, insist upon cultural autonomy as a prerequisite for Africa’s emergence into proper independence. Moreover, both treat culture as a rubric for defining Africa’s differences from other peoples, especially those of Europe.

Take, for instance, Senghor’s comments on African art, which he sets up by contrasting it with European art: “[I]n Africa, art for art’s sake does not exist. All art is social…Through the dialectic which they [the art works] express, they become essential factors in the social equilibrium” (82). Compare this to Sembéne’s commentary on art in

“Man is Culture”: “The word ‘art’ does not exist in any of the languages of West Africa.

On the other hand, Man is the symbol of art. He himself is art” (cited in Murphy, 11).

147

David Murphy’s interpretation of Sembène’s version of culture treats it as antithetical to

Senghor’s: “Culture is deemed to be an integral part of daily, lived experience. This places it within the realm of history and not in terms of the timeless essence of an imagined cultural authenticity” (“Culture, Development,” 11). This reference to a timeless essence is directed at Senghor, who “perceives a deep-seated and immutable foundation to culture” (6).

As analyzed above, this metaphysical notion of culture plays a prominent role in

Senghor’s work, but I want to disagree with Murphy and argue that it is joined with an equally important emphasis on African cultures as dynamic and provisional, and therefore closely aligned with living history. In the following quotation, Senghor clarifies this dynamism through a discussion of the nature of art:

Because he is committed, the [African] artisan-poet is not concerned to make a work for eternity. The work of art is perishable…Some anthropologists and art critics have gone about pretending that the words ‘beauty’ and ‘beautiful’ are not found in African languages…The truth is that the African assimilates beauty to goodness, and especially effectiveness. (82)

In Senghor’s account, artistic beauty is intrinsically linked to utility; in other words, it is part and parcel of the art object’s intervention in living reality. Sembène’s conception of the role of art is quite similar. Indeed, it is not often pointed out that both men were committed advocates of the Marxist dialectic of historical process, and therefore both emphasized a dynamic and concrete approach to culture and society.

A close look at Senghor’s involvement in the establishment of Négritude and his influence in the postwar debate on universal citizenship suggests that an effective challenge to colonial racism and Western exceptionalism necessitated an equal emphasis on essentialist and constructionist narratives of Africa. In the passage that

148

follows, Senghor sets a unified African identity against the capitalistic modernity of the

West. Note, however, that he introduces this polarity in the service of an eventual vision of mutual transformation:

We want less to rid ourselves of the tutelage of the metropole than of the tyranny of international capitalism…We want to construct a better world, better than the colonial world of yesterday, better as well than our world before the European conquest. We will build it taking inspiration from European socialism and the old African collectivism. We will thus reconcile modern technique and African humanism. For it is a question of building a new world where, in an organized society, men will be equal and fraternal without distinction of race or religion. (Cited in Cooper, 84)

Négritude thus signified both an essential identity and a historical formation open to change and evolution. The emphasis that Senghor and Sembène place on culture can therefore be understood as a way to navigate this antinomy: culture in general—and art in particular—allow Senghor and Sembène to explore the interstitial zones between essentialism and constructionism. The eventual goal is to envision a way forward for

African societies—not as pre-established essences, but as evolving constructs able to meet the challenges of the post-and-neocolonial world.

Conceived dialectically, the essentialist and constructionist poles run aground of one another and perpetuate an ongoing process of negotiation. What emerges from this is the realization that “Africa” is in part a contested discursive site. V.Y. Mudimbe’s path- breaking work on Africa as an idea eloquently sums up the antinomy that I have only briefly described. The following quote is a long one, but it pinpoints precisely the multiple registers on which “Africa” functions:

One can state that there is still today [1994] an idea of Africa. On the continent, it is conceived from colonial disconnections and articulates itself as a rereading of the past and as contemporary searches for an identity. In its prudent expressions, this idea presents itself as a statement of a project born from the conjunction of different and often contradictory elements such as African traditions, Islam, colonization and

149

Christianity…In its operations, this idea is also a product of complex and incessant enunciative and practical negotiations between, on the one hand, the polysemic notions of race, ethnos, nation, individual, and humanity (and thus it can hardly be reduced to an essence), and, on the other hand, those peoples using, delimiting, or dealing with these terms. In effect, the idea is qualified by sets of composite memories, which are gratuitous systems of recollection. They bring together a number of things and experiences; and in them one might choose to emphasize certain aspects, and, voluntarily or accidentally, to forget or, at least, to minimize others. (211-212)

Africa, then, is partly the effect of multiple, often contradictory, discourses. Indeed,

Mudimbe classifies his own intervention into this question as a particular way of telling stories, thereby attesting to the discursive constructions constituting the idea of Africa.

On this register, Mudimbe emphasizes the contingency of his intervention, and by extension of the idea as such: “[t]here are voids in my stories” (209). Far from an admission of bias or guilt, Mudimbe is foregrounding the necessary partiality of history as an assemblage of discourses. The “gratuitous” locus of these discourses is the historically situated subject. As Mudimbe’s formulation asserts, such a subject is itself an effect of multiple, competing discourses and ideas.

I argue that all of these conflicting discourses and tendencies inflect and influence a reading of Mandabi, especially concerning the instability of Dieng’s identity.

As stated earlier, the potential of this liminality lies in its ability to reveal and disseminate the collective dimensions of Dakar’s public sphere. In revealing Senegalese collectivities, Mandabi also reveals the spectral revolutionary impulses that lie dormant beneath the film’s bureaucratic institutions. These impulses find their strength in the communalist ethos that Sembène’s films express.

The idea of communalism has often functioned as a signifier of African cultural identity as contrasted with the bourgeois individualism of Western Europe and the

150

United States. In Jameson’s reading, a communalist ethos serves as a constant reminder of the still potent role of indigenous African practices in the midst of neocolonialism’s attempt to consolidate modern Africa. As a signifier of a unique cultural heritage and a shared value system, communalism is a powerful trope through which activists such as Senghor and Sembène proposed to educate their audiences in the task of making a future. Indeed, to quote Jameson, communalism indexes the spectral promise of “a past and future utopia.” It also indexes the universal implications of

Négritude, which signifies culture as a categorically binding force.

Contemporary investigations into the question of communalism help to clarify the nuances of communalism’s appeal to universality. The significance of this appeal lies in its ability to unify historical agents while avoiding homogenization. In his breathtaking

Philosophical Perspectives on Communalism and Morality in African Traditions, for instance, Polykarp Ikuenobe clarifies the epistemological significance of his exploration of the concept of “traditional” African communalism. In many ways, his explanation sums up the antinomy between the performative and the pedagogical rehearsed above:

My references to ‘traditional’ and ‘African cultures’ are not meant to be descriptive in the sociological or anthropological sense…Rather, my references…involve an attempt to provide a theoretical or abstract normative (re)construction and to conceptually capture a dominant philosophical theme…regarding how the modes of thought, values, and practices in traditional African societies ought to be viewed. (2)

By emphasizing the prescriptive (and therefore contingent) nature of his analysis,

Ikuenobe points out both its pedagogical and performative dimensions. This is the significance of placing the “re” of reconstruction in parentheses: the analysis is both a representation and a conceptual tool. Ikuenobe, then, articulates how normative and

151

contingent gestures enable him to engage in an imaginative exploration of African communalism that is also informed by concrete examples and events.

