Dispossession and Recovery in Paulo Morelliâ•Žs City Of

21 Beyond the Bandit: Dispossession and Recovery in Paulo Morelli’s City of Men Kate Lawless* perception and social organization change over time, but that these changes are histor- Let’s begin with a maxim: Changes ical, meaning they are inextricably linked in material conditions produce changes to shifts in the material circumstances of in human perception. Clearly materialist production. Benjamin describes this ten- in its infuence, such a maxim derives in dency more explicitly in his exposition of large part from the work of Walter Benja- modernity via Baudelaire (1939): further min, whose insights on the history of tech- elaborating tensions between subjectivi- nology continue to infuence the dialectic ty and mediation, Benjamin describes the of politics and aesthetics today. In 1936, historical shift in perception he names “the illustrating changes in perception that ac- shock experience” and its relationship to companied the inventions of flm and pho- changes in social organization that emerged tography, in what would become his most at the apex of modernity. I quote at length a oft-cited essay,1 Benjamin wrote: “Just as passage that elucidates the transition from the entire mode of existence of human col- one technological formation, one social lectives changes over long historical peri- formation, to another: ods, so too does their mode of perception. Baudelaire speaks of a man who The way in which human perception is or- plunges into the crowd as into ganized—the medium in which it occurs— a reservoir of electric energy. is conditioned not only by nature but by Circumscribing the experience history” (emphasis in original, 23). What of the shock, he calls this man becomes increasingly clear in this and later ‘a kaleidoscope endowed with works is not only that the modes of human consciousness.’ Whereas Poe’s *Kate Lawless is an assistant professor in the Centre for Global Studies at Huron Univer- sity College in London, Ontario. She has recently published articles on memory, art and capitalism in American Imago and Public: Art/Culture/Ideas. Scum & Villainy 22 Te Word Hoard Beyond the Bandit passers-by cast glances in all di- particular—and its effects on human per- rections seemingly without cause, ception in the age of industrial production today’s pedestrians are obliged to (especially in terms of the sharp rise of Fas- look about them so that they can be cism he witnessed in the frst half of the 20th aware of traffc signals. Thus, tech- century), aligned with insights by Foucault, nology has subjected the human Agamben, and Hardt and Negri, contempo- sensorium to a complex kind of rary media theorists have replaced Benja- training. There came a day when a min’s politics with biopolitics in order to new and urgent need for stimuli was imagine the ways in which visual econo- met with flm. In a flm, perception mies participate in the biopolitical impera- conditioned by shock was estab- tive to preserve life—in Foucault’s words, lished as a formal principle. What to “to make live and let die” (Society 241). determines the rhythm of produc- In this regard, Allan Meek argues that “[b] tion on a conveyor belt is the same iopolitical theories require us to think about thing that underlies the rhythm of media beyond its uses, its social impact, its reception in flm. (175) representations, its ownership and control, or its technological development and to con- Here, Benjamin not only demonstrates the sider how media record, monitor, analyze, ways in which human perception and sub- classify and harness life as biopower” (2). jectivity shifted with the new forms of so- More specifcally, drawing on Benjamin’s cial organization that accompanied rapid adaptation of Freud’s “protective shield,” urbanization; he also reveals the ways in Meek maintains that “[m]edia form part which such an experience is formalized in of an apparatus of immunity that promises the aesthetic production of a given histori- to insulate us from actual destruction” (2). cal moment. The crowd, the traffc signal, Pasi Valiaho takes a slightly different tack. and flm are all part of the same formali- Extending Benjamin’s materialist rather zation of shock that characterizes the over- than Freudian leanings, Valiaho emphasiz- whelming experience of modernity under es the ways in which the function of screen the industrial mode of production. More media has shifted with historical changes importantly, all three are technologies that in the mode of production. “If the visual subject the human sensorium to a complex economy of cinema in the early twenti- kind of training that produces a particular eth century corresponded with modes of historical subject. Fordist production and sensibility,” he While Benjamin sought to eluci- argues, “one could