Noir Affect

Christopher Breu, Elizabeth A. Hatmaker, Christopher Breu, Elizabeth A. Hatmaker

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780823287666, 9780823287802
• eBook ISBN: 9780823287789
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

Noir Affect proposes a new understanding of noir as defined by negative affect. This new understanding emphasizes that noir is, first and foremost, an affective disposition rather than a specific cycle of films or novels associated with a given time period or national tradition. Instead, the essays in Noir Affect trace noir's negativity as it manifests in different national contexts from the United States to Mexico, France, and Japan and in a range of different media, including films, novels, video games, and manga.The forms of affect associated with noir are resolutely negative: These are narratives centered on loss, sadness, rage, shame, guilt, regret, anxiety, humiliation, resentment, resistance, and refusal. Moreover, noir often asks us to identify with those on the losing end of cultural narratives, especially the criminal, the lost, the compromised, the haunted, the unlucky, the cast-aside, and the erotically "perverse, " including those whose greatest erotic attachment is to death. Drawing on contemporary work in affect theory, while also re-orienting some of its core assumptions to address the resolutely negative affects narrated by noir, Noir Affect is invested in thinking through the material, bodily, social, and political–economic impact of the various forms noir affect takes.If much affect theory asks us to consider affect as a space of possibility and becoming, Noir Affect asks us to consider affect as also a site of repetition, dissolution, redundancy, unmaking, and decay. It also asks us to consider the way in which the affective dimensions of noir enable the staging of various forms of social antagonism, including those associated with racial, gendered, sexual, and economic inequality. Featuring an Afterword by the celebrated noir scholar Paula Rabinowitz and essays by an array of leading scholars, Noir Affect aims to fundamentally re-orient our understanding of noir.Contributors: Alexander Dunst, Sean Grattan, Peter Hitchcock, Justus Nieland, Andrew Pepper, Ignacio Sánchez Prado, Brian Rejack, Pamela Thoma, Kirin Wachter-Grene

CHAPTER 1

Toward Alphaville: Noir, Midcentury Communication, and the Management of Affect

Justus Nieland

In May 1968, the American conceptual artist Mel Bochner published a four-page artwork titled “Alfaville, Godard’s Apocalypse” in Arts Magazine (fig. 1). At once a compressed movie review of the director’s noir/science-fiction hybrid Alphaville (1965) and a collection of quotations aping Jean-Luc Godard’s own citational style, the piece takes the form of a typographic grid. Bochner’s rationalized design nods to the ruthlessly technocratic world of Alphaville, governed by the omniscient computer Alpha 60, even as its layout scrambles the functionalist protocols of the medium (the magazine page) through which it communicates. Like Robert Smithson and Dan Graham, Bochner’s work in the 1960s shared a preoccupation with discursivity and sought to intervene in the mediated scenes of information’s distribution and display, folding strategies of dissemination into the production of the artwork itself. In adopting an aesthetic of information, 1960s conceptual art such as Bochner’s assumed what Sianne Ngai calls the “look of capitalist modernity itself”—not just the look of thought, but of bureaucracy, of “post-Fordist knowledge work.”¹ The Godard of Alphaville was up to something similar.

Figure 1. Bochner’s “Alfaville: Godard’s Apocalypse.”

In the United States, the rise of new communications technologies in the postwar “informating” society was accompanied by a neutral, low-affect disposition that Alan Liu has dubbed “cool.”² In “Alfaville” Bochner argues that the emotions of Godard’s noir hero, Lemmy Caution, betray something similar, “nothing more than a slightly roused boredom.”³ For this reason, Bochner continues, Lemmy’s “avowal of humanist values such as love and personal feeling are all the more disproportionate.”⁴ Bochner’s own dispassionate, late-modernist grid is the appropriate technique for communicating that kind of permeant postindustrial boredom, which saturates the modern mise-en-scène of Godard’s New Wave noir: “Alphaville locations: deserted lobbies, parking lots, shopping plazas, cloverleaf intersections, curtain-wall buildings, self-service elevators, hotel bathrooms, phone booths, circular staircases, highways around large cities, a bedroom with a jukebox.”⁵ Bochner identifies here precisely the kind of serial and anonymous spatiality characteristic of what Ed Dimendberg calls the decentralized, “centrifugal spaces” of the film noir in late modernity and their dispersed communication networks.⁶

With “Alfaville,” Bochner locates noir affect within the technical ambitions and scenes of postwar communications media and inside the strategies of critique, display, or détournement of its avant-garde practitioners, from Brecht to Burroughs (fig. 2). Liu has dubbed such subcultural mimicry of the look of technological rationality as “technostyle,” briefly suggesting how film noir’s familiar ethos of deadpan cool was itself a similar affective “displacement, circumvention, or ‘work-around’ for a life dominated by the culture of work.”⁷ In doing so, Liu urges us to consider noir affect as an episode in a more ambitious program of feeling’s bureaucratic management by midcentury technique and technology, en route to the affective protocols of the contemporary moment, when “all culture is increasingly the culture of information.”⁸