In Ikuenobe’s analysis, traditional African societies themselves establish a similarly paradoxical framework for understanding social practices. Far from the conventional image of traditional culture as a strictly policed and unchanging set of practices, Ikuenobe emphasizes the fundamentally provisional quality of African communalism. He does this first of all by emphasizing the role of narrative in traditional societies. Take, for instance, the following description of the pedagogical role of African elders “[c]hildren are supposed to imitate the actions of elders who are role models.

This idea of imitation is an important process of learning and moral education. In which case, the actions of elders are seen as a kind of narrative or text that indicates an acceptable action” (136). The structure of narrative is thus ubiquitous in traditional societies and not solely located in the actual myths, legends, and history of a given culture. Ikuenobe makes the provisionality of this arrangement explicit when he emphasizes the contrast between abstract narratives and concrete experience. In other words, people do not simply adopt a framework willy-nilly, but instead are constantly testing and comparing it against available evidence:

This network of beliefs is accepted because of the pragmatic and heuristic values of the relevant beliefs…Because cultures may be characterized as experiments in living, elders have tested, analyzed, criticized, and revised these beliefs over time, and from their experiences, they have seen their validity, thus, these beliefs constitute part of the African tradition. This view implies that if the traditions or relevant beliefs warrant revision, they will be revised. (182)

From an abstract, normative perspective, members of a communal paradigm rationally weigh the lessons of stories against their own lived experiences. It follows from this that traditional structures have a dynamic quality and are subject to change and revision

152

over time. While it is generally true that tradition emphasizes enduring beliefs and values, it does not follow from this that traditional societies are simplistically static or

“frozen” in time. This is not to say that traditional frameworks cannot become authoritarian or oppressive; it is only to suggest that they are not inherently so.

Ikuenobe’s analysis helps us to understand the radical quality of communalism’s sudden manifestation in Mandabi. Far from simply opposing neocolonial modernity to

African tradition, communalism functions as a third term. Viewed through the lens of

Ikuenobe’s analysis, the provisionality of Dieng’s character suggests a transformative potential which neocolonial Senegal has suppressed. On this register, Dieng’s perpetual mobility indicates the possibility for change as well as the actuality of alienation.

Although he repeatedly fails to mark the collectivity through which he might contest neocolonial alienation, the film plays with the possibility that he might attain a new consciousness of his situation and change his behavior accordingly. While the overt events of the film deal mostly with his failure to realize the radical import of his situation, there are numerous sequences where a more hopeful perspective emerges.

As stated earlier, Dieng is often framed in long shots which emphasize the highly populous settings that he navigates; also significant in this regard are Dieng’s frequent encounters with panhandlers. In one scene in particular, Dieng once again fails to mark an encounter with one of the representatives of Dakar’s radical collectivity. As Dieng returns from the bank, a woman approaches him asking for alms. Having already given money to a woman before visiting the bank, Dieng not only refuses; he also accuses the woman of being the same person who approached him earlier. David Murphy makes much of this scene in his analysis of the distrust and paranoia informing Dieng’

153

movements (Sembene, 92). While the overt result of this encounter is certainly deflating, however, it is also a precursor to the ambivalently hopeful climax, in which

Dieng is finally forced to acknowledge the collective dimensions of his struggle, thereby attenuating the alienation of his journey. As Murphy relates, the panhandling woman’s notable differences from the previous woman suggest not only Dieng’s paranoia, but also the grim reality of Dakar, where panhandling has become an institution. That said, it also provides another reminder that suffering is shared collectively.

Dieng’s trip to Dakar’s city hall builds upon this spectral commonality. Again filmed on a shot/reverse-shot axis, this scene is notable for the extended sequence of dialogue that precedes Dieng’s request for a birth certificate. Filmed in a long shot from over Dieng’s shoulder, we see three city hall employees talking about their own financial struggles and debts. One employee in particular mentions that he has not been paid in six months, suggesting not only corruption, but also the economic insecurity that haunted independent Senegal. It appears as if crippling debt characterizes almost every sector of Senegal, even within the exclusive confines of its bureaucratic centers. In this scene, Sembène hints that the problem is not simply a matter of the individual corruption that Dieng encounters; it is also a matter of the state’s institutional dependence and lack of resources. The suffering associated with perpetual poverty and debt is extended to the Senegalese state, suggesting that even the neocolonial centers of bureaucratic administration are haunted by the suffering public that it exploits.

Dieng’s request for a birth certificate is predictably rejected because his identity papers do not provide a specific month for his date of birth. As he argues with the clerk, a young man and woman waiting in line step forward and speak on his behalf; the clerk

154

curtly tells them to step back in line. Affronted, the young man smiles dryly and admonishes the clerk that he had “better be polite to citizens.” As is typical of

Sembène’s films, such apparently throw-away lines are loaded cues to his audience. In this sequence, audiences are encouraged to reflect upon the meaning of citizenship in

Senegal, and by extension upon the contours of Senegalese identity in general, since

Dieng is explicitly a figure who occupies different temporal zones at once. In addition to his status as an unemployed debtor—a position that Sembène posits as characterizing independent Senegal in general—Dieng is also a specter of the recent past, prior to independence. As someone who cannot speak French or read and write, and as someone who is not counted amongst the citizens of the land, he represents those who are excluded by the written codes of Senegal’s bureaucratic mechanisms, as well as those who do not fit into the Franco-African assimilation that Senghor imagined as the key to Senegal’s future. Dieng’s lack of agency thereby stands in for Senegal’s continued subjection to colonial structures.

Sembène extends the perpetual debt which we now know city hall employees share with Dieng to encompass the entire world of the film, for the dusty streets of the rural compound are always populated by complacent members of the community. In particular, a neighbor—and one of the film’s many opportunistic acquaintances— admonishes Dieng for a loan of rice. In between this conversation, however, the viewer witnesses this man and his companions lolling lazily in the streets in a manner which suggests the desensitized apathy characterizing the residents of the village. In an especially acidic gesture of irony, the neighbor’s name is Imam, which is Arabic for

“faith.” Indeed, Imam is a virtual twin to Dieng: while paying lip service to the values and

155

principles of his faith, he is consistently shown to be much more concerned with material wealth, even if the method of its acquisition entails personal degradation. In the

Imam, especially, Sembène suggests that begging and debt have become so endemic to Senegal that asking for a loan is now second nature; he shows no shame or embarrassment over his begging, but instead appeals calculatedly to Dieng’s sense of

Muslim charity. When Dieng returns home after each failed attempt to cash the money order, we are repeatedly presented with scenes of the compound residents lying about in the streets, suggesting not only their complacency but also the long-term unemployment typical of independent Senegal.