say that postcinemat- date the politics of mass media—flm in ic images correspond with post-Fordist Issue 5, 2016 Lawless 23 production, neoliberal ideologies, and theory of homo sacer to that cinematic text contemporary biopolitical ways of taking and which reads the fgure of the favelado charge of the life of individuals and popula- as a manifestation of banditry that exem- tions” (8). Focusing more narrowly on the plifes bare life.2 This kind of analysis con- biopolitics of flm in particular, Nitzan Leb- ceives of the text as a direct refection of ovic is concerned not with the apparatus of reality (though if this is the case we really immunity but rather with the emancipatory have no need for the flm in our analysis of potential of biopolitical flm. In particular, the favelado); more importantly, however, he identifes the ways in which biopolitical it overlooks the ways in which the text is flm not only “seems to focus on the urgent rather a carefully constructed and complex need to expose and undermine the fallacy of system of signifcation that emerges dialec- centrism and consensus” but also demon- tically within a given social, political, and strates “how thinking through catastrophe economic order. In contrast to Cruikshank’s can be an emancipatory power for the re- claim that City of Men provides an “effec- consideration of norms, whether political, tive medium to advertise the biopolitical political-theological, or aesthetic” (n.p.). event of the favelados” and “urban resist- Despite their varying approaches, all three ance” (Cruikshank 8), we should ask how suggest that flm and media are not only vi- the favela flm engages in the production able sites for theorising the biopolitical but and reproduction of a biopolitical subject also central vehicles for the production and in the age of information and digital me- reproduction of biopolitical life. dia. Melanie Gilligan opens this line of in- Offering an account of the varied quiry when she asks: “Is representation the ways in which the visual economy inter- answer to ‘social exclusion’ or one of the sects with the order of biopolitics in a world mechanisms of its reproduction?” (n.p.). In shaped by information networks and fnan- biopolitical terms, the question becomes: cial speculation, these recent interventions Does the favela flm work to counter the ef- suggest that instead of simply applying bi- fects of social and economic exploitation, opolitical theory to the object of analysis, or does it reinforce an existing order in we should consider the ways in which the which images not only reproduce but also object—for example, the 2007 flm City of capture and direct the “potentials of life” Men—engages in the maintenance of the (Valiaho 7)? current biopolitical order. Such an approach In keeping with our original max- complicates Stephen Cruikshank’s essay im, and building on the insights of Meek, “Bandits and Biopolitics,” which proposes Valiaho, and other biopolitical media the- a straightforward application of Agamben’s orists, we should begin by examining how Scum & Villainy 24 Te Word Hoard Beyond the Bandit the formal and narrative structures of the of globalization. Accordingly, the com- favela flm in general, and City of Men in plex form of training that emerges in the particular, refect, register, and facilitate age of biopolitics is reception in recov- the transition from industrial to fnancial, ery, wherein a fantasy of redemption or perhaps cognitive, capital.3 If we agree merges with history from below to con- with Benjamin’s claim that “[f]ilm serves ceal the ongoing material conditions to train human beings in those new apper- of exploitation. ceptions and reactions demanded by inter- In the favela flm, the history of action with an apparatus whose role in their dispossession and alienation that accompa- lives is expanding almost daily” (26), then nies global crises of housing and labour are it serves to reason that the favela flm must re-written as narratives of personal struggle contribute to the training of human beings that participate in what I have elsewhere in those new apperceptions and reactions called the preservationist aesthetic—that demanded by the biopolitical apparatus. is, the principle of preservation at the heart Benjamin names the complex form of train- of new practices of cultural resistance and ing invoked by flm in the age of industrial new forms of enclosure and assimilation production “reception in distraction,” a pro- worldwide.4 Marx famously defned the cess by which, instead of being absorbed process of enclosure or primitive accumu- by the work, the “distracted masses absorb lation as the separation of the worker from the work of art into themselves” (40). Writ- the means of production, using the land en- ing

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