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part one
the geopolitical imaginary of cinema studies
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one
notes on transnational film theory
decentered subjectivity, decentered capitalism
kathleen newman
In 2008, about twenty minutes into the television broadcast at the Academy Awards ceremony, actor George Clooney introduced a short film sequence honoring the eightieth anniversary of the Oscars. At the end of the piece, which highlighted moments in past ceremonies when stars were moved by the recognition of their peers and which swept to its minor epic conclusion with an aged Charlie Chaplin thanking the Academy and his fellow filmmakers over Celine Dion’s voice singing “My Heart Will Go On” from Titanic, the host of the ceremony, comedian Jon Stewart, pretended to be distracted. Holding an iPhone or iPod, he announced he was watching Lawrence of Arabia, but that it was better appreciated in widescreen and so he turned the device sideways. It was the perfect joke for the film industry in the digital age, recalling the celluloid grandeur of filmmaking past, referencing, by the film’s theme of Middle Eastern wars, the current US military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, and deflating popular hyperbole regarding new media. Most interesting of all was the gag’s recognition, beyond the question of screen size, that questions of geopolitical scale are central to the meaning-making processes of cinema. How a film instantiates the geopolitical imaginary of a particular historical time and place, whom the film addresses and from what geopolitical perspective, and what a film accomplishes as a narrative are understood to be the simultaneous operation of multiple scales. This popular recognition of the centrality of the question of scale has also become a concern for the discipline of film studies.
disciplinary assumptions
Current scholarship on the transnational scale of cinematic circulation now takes for granted a geopolitical decentering of the discipline. Areas once considered peripheral (that is, less developed countries, the so-called Third World) are now seen as integral to the historical development of cinema. The assumption that the export of European and US cinema to the rest of the world, from the silent period onward, inspired only derivative image cultures has been replaced by a dynamic model of cinematic exchange,1 where filmmakers around the world are known to have been in dialogue with one another’s work, and other cultural and political exchanges to form the dynamic context of these dialogues. Audiences outside the United States are understood to have long had access to at least more than one national cinematic tradition, if not several, and their viewing practices are understood to be active engagement, not to be passive reception. Changes in film industries and in film style are now understood not merely to be a response to national conditions and pressures, but also to have, most always, multiple, international determinants. Borders are seen to have been always permeable, societies always hybrid, and international film history to have been key to the processes of globalization. In these early years of the twenty-first century, it is hoped we have better understood the complexities of social structuration than we did in the late twentieth century. Yet, in this recognition of the complexity of the role of the film text in socio-political processes, certain questions raised during the interdisciplinary theoretical debates of the twentieth century remain unanswered. The linguistic turn and the cultural turn, enabled by and enabling the theoretical advance of the decentering of subjectivity, produced interesting questions regarding the relation between the meaning-making processes of art and the determinants of social practices and the trajectories of social change. Yet, until relatively recently, the articulation of the concerns of both the humanities and the social sciences was quite difficult because in neither general area of inquiry had the full implications of the discussions of the nature of globalization been realized: capitalism itself is, and has always been, a decentered practice. Beginning in the 1970s, the sociologists developing world-systems theory were among the first to suggest that the operations of capitalism might be decentered, and, over the subsequent decades, anthropologists, geographers, literary scholars, and political theorists sought to rewrite the conceptualization of power asymmetries: counter-hegemony, subalternity, and discursive formations were key terms of the period.2 While in film studies there were parallel debates regarding the politics of cinema (particularly regarding ideology and the social divisions of class, race, gender, and sexuality, with the international dimension of these debates concentrated in theories of Third Cinema and their counterpart, theories of Global Hollywood3), more pressing in terms of theory were the reconsiderations of temporality.4 In general, in the humanities, however, by the last decade of the twentieth century, formulations of postmodernity gave way to formulations of cosmopolitanism, inflected by postcolonial theory, and, via the necessary globalism of the latter two projects,5 matters of temporality were reconnected to matters of space. This spatial turn in the humanities, that is, the inclusion of the theoretical work from the discipline of geography, has made possible, finally, to begin the theoretical articulation of decentered subjectivity and decentered capitalism.