Viewed though the theoretical schema of African communalism, Dieng and the other characters didactically embody questionable behavior. To paraphrase Sembène’s

Marxist perspective, however, this didacticism invokes and presupposes a collective social body whose initial absence indicates the protagonist’s unselfconscious investment in an outmoded identity unsuited to the complexities of modern Senegal precisely because it blocks him from understanding the scope of modern Senegal’s dilemma. Viewed retroactively, Dieng’s sensual enjoyment and his performance of traditional Muslim identity suggest a disastrous alienation from a larger social context.

As he gradually moves deeper into the urban space of Dakar, a social totality emerges whose neocolonial disfigurements are metonymically connected to Dieng’s isolation.

Although painfully, Dieng finally comes to realize the depths of Senegal’s neocolonial corruption.

Sembène’s insistence on communality as a basis for resistance invokes Fanon’s insistence on the collective nature of anti-colonial struggle. In this respect, I argue that

156

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s concept of the multitude generated and exploited by capitalism emerges as a central concern of Sembène’s engagement with African modernity. The multitude is deeply connected to the transitional nature of globalization in the early twenty-first century, because the instabilities resulting in part from globalization—perpetual warfare, finance capital, the decline of the nation-state paradigm—enable the multitude to emerge and become legible. That said, there discussion of the term makes clear that its history is more or less coterminous with that of modern capitalism. Regardless of the historical register of the multitude, however, one thing remains constant: the material productivity of the multitude functions as a double-edged sword for the purposes of capitalist exploitation. While capitalism depends upon the multitude’s productive powers, it is also constantly forced to curtail and restrict this productivity, lest it develop into a full-fledged revolutionary phenomenon.

In Hardt and Negri’s analysis, one of bourgeois capitalism’s major strategies for restricting the multitude is to treat it as a straightforward identity. A traditional identity is bounded and determinate, and therefore it can be more easily subjected to abstract mechanisms of control. In Hardt and Negri’s view, however, the multitude is not an identity in this sense; rather, it is a perpetually transforming assemblage of heterogeneous subjectivities that resist codification. The difficulty of fostering the multitude’s radical potential becomes apparent, however, when Hardt and Negri examine past attempts at galvanizing revolutionary subjectivities. In their view, the process of constructing identities in opposition to capitalist modernity, while important and necessary, can also quickly fall into the trap of identity politics: “[t]he risk is that

157

affirming identity and tradition…creates a static position, even in its opposition to

[colonial] modernity’s domination. The intellectual has to avoid getting stuck in antimodernity and pass through it to a third stage” (Commonwealth, 103). Hardt and

Negri call this third stage altermodernity, which is the proper register for fostering the multitude. Altermodernity is typified by a liberated performativity, in which radically heterogeneous subjectivities engage in collective forms of self-motivated transformation. The altermodern eschews the traditional/modern binary in favor of a hybrid conception of revolutionary struggle that freely borrows from multiple historical registers. Senghor’s eclectic borrowing from both European and traditional Senegalese referents functions as a quintessentially altermodern gesture. Rather than becoming stuck in a static identity construct, altermodern subjectivities engage with the past and present in order to influence their possible futures. Senghor’s desire for a Senegalese— and African—future that embraces differences within solidarity, he expresses one of the fundamental aspects of the multitude as stated by Hardt and Negri:

When we say that we do not want a world without racial or gender differences but instead a world in which race and gender do not matter, that is, a world in which they do not determine hierarchies of power, a world in which differences express themselves freely, this is a desire for the multitude. (Multitude, 101)

Although I do not wish to claim that they are identical, this articulation seems very closely connected to Senghor’s concept of universal civilization, in which differences express themselves in a global context of equality and association. This was precisely

Senghor’s dream for the fourth republic and its federalist solution.

While perhaps compromised, I take Négritude as a major attempt to conceptualize and foment an African multitude. In fact, I believe that it is precisely

Négritude’s compromised status as an identity politics that makes it possible for the

158

multitude to appear at all. In the case of the post-colonial Senegal of Sembène’s early films, at least, an approach to altermodernity must necessarily nagivate the less fluid registers of tradition and modernity. Such an approach must also insist on the protective function of constructing an affirmative and exclusive identity formation. Colonialism’s discourse necessitates a counter-discourse. As Fanon states, however, this stage must not become an end in itself, but must instead be the prelude to something altogether different.

Colonial discourses and the counter-discourse of Négritude constitute a major aspect of the conditions of possibility within which Sembène’s cinematic project unfolds.

Sembène’s making of the multitude is thus both constrained and constituted by the discourses against which and through which he intervenes. Through Sembène’s simultaneous deployments of the performative and the pedagogical, he both posits and problematizes the idea of autonomous African cultures. Rather than attempting to deny the notion of pre-colonial African traditions altogether, Sembène treats both the concept of tradition and its questioning as equally important moments in fostering the multitude.

More specifically, Sembène’s cinema addresses an audience whose revolutionary education depends equally upon normative and performative gestures. That is,

Sembène insists equally on the necessity of defining the contours of Senegalese identity and on its provisional openness—it’s orientation to many possible futures. To paraphrase Hardt and Negri, Sembène emphasizes the freedom to “become who we want,” but he also insists on navigating the framework that constitutes “who we are.” As such, he invests in the fundamental antinomy constituted by these competing registers.

159

It is for this reason that I quibble with Kenneth W. Harrow’s critique of Sembène.

Harrow believes that Sembène perpetuates colonial axiomatics by adhering to mainstream narrative conventions which presuppose an objective truth value. Harrow proposes to problematize this tendency in Sembène’s work by foregrounding the repressed, libidinal interstices of the films (8). In my view, however, supposing a simple split between the normative and libidinal (i.e. performative) registers of Sembène’s work misses the point entirely. Here is where Ikuenobe’s distinction between metaphysical and normative gestures again becomes useful. I believe that Harrow’s critique stems from a conflation of the normative with the metaphysical. In Ikuenobe’s terms, unlike metaphysical claims, even the most prescriptive rhetorical gestures presuppose a contingent social context in which consensus and collective identity are always subject to resistance and revision. When Sembène foregrounds the formal construction of his filmic narratives, he is asking his audience to recognize this distinction; contra the illusory seamlessness of narrative cinema in the Hollywood mode, Sembène proposes his cinema as a workable template upon and through which an African audience may intervene in the ongoing debates over its identity.

