Drive in Cinema

Essays on Film, Theory and Politics

Marc James Léger

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781783204854
• eBook ISBN: 9781783204861
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

In Drive in Cinema, Marc James Léger presents Žižek-influenced studies of films made by some of the most influential filmmakers of our time, including Jean-Luc Godard, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Werner Herzog, Alexander Kluge, William Klein, Jim Jarmusch, Hal Hartley, Harmony Korine, and more. Working with radical theory and Lacanian ethics, Léger draws surprising connections between art, film, and politics, taking his analysis beyond the academic obsession with cultural representation and filmic technique and instead revealing film's potential as an emancipatory force.

Introduction

1 + 1 + a

Drive in Cinema proposes that one might be able to screen the history and actuality of radical experimental cinema as a means to account for what I have described in Brave New Avant Garde as the ‘avant garde hypothesis’ – the Alain Badiou-derived idea that the event of the avant garde represents not only the multiplicity of becoming, not only the reality of today’s neoliberal world situation, but a cut in the continuum of the world.¹ Subjectivity for Badiou is precisely the consequence of this event, this new process, and the kind of subjectivity that we could say is faithful to the event of the avant garde. We might refer to this subject as a militant. Insofar as Badiou’s Handbook of Inaesthetics distinguishes between the didactic tendencies of twentieth-century materialism and what he defines as an artistic truth procedure, which I will refer to here as the event of the avant garde, how does the militant subject carry forward the task of psychoanalysis? That is to say, how does avant-garde film frame and reframe the ‘blockage of the symbolic by the Real’ and the ‘extimacy of the objet petit a’ in the Imaginary?² From Dada to Surrealism and Situationism, or, from Sergei Eisenstein to Luis Buñuel and Guy Debord, such was certainly a task that went beyond the poietic mandate of art to be the guardian of openness and indeterminacy and was rather a ‘didactic schema,’ as Badiou puts it, that wished to put an end to art as a form of alienation. The question, then, is whether art as a truth procedure is significantly different from the avant-garde projects of the twentieth century.

Certainly the quandary for thinking about the encounter between the ‘avant garde hypothesis’ and the cinema has to do with the ‘collapse of the ideal of the historico-political revolution.’³ For Badiou, this means thinking the political outside of state power. The link between philosophy and politics for him is the category of truth, the only basis to a democratic universality that goes beyond relativism. Badiou asserts that the truths of art are those that are immanent to art itself. But if art is irreducible to political truths, does the notion then that art is itself the Real and not the effect or reflection of reality serve the philosopher more than the militant? Badiou adds to this by saying that an artwork is neither in itself an event nor a truth. Very specifically, ‘a truth is an artistic procedure initiated by an event’ and is ‘not manifested in any given work.’⁴ The work, then, belongs to the procedure as a ‘situated inquiry,’ the post-evental dimension that configures its truth. It is possible, I would argue, to conceive the artistic configuration of the avant garde as an evental rupture that renders both prior and contemporaneous configurations obsolete. In this way the avant garde, both past and present, can be linked to the notion of drive. With Badiou, drive in cinema refers to the infinite artistic configuration of the event of the avant garde.

While the truths of art are immanent to art, the avant garde configuration in film cannot be limited to the distinct elements of cinema – to editing and framing and to the passage of time. For Badiou, the ‘eternal’ idea is not incarnated in the sensible form of the idea. In his view, the cinema does not give priority to the ‘indistinct’ effects of acting, scenography, cinematography or plot, nor to authorial intention and critical review, and not to the forgetfulness of enjoyment, but to the overall stylistic quality from which it is possible to trace an artistic configuration. The truth of film therefore defies intersubjective belief in the facticity of film as symbolic inscription. Criticism does not designate art but designates artistic ideology. True art, Badiou argues, pierces a hole in ideology – not only in the ideology of modernism or the ideology of the commodity, but in the ideology of the eternal idea of art as such.⁵ Here then, once again, is where we locate drive in cinema and I define this work of militant artistic production as sinthomeopathic practice.