the constitution of texts and societies “prerequisite to any subject [positions] whatsoever”
In discussing the mutual constitution of the textual and the social, or subjectivity and structuration, as a matter of power asymmetries and uneven development, it is useful to consider the links across some thirty years between the writings of Michel Foucault and David Harvey, theorists from areas of academic inquiry that deploy theories of representation quite differently. We remember that, in preparation for his discussion of the “anatomo-politics of the body” and the “bio-politics of the population” as practices of sovereignty in the final chapter “Right of Death and Power over Life” in The History of Sexuality, Volume I (1978), Foucault argues regarding “Method” that
This definition of method permitted literary and film studies to consider print and audiovisual texts as “grids of intelligibility,” whose textual operations, particularly narrative operations, served as sites of multiple and overlapping discursive formations. Given subjectivity is constituted in language, narratives are then the evidentiary sites of simultaneous, multiple subject positionings, those of reception of readers or viewers as well as those of enunciation of authors or filmmakers, both active positions of engagement; thus narratives become sites of structuration, effecting multiple subject positioning, including uneven relations of power, and any act of communication produces a concatenation of subject positions in language. The spatial terms are used advisedly because power hierarchies are necessarily spatialized. This was one of the points of greatest concern to geographers when reading Foucault’s work: they viewed spatial dispersion or mapping of power as a material practice, not as the secondary order, for them, of metaphor.7 For theoretical work combining the insights of the humanities and the social sciences, textual operations necessarily reveal the “sphere” in which force relations operate not to be a place in which force relations operate, but rather the always ongoing constitutive process by which social relations are assigned, located (spatialized), delimited, and, ultimately, transformed, whether by cooperation or under the sign of violence. Foucault was concerned with state power and the control of the means of violence within and by nation-states, what Nicos Poulantzas described, in the same period, as violence at the heart of the State,8 but he knew discursive operations to be constitutive, not merely derivative. However, he was more concerned with the intelligibility of specific discursive formations rather than the articulation, one to another, of formations, that is, rather than with the articulations of the “grids of intelligibility” at multiple scales, including those above and below the national scale.
David Harvey, to the contrary, finds himself as a geographer obligated to consider the operation of power at multiple scales of both historical and contemporary capitalism because, not only are geo-economic exchanges multi directional but capitalism itself operates via the simultaneity of multiple territorial delimitations, among them, local, national, interna tional, world-regional, transnational, and global scales. In Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development (2006), Harvey writes:
He describes the shift in wealth, over the latter years of the twentieth century, to scales beyond those of the nation-state, through “accumulation through dispossession,” wherein economic operations that in the past served to accrue wealth within a nation-state now facilitate the accumulation of wealth by transnational elites. His work addresses what Giovanni Arrighi, in The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times, a work of historical sociology published in 1994,10 theorized as either the emergent fifth long century of capitalist development (overlapping phases of material and financial expansion, incorporating new territory into the politicaleconomic system, with each long century marked by the competition between two major state powers, with the last competition being that between the nation-states of the United States and the Soviet Union) or the transformation of the capitalist world-economy into something else all together. Thus, Harvey and Arrighi, building on world-systems theory, reveal the decentering of capitalism that was not readily apparent to scholars in film and literary studies in the heyday of Marxist cultural theory in the 1970s and 1980s. In addition, the easy conflation of the terms globalization and capitalism of recent years (where once globalization was thought to include other kinds of flows and exchanges11), makes clear that agency within (or of) capitalism is not confined to class agency and, therefore, the nature of resistance and revolution are redefined also to operate at multiple scales, well beyond the “overthrow” an unjust political system seen as a worthy goal in yesteryear.
While both Foucault and Harvey stress the unevenness of power relations at the center of their arguments, neither seek to find a way describe with precision the relationship between multiple determinants of social transformation. Inequality, oppression, counter-hegemony, alternity … one and all are seen to operate under the sign of a complexity too great to be parsed. Thus, the simila...