This is why narrative serves such a crucial role in Ikuenobe’s communalist schema: via narrative, communal societies provide opportunities to both reinforce and revise established practices. Far from simply problematizing normative claims to truth, the performative fragments of Sembène’s films complement and extend his address to a native audience by emphasizing the contested nature of truth in its historical manifestations. African narrative conventions become the major instruments of

Sembène’s appeal. The film’s climax and denouement completes Sembène’ argument

160

for self-fashioning. Having been shown the corruption and deprivation that characterize three highly symbolic centers of Senegal’s public sphere, the audience then watches as

Dieng is robbed of the money order by Mbaye, a scheming businessman who foreshadows Sembène’s critique of the Senegalese bourgeoisie in Xala (1974). As if to rub salt into the wound, Mbaye has left him with a small bag of rice as a consolation prize. The ambivalence of this gift is dramatized when three women wordlessly approach and begin to load the rice into their baskets. Dieng squats in passive misery as this occurs. Sembène shoots this scene in a low-angle long shot. Dieng and the approaching women are located at the center of the frame, but the viewer can also clearly see a small group of what appear to be children huddled together—yet another visual reminder of the deprivation that Dieng’s compound lives in. As the women shovel rice into their baskets, they come to blows, each grabbing and pulling the bag of rice in different directions.

These women invoke the film’s introductory montage, in which we beheld three similar looking women who were also carrying baskets. Diawara’s rhapsodic analysis of this moment suggests its fundamental role in the interpretation of the climax. In the beginning moments, the viewer is sutured into a vividly portrayed community. As composed by Sembène’s camera, these scenes serve to construct a deeper equivalence between film time and real time, and therefore to hail a more patient and engaged viewing subject: “Sembène’s recourse to this linear editing…brings the viewer to what I will call a natural and original state of film spectatorship…Sembène’s

‘imperfect’ cinema forces us to slow down and take time, as if we were involved in the suturing process” (African Film, 39). How significant is it that, having been fully sutured

161

into the diegesis, the audience is then presented with three similar-looking women who are engaging in such casual thievery? In a sense, this scene is the archetypal educational moment for Sembène’s audience. If, in the beginning, the audience was introduced to a living and organic world tinged with the promise of a more meaningful engagement with the film, here they are alienated once again by the robbery of Dieng’s meager stock of rice. The community which Sembène performatively constructed in concert with the viewer’s attention is shown to be figuratively cannibalizing itself. This brings us back to Sembène’s unromantic attitude towards the truth of postcolonial identity: that African artists should not only show what is good and hopeful about the community, but also what is ugly and what needs to be changed.

Eventually, one of Dieng’s wives arrives to break up the fight and shepherd him back to their house. As he slouches into a seating position with his wives on either side of him, the camera frames them in a claustrophobic long shot, suggesting the virtual destruction of whatever agency they could have laid claim to. As they all mourn the loss of the money order’s illusory promise, the camera cuts to an opposite view from behind them, showing the entrance of a postman, possibly the very same one who delivered the money order in the first place. When the postman inquires if Dieng is distributing rice, Dieng angrily responds by denouncing the corruption of Senegal and vowing to

“become a wolf among wolves—I, too, will become a thief and a liar.” The postman hands him another letter from Paris before saying, “as for the country, we’ll change it!”

Obtuse to the end, Dieng asks “who is ‘we?” To which the postman responds: “You, your wives, your children, me. We will change things.”

162

In this closing moment, the postman acts as a mouthpiece for the collective struggle that the film has suggested must take place if change is to happen. He also serves as a didactic mouthpiece that makes the authorial enunciation explicit. Hidden throughout the narrative, whether in Dakar’s streets or Dieng’s village, specters of

Senegal’s collective identity have been striving for recognition. Sembène invokes these moments throughout the film, especially in the documentary views of the populace surrounding Dieng and didactic moments when one of the characters begins to speak in the name of its director, as the young man in line at city hall does when he reminds the viewer that “we” are citizens, and are therefore worthy of respect. The postman, however, invokes most intensely the figure of the griot so well-known to be a reference point for Sembène’s cinema. The Postman makes explicit what had previously been submerged in Dieng’s restless pursuit: that he has never been alone, but was a part of a greater whole that similarly struggles under the burden of neocolonial rule. This realization of a collective identity and of collective struggle closes out the film. It also, however, suggests that even the bureaucratic institutions are potential centers for collective consciousness and its revolutionary struggle. In the city hall sequence, for instance, the knowledge of the clerks’ debt becomes a shared frame of reference that hints at a subterranean solidarity; a solidarity that peaks out through the corners of

Sembène’s film.

The postman sequence, invocative of the griot and of West Africa’s oral tradition, also clarifies the indivisibility of pedagogical and performative registers in Sembène’s work. As Jameson notes in his analysis of Xala, moments of authorial interruption characterize the work, a gesture noted by other scholars as well. In such moments, the

163

voice of Sembène himself intercedes to offer an interpretation of the situation. In

Mandabi, this happens through the figure of the postman and his analogs, who explicitly articulate the film’s radical perspective. More profoundly, however, these moments are narrative gestures that explicitly interrupt the flow of the narrative to articulate a new possibility: these moments function as potential beginnings for a radical reinvention of the neocolonial struggle. While such moments would be jarring interruptions in a

Western commercial film, they have a much different effect in a film that makes no show of constructing a self-contained, autonomously functioning cinematic world. Instead, these moments of meta-textual intervention invite the viewer to engage themselves in this revolutionary struggle: to identify with the “we” of the text and take up the project of remaking the future so overdetermined by neocolonialism’s teleological mechanisms. It turns out that almost every gesture in the film—from the opening montage to the documentarian city-scapes, to every bit of dialogue—has been pushing us in the direction of this “we.”

This returns my argument to Hardt and Negri, who refer to the specters of the common that haunt the modern global empire of property. In the following passage, they outline three major focal points for the instantiation of the common:

The three most significant social institutions of capitalist society in which the common appears in corrupt form are the family, the corporation, and the nation. All three mobilize and provide access to the common, but at the same time restrict, distort, and deform it. These are social terrains on which the multitude has to employ a process of selection, separating the beneficial, generative forms of common from the detrimental and corrupt. (Commonwealth, 160)

In my analysis, this “process of selection” is precisely what Sembène encourages his audience to engage in. The Dakar metropolis and Dieng’s compound serve as symbols of the Senegalese nation and the extended kinship structures of Senegalese

164

communalism, respectively. This process of selection is constantly hailed by the tracking shots of Dakar, in which the audience is encouraged to register the social context of Dieng’s actions; at the bureaucratic counters, where figurative and literal borders overtly compromise Dieng’s integration into the social totality; and in the compound, where the cooperative ingenuity of Dieng’s wives and the common state of deprivation all ceaselessly gesture towards the collective dimensions of Dieng’s struggle. At the same time, however, these gestures also gain their legibility through their eruption from within the distorting mechanisms of neocolonialism. One cannot, after all, engage in a process of selection unless she is herself a part of the contested context that calls for such a selection. What is more, one cannot address someone as a member of a community without also assuming at least a provisionally solidified form for the latter. The Senegalese multitude is thus always already contaminated by the given historical developments that constitute and constrain it.

