The Poetic Vehicle of Authoritarian Ideology

(note: I may use gender-neutral “they,” “them,” “their,” and/or “theirs” to refer to anonymous imagined persons)

 

Benjamin’s view seems to be that technology and geopolitics have formed a situation by which people’s discontent, paired with their lack of connection to reality, has opened a space available to exploitation by authoritarians. Today, we might see this as a Žižekian point: effective authoritarians often rely on poetry to motivate the masses to comply with unspeakable terrors[1]. This poetry relies on the emptying of ideological space. Benjamin’s historical dialectics proposes that modern consumption of art entails the effacement of artworks’ material and ritual aspects that initially are artworks’ raison d’etre. In modernity, the roles of art and culture are hollowed out in a way that recalls Marx’s line from The Eighteenth Brumaire: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”[2] For Benjamin, this appears in the difference between myth and allegory: myths are stories born of people’s common material experiences and conditions, whereas allegories are tales meant to instill bourgeois ideals and practices agreeable to the ruling class.

Part of the problem is that technology and capitalism have cheapened people’s experiences. In “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” Benjamin says, “Since the end of the nineteenth century, philosophy has made a series of attempts to grasp ‘true’ experience, as opposed to the kind that manifests itself in the standardized, denatured life of the civilized masses.” (314) People’s experiences no longer appear to be authentic and fulfilling. Further down the page, Benjamin refers to Bergson’s relationship to the problem as expressed in Bergson’s Matière et Memoire (Matter and Memory): “As the title suggests, it regards the structure of memory as decisive for the philosophical structure of experience. […] [Experience] is the product less of facts firmly anchored in memory than of accumulated and frequently unconscious data that flow together in memory.” Memory, then, is partly determined by unconscious information that informs everything that we do, including thought. In V. N. Vološinov’s Marxism and the Philosophy of Language[3], he fleshes out a similar idea. On p. 10, he says, “The domain of ideology coincides with the domain of signs. They equate with one another. Wherever a sign is present, ideology is present, too.” For Vološinov, all use of language necessitates what Benjamin calls “unconscious data.” Later in the book, Vološinov determines that individuals’ uses of signs rely on social construction. Members of groups of people mutually agree upon the meanings of signs. All signs reflect understandings of the world determined by the group of people who construct that particular system of signs. Signs facilitate these system formations. The process of forming these systems always already includes ideology, even before any sign is constructed.

The same signs often appear in different, contemporaneous systems. The constructions of these differing systems of signs depend on the situations in which people find themselves. Any group of people might understand a sign differently from any other group of people. In any geographical place, the proletariat at any point in time can, and often does, construct a different meaning for any particular sign than that which the bourgeoisie might construct. These signs help to determine how we view ourselves, so all aspects of the individual are partly determined by the community.

When Benjamin says, “Experience is indeed a matter of tradition, in collective existence as well as private life,” (314) he highlights how socially constructed signs inform the construction of the individual but also how these signs construct our understandings of past events. Throughout Benjamin’s writing, he points out that understandings of history are determined by interpretations of past events. Illegible and inconvenient parts of histories are removed, while recollectors of histories imbue positive content-values: what Vološinov calls “ideology” and what Benjamin calls “unconscious data.”

To return to the beginning of this essay, what is imbued in these histories can be a bit of Žižek’s authoritarian poetry—a concern that Žižek and Benjamin seem to share. As the authoritarian’s poetry determines the interpretation of history, it also determines how individuals define themselves in and against their communities.

[1] For example, see Slavoj Žižek’s “The Poetic Torture-House of Language,” Poetry. Chicago: Poetry Foundation. 2017. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/70096/the-poetic-torture-house-of-language

[2] Marx, Karl. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Moscow: Progress Publishers. 1934. 10.

[3] Vološinov, V. N. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. New York: Seminar Press. 1973.

Benjamin, Walter. “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.” Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 2. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 1966. 313-55.

Faith in the Time-Image: Weerasethakul’s Syndromes and a Century and Malick’s The Thin Red Line as Examples of Contemplative Cinema

André Bazin and Gilles Deleuze addressed a kind of shift (or, perhaps, growth) in the semiotics of cinema. They each suggest that a new form of cinema emerged after WWII by which the symbols and the arrangement of those symbols were different from those of the cinema that had preceded this new form. However, Bazin and Deleuze differ some, especially in where they put their emphases. For Bazin, the syntax (or arrangement) of film—the ways by which films are conceived of and shot, the editing process, the intended relationship of the spectator to the medium—becomes central to the shift, whereas for Deleuze, the signs, themselves—the images and sounds—come to represent a different kind of cinema from that from before.