For Jacques Lacan, writing in the mid-1970s, the orders of the Imaginary, the Real and the Symbolic are distinct from a fourth order, which he refers to as the order of the symptom.⁶ The symptom is situated in a particular configuration of these three orders, beyond equivocation. In terms of set theory, it is situated between one and two. The film, we could say with regard to Lacan’s seminar on the sinthome, is the support for what borders on the empty set. In Badiou, this refers to the notion that the (avant-garde) film does not merely materialize the idea but operates on the other arts as well as on non-art. In Lacan, the canonical notion of the artwork would refer to S1, the Master Signifier or the One, in relation to which the film exists but in no way can be said to consist. The truth of any filmic or artistic configuration is represented by Lacan in a topological figure like the Borromean knot, in an enigmatic – rather than miraculous – link that supposes the ex-sistence of the sinthome. The sinthome, then, refers to a particular configuration of Imaginary, Real and Symbolic.⁷ The ‘sin’ in sinthome, which Lacan refers to as Eve’s use of language, or simply to sense, represents the part of meaning that lies between the Imaginary and the Symbolic but which excludes the effects of the Real. This is typically what film criticism attempts to describe. We might refer to this as the phenomenological or hermeneutic aspect of the film. The Real, however, intervenes in two places in the knot, as imaginary enjoyment in its locus between the Real and the Imaginary, excluding the Symbolic, and as phallic enjoyment in its locus between the Real and the Symbolic, excluding the Imaginary (with both exclusions, however, falling within the knot of the IRS). This duality of enjoyment implies that the film text as such, as Thing or as Master Signifier, is inherently nonsensical, meaningless – a cut in the continuum of the world. One might consider as an example of this the order of the commodity form under capitalist rule. In this schema, the psychoanalytic notion of the drive appears at the moment of reversal of infinite becoming, when the notional determination – the idea – short-circuits a particular into a concrete universal, for which Absolute Knowing represents not an open field, but a lack in the Other, or, as Lacan puts it otherwise, simultaneously the lack in the objet a and the lack that is the objet a. Drive in Cinema is, in this sense, concerned to examine the different ways in which films show the inconsistency of reality: film as lack, inscribed in the structure of fantasy.

In the sinthomatic space between the Imaginary and the Symbolic, the eternal idea no longer serves reality but stands on its own as realized reflexivity. Here we turn to Slavoj Žižek, who argues in his recent book on Hegel that we should look beyond the classic materialist emphasis on determination and consider as well the work of the Real, without which reality itself would disintegrate.⁸ The work of the Real is what I refer to in the title essay of this book as the drive. With regard to the space of cinematic inscription – this fiction that is supposed to know but does not, which is always foreclosed – drive in cinema references the subject’s objectal counterpoint, as defined in the Lacanian formula for fantasy ($<>a), between determination and Absolute – a dialectical-materialist passage from Being to mediation, the consciousness of the filmic frame as itself a loss that the viewer must work through, opening up the space for the emergence of the pure drive beyond the fantasy frame.⁹ Drive refigures the contours of the avant garde hypothesis as sinthomeopathic action, as movement within an artistic procedure that is in conflict with the alienations of ideology, aesthetic and otherwise. Drive, therefore, also refers to creation. As Lacan puts it, ‘a knot can be made.’ How then to think of the action of avant-garde production in this twenty-first century?

The Negation of the Avant Garde as Symptom

Since the rise of the anti-globalization movement in the late 1990s, cultural production has undergone a renewed interest in leftist political theorization. Postmodernism is seen by many today as little more than an aestheticist after-effect of the contradictions of modernism, unable to deal a final coup de grâce to realist and Marxist modes of analysis. Despite the success of various formulations of political art in contemporary practice, in particular that of ‘socially engaged art,’ the concept and name of the avant garde is better able to capture the radical ambitions of anti-capitalist forces. Evan Mauro is correct to note that the term ‘avant garde’ is typically perceived as belated. He cites Badiou, who notes that while the whole of twentieth-century art claimed avant-garde functions, the fact that the term is routinely admonished suggests that ‘we are in the presence of a major symptom.’¹⁰ Witness to the displacement of academic cultural studies, and in contrast to the far more vital interest in radical anarchism and communism, cultural theorists today react to the threat of what Nicos Hadjinicolaou long ago termed ‘the ideology of avant-gardism.’¹¹ While theorists have only begun to draw the alternate genealogies of avant-gardism that Mauro calls for, some have tried to pre-empt the political effects of this rethinking by emphasizing the relation of the artistic avant gardes to the party and state politics of the Leninist vanguard, tying the fate of both to the traumatic experience of Stalinism. We are all anti-foundationalists now, post-political postmodernists tell us, and so there is no point in attempting to define the new composition of a leftist political front. In only one of several such formulations, the ethical turn of today’s relational and community art transforms the art of revolution into an ‘endured catastrophe,’ thereby reducing art to ‘ethical witnessing’ and avoiding any notion of emancipation as a radical collective project.¹²