By invoking oral narratives and the social codes of modern Senegal, and employing the griot’s strategies of admonishment and overt commentary, Sembène clearly addresses the popular, shared context of his audience, making explicit what the archetypally darkened theaters of the Hollywood dream factory try to suppress: that spectatorship, like revolutionary struggle, is impossible without the shared reserves of the common’s historically developed capacities. Although I have not explicitly employed the language of a Marxist materialism, I hope it is clear that Sembène is asking his audience to use their historically developed cognitive capacities—that is, their culturally and socially specific attributes as spectators—in the service of contesting neocolonialism. These capacities enable the spectator to realize and affirm her common

165

existence—her connection to a social totality that shares overlapping histories and experiences. Like Dieng at the film’s conclusion, Sembène’s audience finds themselves in a position to finally say “we,” a capacity that was theirs all along. It is this revelation of solidarity that closes the film, extending a spectral invitation to the audience now filing out into the larger Senegalese public sphere.

Far from simply opposing Senghor’s identity politics, then, Sembène treats normative identity as the very condition of possibility for fomenting collective struggle, just as Senghor understood Négritude as a fundamentally radical theory of African identities. By invoking conventional Senegalese concepts of tradition, community, Islam, masculinity, and narrative, Sembène posits a shared and stabilized identity in order to problematize it from within. This intervention, however, is impossible without the initial positing. That said, as opposed to the metaphysical and monolithic conception which characterizes one of Négritude’s significant interpretive strains, Sembène posits the

“who we are” of identity in order to enable futurity as an open network in which African subjects have the freedom of maneuver to decide “who we want to become.” It is here that Sembène’s final film, Moolaadé (2004), becomes relevant to my project, for I think it expresses Sembène’s abiding devotion to the concept of futurity and its relevance for fostering moments of altermodernity in the still-neocolonial spaces of African societies.

As with Mandabi, however, these moments are only legible to historically-constituted identities, for which the shared referents of culture and history become foundational reserves of labor power. Once again, performativity and pedagogy must be posited together for meaningful engagement to be possible.

166

Jude G. Akudinobi’s “Durable Dreams: Dissent, Critique, and Creativity in Faat

Kiné and Moolaadé” provides a masterful reading of the fundamental role that conceptions of African tradition play in Sembène’s final films. Akudinobi connects this preoccupation to the larger role of African traditions in anti-and-neocolonial struggles, and his claim for the role of tradition in these struggles makes a crucial distinction between the normative and performative registers of an African tradition:

[T]radition is intrinsically always under pressure from the dynamics of its constitutive society…This is important because during the anticolonial struggles for independence, for instance, and more so afterwards, African nationalists saw tradition as a reflecting pool from which they must sip, occasionally, for sustenance as well as to look into for answers to certain issues and to (re)constitute their senses of selves. As such, tradition features in African cultural production, not merely to sketch coherent pictures of who we are…but, more crucial, as a hermeneutic compass, a means of organizing meanings around and structuring the expressions of the inevitable transformations within African cultural field. (178)

Akudinobi’s analysis of both films is based on the eclectic role of “indigenous precepts” in fostering actual cases of feminist dissent in Nigeria, in particular the occupation of

Chevron-Texaco oil terminals by about three hundred Nigerian women in 2002. The women were able to hold over 1,000 male workers hostage by threatening to strip naked in front of them, a traditional act of shaming men in many Nigerian contexts. This recourse to a Nigerian protocol served as the basis for the women’s transgressive ability to hold the oil terminal for as long as they did. Akudinobi uses this historical referent as a framework for reading the radical role of indigenous African traditions in Faat Kiné and

Moolaadé.

The final two films of Sembène’s career also place African womanhood and

African feminism front and center; Moolaadé, in particular, uses these two major concepts as foci for the unsettled and contingent makeup of normative mainstream

167

culture. In Akudinobi’s analysis, a key dimension of this intervention involves

Sembène’s insistence on the exceptional moments of heroism underpinning the everyday banalities of society; these moments become legible from a suitably critical point of view and suggest a radically feminist dimension of quotidian resistance: “

Insofar as heroism calls for the remarkably exceptional, it emerges from a deep-seated, proactive well-spring…However, as Sembène demonstrates, the heroic…can be recast in unexpected quarters, found in, seemingly, intuitive deeds by ordinary (women) folk.”

This latent feminine heroism informing the everyday life of African societies provides an omnipresent “well-spring” of potential resources for fostering “a mode of agency and subjectivity deriving from culturally specific life experiences, social institutions, personal challenges, and collective tribulations rather than reductive categories” (181). In his appeal to cultural specificity, Akudinobe conceptualizes a metaphorical zone from which ordinary African subjects can access the necessary resources for resistance. This zone is the ever-shifting domain of historical experience, comprised of both individual and collective experiences.

In the case of Collé (Fatoumata Coulibaly), Moolaadé’s heroine, her vivid experience of female circumcision motivates a strategic recourse to pre-colonial African tradition; the collective consensus reinforcing this tradition enables Collé’s transgression at the same time that it makes her legible within the mythic-historical identity narrative shared by the residents of her village. Her character’s invocation of the pre-colonial heritage reminds one of Sembène’s well-known statements about the crucial role that women have played in the anti-colonial struggle, especially emphasizing the historical

168

role of women in public protest and the safeguarding of African cultures (C.f. Busch and

Annas, 26-27).

Moolaadé takes place in a rural village in Burkina Faso. The film’s title is a Pulaar word whose literal translation is ‘asylum,’ but it also carries connotations of magical power. The asylum in question refers to four girls who escape from the care of the village’s female elders, called the Salindanas, who are in charge of purifying girls through the ritual of circumcision. Collé, who refused to have her own daughter,

Amsatou (Salimata Traoré), circumcised because of her own traumatic experience with the procedure, decides to institute the moolaadé as protection for the girls, who must stay in the confines of her compound in order to remain shielded. Collé clearly announces to the village that a moolaadé has been instituted by tying a woven cloth across the door into her compound (See Figure 5-2). The purported consequence of violating the moolaadé is a violent death. After much strife, including the murder of the village’s itinerant merchant, Mercenaire (Dominique Zeïda), Collé’s efforts win out, and the men of the village decide to cooperate with her and her female advocates to ban circumcision.

Sembène’s incisive formal treatment of the village (the film’s only setting) invokes the formal patterning he developed to represent the setting of Dieng’s home in Mandabi.