In fact, beginning in the postwar period, noir affect—as a problem for management—was often inseparable from the information agendas of various organizations and embedded in period-specific understandings of communication and its media technologies. Dimendberg has observed the increasing presence of mass media in noir after 1949, noting the publication that year of Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver’s The Mathematical Theory of Communication and the construction of an early computer at the University of Illinois—both harbingers of the information age that would help to transform noir spatiality.⁹ I will argue that noir affect’s relationship to the managerial imperatives of midcentury communications theories and practices began even earlier, alongside wartime studies of propaganda (a term long synonymous with “information”), and then accrued heightened scrutiny as a therapeutic idiom of communication flourished following the war. In the process, noir affect became bound to what Mark Greif has dubbed the midcentury’s “crisis of man” discourse. This pervasive and anxious humanism arose in the historical shadow of fascism and totalitarianism and viewed the human being as beset by various forms of technics, from the machine to proliferating strategies of “what we might call ‘social technique,’ organization, or simply government.”¹⁰ As a technical problem for organizations, and requiring expert management, noir affect thus intersected fitfully with what Greif identifies as various “sub-topics” underwriting “crisis of man” debates: “totalitarianism, existentialism, world war, and Cold War propaganda … human rights, and the United Nations.”¹¹ Moving toward Alphaville as a late, French entry in the “crisis of man” discourse, this essay turns to the chronically maladjusted and negative terrain of noir affect to offer a brief history of the genre’s relationship with the organizational and managerial operations of the administered society that, for Godard, Bochner, and others seemed to force humanism to a terminal crisis by the late 1960s.

Figure 2. Détournement in Bochner’s “Alfaville.”

Noir Communication

Film noir’s most famous memo, in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944), is an early instance of the bureaucratization of noir affect and its organization within the managerial paradigms of midcentury communication (fig. 3). Walter Neff’s (Fred MacMurray) interoffice confession to his friend and coworker Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson) is a now-iconic example of noir’s tendency to subjectivize narration through voiceover and flashbacks, amplifying generic affects of anxiety, unease, and disorientation. But Walter’s affect here seems rather cool—cooled not just by its hard-boiled tone of cynical retrospection but also its technological mediation. It is spoken into a Dictaphone and takes the form of an office memorandum, what John Guillory calls bureaucratic modernity’s “quintessential information genre.”¹² The memorandum “gives directions, makes recommendations, but above all, it is means of transmitting information within the large bureaucratic structures organizing virtually all work in modernity.”¹³ The film opens by framing the affects most proper to Walter—his sincere feelings—within a communicative, organizational circuit. The scene of confession blurs with the scene of administration.

Figure 3. Walter Neff’s interoffice confession in Double Indemnity.

Much like Keyes’s “little man,” a kind of tireless emotional laborer deep inside, alerting him to phony insurance claims and protecting the corporate bottom line, Neff’s memo is a symptom of Double Indemnity’s investment in the modern management of feeling as both a technical and ideological matter within those bureaucratically managed systems constitutive of modernity, from insurance agencies to nation-states. As figures of the professional-managerial class, Keyes and Neff betray an emotional coldness typical of white-collar workers in a midcentury corporate culture that would be increasingly shaped by automation and new structures of bureaucratic control with designs on human emotion. Emotional life portrayed by middle-class workers like Keyes and Neff was, Liu claims, “all about ‘management.’ It was about managing the allowable range and intensity of productive affect, displacing excess affect into indirectly productive acts of consumption, and thus establishing the modern paradox of deadpan professionalism and binge leisure.”¹⁴ In Liu’s account, this was a legacy of Taylorism, “the first rationalized system of emotional labor management,” whose scientific strategies sought to remove workplace antagonism between human laborers by absorbing it “into a relationship with something one could safely hate (or mourn or love) with no practical effect at all: the technological/technical system.”¹⁵ In the work of Elton Mayo and others, hard Taylorist science led to softer managerial techniques for enforcing a norm of low affect in the workplace that were further refined in the 1920s and 1930s with the emergence of new fields of industrial psychology, “salesman training (e.g., Dale Carnegie), personnel counseling, employee testing, and so on,” leading to the managerial revolution known as “human relations” or “human resources” that gained steam in the 1930s.¹⁶ The goal of workplace relations rethought as human resource management was not just a Fordist affective “harmony” or alignment with technical system but what Liu calls a “resocialization of work under the name of systemic friendship” and the “identification” of managers and professionals “with the technological/technical system.”¹⁷ Walter’s ambivalent feelings for Keyes, relayed via memo, are a displaced form of his feelings for a vast technical system he both hates and loves. Ironically, he can only confess them within the confines of an informational genre devoted to securi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Half Title
• Introduction: Dark Passages
• 1. Toward Alphaville: Noir, Midcentury Communication, and the Management of Affect
• 2. Public Violence as Private Pathology: Noir Affect in The End of a Primitive
• 3. Cold Kink: Race and Sex in the African American Underworld
• 4. Noir Pedagogy: The Problem of Student Masochism in the Classroom Economy
• 5. The Shadows of the Twilight World: Beebo Brinker and the Circulation of Affect
• 6. Peripheral Noir, Mediation, and Capitalism: Noir Form, Noir Mediascape, Sociological Noir
• 7. Cyborg Affect and the Power of the Posthuman in the Ghost in the Shell Franchise
• 8. Playing with Negativity: Max Payne, Neoliberal Collapse, and the Noir Video Game
• 9. Chick Noir: Surveilling Femininity and the Affects of Loss in Gone Girl
• 10. Surplus Feelings: Neoliberal Noir and the Affective Economy of Debt
• 11. Capitalism as Affective Atmosphere: The Noir Worlds of Massimo Carlotto
• Afterword: Melodrama, Noir’s Kid Sister, or Crying in Trump’s America
• List of Contributors
• Index