What if we added to such aversion to artistic avant-gardism the notion that the current critique and dismissal of revolutionary political vanguardism is likewise a major symptom? As with any other symptom, interpretation should not be to limited to awareness of a repressed content, but should address the form of the symptom as itself a significant factor in its possible dissolution. The form that is given to the political vanguard in much of today’s discussion is that of an abject remainder of the real political struggle. As Žižek states in his essay on ‘The “Dream-Work” of Political Representation,’ the fact of class antagonism itself explains the impossibility of pure representation. The social in militant art is therefore barred, a not-All that obscures radical political articulation. The creation of a political class whose function would be to supplement this impossible class antagonism is therefore foreclosed from contemporary democratic discourse and proscribed as authoritarian hierarchy. As Žižek puts it:

The standard way of disavowing an antagonism and presenting one’s own position as the representation of the All is to project the cause of the antagonism onto a foreign intruder who stands for the threat to society as such, for the anti-social element, for its excremental excess. This is why anti-Semitism is not just one among many ideologies; it is ideology as such, kat’exohen. It embodies the zero-level (or the pure form) of ideology, establishing its elementary coordinates: the social antagonism (‘class struggle’) is mystified or displaced so that its cause can be projected onto the external intruder. Lacan’s formula ‘1 + 1 + a’ is best exemplified by the class struggle: the two classes plus the excess of the ‘Jew,’ the objet a, the supplement to the antagonistic couple. The function of this supplementary element is double. It involves a fetishistic disavowal of class antagonism, and yet, precisely as such, it stands for this antagonism, forever preventing ‘class peace.’ In other words, were there only the two classes, 1 + 1, without the supplement, then we would not have ‘pure’ class antagonism but, on the contrary, class peace: the two classes complementing each other in a harmonious Whole. The paradox is thus that the very element that blurs or displaces the ‘purity’ of the class struggle also serves as its motivating force.¹³

As he mentions also in Less Than Nothing, the official antagonism is always reflexive, supplemented by a remainder that is foreclosed, which means that ‘the true antagonism is not between liberal multiculturalism and fundamentalism, but between the very field of their opposition and the excluded Third (radical emancipatory politics).’¹⁴ Žižek’s view that the culture war is a class war in a displaced mode therefore has an uncanny and unexpected supplement in radical cultural theorizing. Whereas most cultural studies would want us to see the variously oppressed Others as the excluded a – the immigrant, the foreigner or the various other marginalized identities, nationalities and so on – today’s neoliberal control of populations as a biopolitical ‘destituent power’ leads to the kind of class struggle that prohibits the formation of a radical political class.¹⁵ Instead, a ‘politicized’ anti-capitalist petty-bourgeois class of activists and non-governmental forces competes with the post-ideological class of technocratic experts and middle-class ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword: Revolution at the Drive-in by Bradley Tuck
• Introduction: 1 + 1 + a
• Chapter 1: Sad Bunny: Vincent Gallo and the Melancholia of Gender
• Chapter 2: Drive in Cinema: The Dialectic of the Subject in Daisies and Who Wants to Kill Jessie?
• Chapter 3: The Ghost Is a Shell
• Chapter 4: Ecstatic Struggle in the World System: Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World
• Chapter 5: Alexander Kluge’s News from Ideological Antiquity: Marx – Eisenstein – Das Kapital: A Conversation with Michael Blum and Barbara Clausen
• Chapter 6: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Obama (But Were Afraid to Ask Mr. Freedom)
• Chapter 7: An Interview with Marc James Léger on Radical Politics, Cinema and the Future of the Avant Garde by Bradley Tuck
• Chapter 8: Pasolini’s Contribution to La Rabbia as an Instance of Fantasmatic Realism
• Chapter 9: Godard’s Film Socialisme: The Agency of Art in the Unconscious
• Chapter 10: What Is to Be Done? with Spring Breakers
• Chapter 11: Analytic Realism in Activist Film
• Conclusion: Only Communists Left Alive
• Index
• Back Page