In contrast to the formal treatment of Dakar, Sembène’s composition of small-scale communal living in both films suggests the traditional extended kinship networks that characterize many forms of African communalism. The outlying buildings surrounding

Collé’s home are connected by a series of partial walls, with openings that provide numerous points of entrance into the large common areas that connect each part of the

169

village. Sembène captures this permeable setting with circular pans and compositions, including bird’s-eye-view shots of the entire compound, emphasizing the village’s open and connected layout (See Figure 5-3). In concert with the setting and mise-en-scène, the film’s formal patterning suggests a world characterized by circularity in both time and space. The recurring idea of the circle suggests the insular and closely-knit makeup of the village, as well as the importance of repetition, habit, and convention in the lives of a small community. Just as significantly, these shots emphasize the fundamentally collective makeup of the village’s social relationships. On both a literal and symbolic level, the viewer is constantly reminded that the characters share a common frame of reference.

As the narrative develops, the circular patterning also gains an analytical dimension, suggesting the omnipresent contingency informing the social spaces of the film. Within this formal logic, each moment of the film becomes increasingly loaded with the ambivalence that Collé’s resistance draws out. This ambivalence informs not only the film’s formal composition, but also the diegesis, as the moolaadé instigates a proliferation of anxious discussions about the meaning and priority of the village’s varied traditions. In an especially memorable scene, the Salindanas bring their complaint over

Collé to the village’s male elders, in a highly ceremonial meeting at the central public square. Sembène films this scene in a series of medium and long shots organized around two primary long shots of the Salindanas and the male elders. Each of these long shots is filmed in deep focus, with the background clearly visible.

As the hearing unfolds, it becomes clear that the moolaadé has resulted in a dilemma that foregrounds the complexity of tradition. On the one hand, the Salindanas

170

base their defense of the ritual of female circumcision (called purification) on its status as a tradition that “no one has ever challenged.” This appeal to the notion of something traditional proves hegemonic, as it informs each of the arguments that is made during the hearing. When the male elders invoke their patriarchal authority in support of purification, they are bought to a stunned halt by the introduction of the moolaadé. This news instigates an extended oratory by one of the male elders. In his impassioned retelling, the viewer learns that the small, pillared sculpture in the background behind the Salindanas is said to be the transformed remains of their first king, who was magically destroyed for violating a moolaadé. The centrality of this magical asylum in the mythic history of the village gives it clear priority in the debate concerning tradition; this priority is emphasized when the elder goes on to explain that the village mosque, located to the left of the mythic sculpture, was built afterwards. The moolaadé, then, antedates both the rite of purification and the introduction of Islam into the village. Its status as an exceptionally old—and, by extension, respected—signifier of traditional culture imbues it with a remarkable potency for all involved, regardless of their allegiances. As with the collective space of the village, the figurative commonwealth of village myth serves as a foundational reference point for debate.

This scene introduces one of the film’s major themes: that the politics of the community is first of all a matter of normative appeals, especially to the concept of tradition. As it turns out, however, it is precisely the normative force of tradition that enables Collé’s resistance while stymying the village elders. It is decided that Collé’s husband, Ciré (Rasmane Ouedraogo), will be responsible for forcing Collé to break the spell by speaking “the word.” The tradition of patriarchal hierarchy is thus pitted against

171

the moolaadé, a spell that was already gendered feminine under the circumstances.

Regardless of the outcome of this decision, however, there is no question of violating the moolaadé. In Akudinobi’s view, this scenario represents Sembène’s investment in showcasing the dynamic flexibility of African traditions so often dismissed as reductive and static: “[t]he cultural, social, and historical processes at work in the narrative show that African cultural systems can generate their own systems and circuits of dissent”

(190). Indeed, the village is eventually able to resolve the dilemma solely with recourse to their own diverse cultural traditions.

Sembène’s final film certainly acknowledges and respects the nuanced role of normative appeals in effective political discourse, but it also— and in my opinion more vividly than Mandabi—supplements these appeals with sustained moments of stunning performativity and discursive ambiguity. This supplementation is a key component of the reconstituted pedagogy of Sembène’s films: normative and performative gestures are equally held up to scrutiny, and it is in the irresolvable interface between them that

Sembène posits the true value of his “evening school.”

This occurs first of all through the ambivalence informing the moolaadé’s truth value. Even as many scenes emphasize the moolaadè’s inviolable authority, countless other sequences undermine it. Shortly after Collé institutes the spell, for instance, the viewer is presented with a toddler on the outer doorstep of her residence. Hesitating for only a moment, the child teeters over the rope without incident. This turns out to be only the first of many scenes in which the moolaadé is perforated by both human and animal agents. While none of the visitors attempt to remove the girls from the residence, thereby suggesting that the moolaadé has not been truly violated, Sembène is sure to

172

emphasize the subtle ambivalence of these moments: each physical violation of the protective barrier is framed in a static long shot, and each human character (other than the child) looks for a long and pensive moment at the rope before stepping over it. The question of the moolaadé’s authenticity lingers silently in each of these scenes, but at no point is this question ever definitively settled: it remains shrouded in the mysteries of the village’s unsettled social hierarchy. The contingent status of truth suggested in these scenes haunts Sembène’s film throughout.

Perhaps nowhere in is the ambivalence of truth more dramatized than in one of the film’s centerpiece scenes. In what may be the most striking image of his cinema,

Sembène frames the central communal space in Collé’s village in a long shot at a slightly low angle (See Figure 5-4). At the center of the frame is the village mosque; to its left is the mythic sculpture said to be the transfigured remains of the village’s first king. In the foreground of the image is a pile of radios, all of which are turned on, creating a blur of electronic noise. The radios have been confiscated by the men of the village as punishment for the women who have supported Collé in her efforts.

This shot invokes Gilles Delueze’s analysis of “sheets of the past,” in which multiple temporal dimensions are visible all at once. Marcia Landy accomplishes a stunning analysis of this effect in her discussion of Sembène’s treatment of folklore and memory:

Folklore functions not as failed recognition but as problematic familiarity. Memory by contrast is fluid, enabling a disarticulation of pieces of the past, the sediments that constitute the sheets of the past. The cliché constitutes the past, frozen and available for constant recycling but also open to recognition. When the clichéd image or word is placed in proximity to the immediacy and fluidity of memory, there is the possibility of an awareness of time and of change. (42).

173

In the scene introduced above, the village mosque, the sculpture, and the radios become symbolic markers of the multiple sheets of time—the heterogeneous moments of history—which continue to characterize modern Africa. Instantiated in the mosque the spectator recognizes the first wave of colonialism by Islam; the sculpture indexes a precolonial past; the pile of radios symbolizes the developments associated with both

European colonialism and African modernity. In a stunning challenge to the stale vision of history as a linear process defined by conventional units of past, present, and future, this shot presents a Burkina Faso defined by the still living forces of its unique and dazzlingly diverse history.