First off, we should clarify that Bazin seems to be taking a structuralist view on how cinema works: cinema is a language and a system defined by the differences between elements within it. What Bazin is proposing, then, is that the language has changed. What is of interest is that the signifiers that we might normally think of—purely images and sounds—are not only what Bazin seems to be getting at. Instead, what Bazin seems to be suggesting is that, in addition to the content-values of the images and sounds, the syntax of cinema has also changed. Instead of Classic Hollywood symbolism overlaid on Classic Hollywood continuity editing techniques, Bazin seems to suggest that a new mode by which symbols are rearranged and the means by which these symbols are presented to us take on different forms. In fact, Bazin seems to have lost faith in the abilities of the old codes, or he at least seems to prefer the new form of cinema. Bazin locates a new presentation of cinema such that the images and sounds that are presented to us can be interpreted in wholly new ways.

Deleuze assists Bazin in defining what this cinema can be. On p. 2 of Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Deleuze says, “What defines neo-realism is this build-up of purely optical situations… which are fundamentally distinct from the sensory-motor situations of the action-image in the old realism.” Deleuze sees Italian neo-realist films and French New Wave films, in particular, as embodying the shift that he identifies. For Deleuze, part of the shift is in how optical signs, opsigns, are treated as spectacles in themselves, whereas, in older cinema, the focus is on action and clear narrative storytelling. The “sensory-motor” driving force in what he refers to as the “action-image” facilitates the older form of cinema that relies on the development of a clear plot with a clear message, leading the spectator along.

For Bazin, those films that “put their faith in reality” take a bold leap into a cinema that he finds more useful. To try to understand what this means, we can think of some of the similarities between Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line and Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Syndromes and a Century. Bazin praises that cinema that could come across as anti-Eisensteinian in the sense that its intentions may not be immediately clear on the surface. If Eisensteinian films are those that are unrelenting in their blatant intentionality, Bazin’s subtler, more complex cinema obfuscates its intentions to the point that they are not always completely clear.

Weerasethakul’s Syndromes and a Century opens with a thirty-second shot pointed directly upward as trees sway in the wind before the film cuts to a simultaneously banal and slightly bizarre interview of what appears to be a Thai military surgeon. After a brief interlude by which the image on the screen is of what appears to be another Thai soldier, the next couple minutes are nothing more than a medium close-up of the Thai soldier being interviewed, mostly staring directly into the camera, answering a random assortment of questions.

Malick’s film opens in a similar manner: within seconds of the opening of the film, the camera is focused on trees in a jungle. The scene cuts from one slow-moving shot staring up into the highest strata of the trees to the next such shot. Instead of a work-related interview, the audio track is occupied by the thoughts in someone’s head: questions about the nature of nature.

In Weerasethakul’s film, there seems to be an intentionality to the slow pace of the opening sequence, to the near-motionless in it. Perhaps the pace is doing part of the work in the film. If one considers the role of rurality and Buddhism, particularly in the first half of the film, and contrasts that part of the film to the more capitalistic, faster-paced second half, the function of this pacing seems clearer. In the case of Malick’s film, the slower pace of much of the film seems to simultaneously juxtapose itself with, and contextualize, the battle that is taking place, i.e. we are not separate from nature and conflict is not separate from nature. The open-endedness of the constant philosophical questionings of the film seem to mirror the open-endedness of the film and its subject matter.

Later in Weerasethakul’s Syndromes and a Century, we come to a scene in which a woman attempts to heal someone by adjusting their chakras. As she performs her work on the young man, the camera slowly pans around the table to another woman. She stares into the camera as the camera pulls back from the table. Her gaze follows the camera as the room’s symbols emerge: alcoholic beverages populate the table at which the people sit; in the corner of the room are plastic bodily appendages, overhung by odd red-and-white pipes; two male doctors sit on one side of the table; and a file cabinet and worktable line one side of the plain, austere, industrial-looking room.

The scene is odd in its imagery and in the reflexiveness implied by the woman’s staring into the camera. The layered composition in the scene may serve as an example of one aspect that Bazin had in mind. It is easy to see that the spectator has several choices in terms of where to look in this scene and how exactly to be affected. Each of these images seems to tell its own story, a point that Deleuze would likely agree to.

This is consistent with Deleuze’s conception of the “time-image,” the post-WWII form of cinema by which images and sounds create a mood that affects the spectator. Through their gaze, the spectator imbues meaning into these symbols, allowing film to tell stories through familiarities in the kinds of symbols embodied in our daily lives’ objects. For Bazin, it is the emphasis on reality that he is concerned with. Bazin sees the relative autonomy of images in post-WWII cinema as giving the spectator a different relationship to film: the spectator plays a freer and more active role in the discovery of the meaning of film.