All at once in this deeply allegorical shot, we are presented with the village’s pre- colonial past, its colonial and neocolonial currents, and—by educated inference—the promise of an alternative future in which all of these currents may play a part. This, then, is the interstitial zone of altermodernity that Sembène is capable of generating for his audience. It is this deeply utopian and radically performative expression of historical contingency that both motivates and completes the normative currents of his cinema. In such moments, we witness the transient undoing of normative gestures in favor of the performative promise of a radically different future. In concert with the moolaadé, this scene and the discourses informing it suggest the equally urgent necessities of anti-

(neo)colonial identity politics. What results is a dialectical relationship in which identity and difference conspire to foment a multitude in quest of a better future.

By foregrounding the radically collective nature of historical experience and film viewing, Resnais, Kluge, and Sembène challenge the isolating interpellations of continuity narrative’s psycho-dynamic construction of its audience, invoking instead a

174

collective and radically transnational audience for whom the global implications of capitalist modernity and its discontents demand a collective engagement with the possible futures of global humanity. As such, these three directors conceptualize a newly global spectator as a fundamental challenge to the colonizing expansion of capitalist empire. For them, cinema becomes a way for spectators to be and think together across national, cultural, and socio-economic boundaries.

175

CHAPTER 5 CONCLUSION

In their very different projects, Sembène, Kluge, and Resnais attempt to intervene in the reifying mechanisms associated with capitalist, neocolonialist modernity. By foregrounding the radically collective nature of historical experience and film viewing, all three directors challenge the isolating interpellations of continuity narrative’s psycho-dynamic construction of its audience, invoking instead a collective and radically transnational audience for whom the far-reaching implications of capitalist modernity and its discontents demand a collective engagement with the possible futures of global humanity. All three directors conceptualize a newly global spectator as a fundamental challenge to the colonizing expansion of global capitalism and its imperialistic project. For them, films become privileged elements in an ongoing dialogue that reaches across national, cultural, and social boundaries.

I want to conclude with an emphasis on the essential futurity of the cosmopolitical spectator. In their discussion of the potentials and pitfalls of identity politics, Hardt and

Negri outline two traditional tasks that may both render even radical identities subject to the structures of domination that they resist. The first task is to make visible the oppression of the identity in question, while the second task is to implement this identity as a weapon in the struggle for freedom. In Hardt and Negri’s analysis, this second task is crucial because “[w]hen freedom is configured as the emancipation of an existing subject, identity ceases to be a war machine and becomes a form of sovereignty.

Identity as property, however rebellious, can always be accommodated within the ruling structures of the republic of propert” (Commonwealth, 330). Identity becomes property when it is conceptualized as an object possessed by a group. For Hardt and Negri, the

176

key to overcoming this impasse depends upon emphasizing not what one already is, but what one can become (331). The stress on self-fashioning—on a becoming and provisional self—is one of the key features of the global humanity interpellated by the films which are the focus of this project. Based in the logic of futurity, these films articulate the crises of identity both for their own present circumstances and for a future to come. By positing industrial modernity and global capitalism as enduring principles of modern human evolution, these films also posit a still-to-be subject of history which develops alongside the march of capital, threatening to erupt into a sudden manifestation of radical collective consciousness.

177

Figure 5-1. Dieng gorging himself

Figure 5-2. The moolaadé rope

178

Figure 5-3. Bird’s eye view of the village compound

Figure 5-4. An altermodern African space

179

LIST OF REFERENCES

Adelson, Leslie. “Horizons of Hope: Kluge’s Cosmic Miniatures and Walter Benjamin.” A Gegenwartsliteratur: A German Studies Yearbook, vol. 13, 2014, pp. 203-225.

Akudinobi, Jude. “Durable Dreams: Dissent, Critique, and Creativity in Faat Kiné and Moolaadé.” Meridians, vol. 6, no. 2, 2006, pp. 177-194.

Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Toward an Investigation).” Media and Cultural Studies Keyworks, edited by Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas M. Kellner, Blackwell Publishing, 2001, pp. 79-89.

Appadurai, Arjun. The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition. Verso, 2013.

Battarbee, Richard W. “Holocene Climate Variability and Global Warming.” Natural Climate Variability and Global Warming: A Holocene Perspective, edited by Richard W. Batterbee and Heather A. Binney, John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2008, pp. 1-7.

Beck, Ulrich. Cosmopolitan Vision. Translated by Ciaran Cronin, Polity Press, 2006.

Beevor, Antony. “An Ugly Carnival,” The Guardian, 4 June, 2009, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2009/jun/05/women-victims-d-day- landings-second-world-war

Beller, Jonathan. The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle. Dartmouth College Press, 2006.

Betz, Mark. Beyond the Subtitle: Remapping European Art Cinema. University of Minnesota Press, 2009.

Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. Routledge, 1994.

Bordwell, David, Staiger, Janet, and Thompson, Kristin. The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960. Routledge, 1985.

Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. Verso, 2004.

Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.

Cesaire, Aimé. Discourse sur le Colonialisme. Présence Africaine, 1955.

Cheah, Pheng. Inhuman Conditions: On Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights. Harvard University Press, 2009.

Commission de la Constitution. Comptes Rendus, 8 April 1946, pp. 667-669.

180

Cowles, Henry C. “The Causes of Vegetational Cycles.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 1, no. 1, 1911, pp. 3-20.

Cooper, Frederick. Citizenship Between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945-1960. Princeton University Press, 2014.

Correa, Cherif A. “Islam and the Question of Identity in Ousmane Sembène’s Film Ceddo.” Ousmane Sembène and the Politics of Culture, edited by Lifongo J. Vetinde and Amadou T. Fofana, Lexington Books, 2015, pp. 33-51.

Cubitt, Sean. The Cinema Effect. MIT Press, 2004.

Davidson, John E. Deterritorializing the New German Cinema. University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

______. “A Kind of Species Memory: The Time of the Elephants in the Space of Alexander Kluge’s Cinematic Principle.” New Directions in German Cinema, edited by Paul Cook and Chris Homewood, Tauris and Comp., 2011, pp. 21-40.

Davies, Lyell. “Why Does Diouana Die?: Facing History, Migration, and Trauma in Black Girl.” Ousmane Sembène and the Politics of Culture, edited by Lifongo Vetinde and Amadou T. Fofana, Lexington Books, 2015, pp. 97-117.

Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx. Translated by Peggy Kamuf, Routledge, 1993.

______. “Taking a Stand for Algeria.” Acts of Religion, translated by Peggy Kamuf, edited by Gil Anidjar, Routledge, 2010, pp. 299-309.

Diagne, Souleymane Bachir. African Art as Philosophy: Senghor, Bergson and the Idea of Negritude. Translated by Chike Jeffers, Seagull Books, 2011

Diawara, Manthia. African Film: New Forms of Aesthetics and Politics. Prestel, 2010.

______. African Cinema: Politics and Culture. University of Indiana Press, 1992.

Didi-Huberman, Georges. “Opening the Camps, Closing the Eyes: Image, History, Readability.” Concentrationary Cinema: Aesthetics as Political Resistance in Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog, edited by Griselda Pollock and Max Silverman, Berghahn Books, 2011, pp. 84-126.

Duras, Marguerite. Hiroshima mon Amour. Translated by Richard Seaver, Grove Press Inc., 1961.

Elsaesser, Thomas. “The Stubborn Persistence of Alexander Kluge.” Alexander Kluge: Raw Materials for the Imagination, edited by Tara Forrest, Amsterdam University Press, 2012, pp. 22-33.

181

Fehrenbach, Heide. The Role of Cinema in Democratizing Germany. University of North Carolina Press, 1995.

Fore, Devin. “Introduction.” History and Obstinacy, by Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt, edited by Devin Fore, translated by Richard Langston, Cyrus Shahan, Joel Golb, and Helen Hughes, Zone Books, 2014.

Hansen, Miriam. Babel and Babylon. Harvard University Press, 1991.

______. “Reinventing the Nickelodeon: Notes on Kluge and Early Cinema. Alexander Kluge: Raw Materials for the Imagination, edited by Tara Forrest, Amsterdam University Press, 2012, pp. 389-409.

Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Commonwealth. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009.

______. Multitude. Penguin Press, 2004.

Hirsch, Joshua. Afterimage: Film, Trauma, and the Holocaust. Temple University Press, 2004.

Ikuenobe, Polykarp. Philosophical Perspectives on Communalism and Morality in African Traditions. Lexington Books, 2006.

Jackson, Patrick T. Civilizing the Enemy: German Reconstruction and the Invention of the West. University of Michigan Press, 2006.

Kaes, Anton. From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film. Harvard University Press, 1989.

Karabell, Zachary. Parting the Desert: The Creation of the Suez Canal. John Murray Publishers, 2003.

Kluge, Alexander. “On Film and the Public Sphere.” Alexander Kluge: Raw Materials for the Imagination, edited by Tara Forrest, Amsterdam University Press, 2012, pp. 33-50.

Kluge, Alexander. “Utopian Cinema.” West German Filmmakers on Film, edited by Eric Rentschler, Holmes & Meier, 1988, pp. 6-11.

Kluge, Alexander and Negt, Oskar. History and Obstinacy. Edited by Devin Fore, translated by Richard Langston, Cyrus Shahan, Joel Golb, and Helen Hughes, Zone Books, 2014.

Landy, Marcia. Cinematic Uses of the Past. University of Minnesota Press, 1996.

Langston, Richard. Visions of Violence: German Avant-Gardes after Fascism. Northwestern University Press, 2008.

182

Markovitz, Irving Leonard. Léopold Sèdar Senghor and the Politics of Negritude. Atheneum Books, 1969.

Mayne, Judith. Cinema and Spectatorship. Taylor and Francis, 1993.

Mudimbe, V.Y. The Idea of Africa. Indiana University Press, 1994.

Murphy, David. “Culture, Development, and the African Renaissance: Ousmane Sembène and Léopold Senghor at the World Festival of Negro Arts (Dakar 1966).” Ousmane Sembène and the Politics of Culture, edited by Lifongo Vetinde and Amadou T. Fofana, Lexington Books, 2015, pp. 1-17.

—————. Sembene: Imagining Alternatives in Film and Fiction. Africa World Press, 2000.

Niang, Sada. “Mandabi: Character, Context, and Wolof Language.” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, vol. 40, 1996, pp. 55-61.

Nygren, Scott. Time Frames: Japanese Cinema and the Unfolding of History. University of Minnesota Press, 2007.

Pavsek, Christopher. “Negt and Kluge’s Redemption of Labor.” New German Critique, vol. 68, Spring-Summer 1996, pp. 137-163.

______. The Utopia of Film: Cinema’s Futures in Godard, Kluge, and Tahimik. Columbia University Press, 2013.

Pollock, Griselda, and Max Silverman. “Introduction: Concentrationary Cinema.” Concentrationary Cinema: Aesthetics as Political Resistance in Resnais’s Night and Fog, edited by Griselda Pollock and Max Silverman, Berghahn Books, 2011, pp. 1-55.

Rabinow, Paul. “Representations are Social Facts.” Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, edited by James Clifford and George E. Marcus, University of California Press, 1986, pp. 234-261.

Ross, Krisin. Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture. MIT Press, 1996.

Rothberg, Michael. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford University Press, 2009.

Sanyal, Debarati. “Auschwitz as Allegory in Night and Fog,” Concentrationary Cinema: Aesthetics as Political Resistance in Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog, edited by Griselda Pollock and Max Silverman, Berghahn Books, 2011, pp. 152-183.

Schlüpmann, Heide. “Femininity as Productive Force: Kluge and Critical Theory.” New German Critique, vol. 49, winter 1990, pp. 69-78.

183

Sembène, Ousmane. “African Cinema Is Not a Cinema of Folklore.” Interview by Siradiou Diallo. Ousmane Sembène: Interviews, edited by Annett Busch and Max Annas, University Press of Mississippi, 2008, pp. 52-63.

———————. “Filmmakers Have a Great Responsibility to Our People.” Interview by Harold D. Weaver. Ousmane Sembène: Interviews, edited by Annett Busch and Max Annas, University Press of Mississippi, 2008, pp. 24-36.

Sembène, Ousmane and Jean Rouch. “A Historic Confrontation in 1965 between Jean Rouch and Ousmane Sembène: ‘You Look at Us as If We Were Insects.” Interview by Albert Cervoni. Ousmane Sembène: Interviews, edited by Annett Busch and Max Annas, University of Mississippi, 2008, pp. 3-7.

Senghor, Léopold Sèdar. Prose and Poetry. Edited and translated by John O. Reed and Clive Wake, Heinemann Educational, 1976.

—————————. “Les Negro-Africains et L’Union française.” Réveil, 24 April 1947.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Cultural Talks in the Hot Peace: Revisiting the Global Village.” Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, edited by Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, University of Minnesota Press, 1998, pp. 329- 351.

Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time 3: Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise. Translated by Stephen Barker, Stanford University Press, 2001.

Turim, Maureen. Flashbacks in Film: Memory & History. Routledge, 1989.

Wayne, Mike. Political Film: The Dialectics of Third Cinema. Pluto Press, 2001.

Wiesel, Elie. Against Silence: The Voice and Vision of Elie Wiesel. Edited by Irving Abrahamson, Holocaust Library, 1985.

Wilson, Emma. French Film Directors: Alain Resnais. Manchester University Press, 2006.

Wilson, Emma. “Resnais and the Dead.” Concentrationary Cinema: Aesthetics as Political Resistance in Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog, edited by Griselda Pollock and Max Silverman, Berghahn Books, 2011, pp. 126-140.

184

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Daniel Norford received his M.A. in English from Oklahoma State University and is currently a PhD candidate in English at the University of Florida. His research interests include global cinema, critical theory, and postcolonial studies.

185