Keywords in Subversive Film / Media Aesthetics

Robert Stam, Richard Porton, Leo Goldsmith

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781118288931, 9781118288924
• eBook ISBN: 9781118340592
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Keywords offers a conversational journey through the overlying terrains of politically engaged art and artistically engaged politics, combining a major statement on subversive aesthetics, a survey of radical film strategies, and a lexicon of over a thousand terms and concepts.

• No other book combines an ambitious essay on radical politics and aesthetics in film with a lexicon of terms and ideas, many of which are new and innovative
• Creates and illustrates over a thousand terms and concept, drawing its examples from a wide range of media
• Provides a broad timespan, covering the very ancient (Ramayana, Aristotle) to the most current (digital mashups, memes)
• Uniquely discusses the areas of film, television and the internet within one book
• No other book combines an ambitious essay on radical politics and aesthetics in film with a lexicon of terms and ideas, many of which are new and innovative

1
An Aesthetics of the Commons

Most studies of subversive aesthetics take political modernism as their point of departure. But political modernism is hardly the only path to radical aesthetics. Modernism was too often premised on a stagist mythos whereby the new simply replaces the old, whereas in fact the old and the archaic can be mobilized in favor of the new and the radical (Gomez-Pena speaks of the “junkies of futurity”).¹ The modernist “cult of the new”—what Alexander Kluge called in a film title “The Assault of the Present on the Rest of Time”—offers diminishing returns in an era when mass media have annexed co-optable features of the avant-garde while evacuating any semblance of political radicalism. Within what might be called corporate avant-gardism, intertextual parody and reflexivity have become mass media staples, as common and bland as white bread.² The transtemporal editing techniques deployed by contemporary TV commercials—which resemble those that first transfixed the spectators of Last Year at Marienbad (1961)—are now used by corporate TV commercials to promote a gravity-free world of consumerist pseudo-freedom. Entertainment capitalism’s accelerationist aesthetics favors excess and transgression as motors of capital expansion.³ The ads of transnational corporations, in this sense, offer a transrealist aesthetic of globally integrated cityscapes, a world without center or borders, conjured up in a hyperkinetic proliferation of deterritorialized simulacra; however, all their wildly dispersive centrifugal energies are ultimately disciplined by the centripetal force of the corporate brand.

The Aesthetic Commons

The “brand new” often ages badly; it inevitably becomes old, which is why few genres date more rapidly than “futurist films.” Our goal here is not to rescue the avant-garde but rather to shift attention to a more venerable arsenal of stratagems. Alternative aesthetics rooted in millennial traditions such as Menippean satire and carnivalesque inversion, we will argue, bear perennial relevance; they remain always already available for renewal. Rather than search for “new stories,” “new techniques,” and “new apps,” artists/theorists can make old stories new by reimagining them through alternative artistic traditions with ancient roots.

This vast planetary archive of ideas and strategies forms a kind of aesthetic commons. At once archly traditional and hyper-contemporary, the metaphor of the “commons” has appealingly multiple resonances, evoking everything from ancient patterns of communal land ownership—the poet Shelley’s “equal participation in the commonage of nature”—to the contemporary digital commons of the “copy left” movements. For Jacques Rancière, “politics is the sphere of activity of a common that can only ever be contentious.”⁴ The notion of commonly held land forms a social norm shared by societal formations ranging from the thirteenth-century England of the “Great Charter of the Forest” to the longstanding communal social systems of countless indigenous peoples. The “commons” evokes a cornucopia of socio-political ideals—Tom Payne’s “Common Sense,” Marx’s “primitive communism,” the “Boston Commons,” the “Common Wealth,” the “common people,” the Paris Commune, the “Creative Commons,” and the indigenous “common pot.” The commons counters the fetishizing of exclusive proprietary rights that fuels the corporate drive to privatize everything from Amazonian biodiversity to the lyrics of the “Happy Birthday to You” song. Vesting property in the community, the commons evokes “communism,” but without its Stalinist baggage, and “socialism,” without the bloodless social-democratism that so easily turns it into capitalism-with-a-human-face.

While it might seem utopian to speak of the commons in an age of relentless privatization, the vaguely remembered plenitude and the future possibilities of the commons trope provides a thread that links many social struggles.⁵ In a political age where US conservatives keep moving the ideological goalpost to the right by redefining a mild liberalism—seen in many countries as a form of laissez-faire conservatism—as if it were socialist radicalism, the idea of the commons moves the goalpost to the left by calling for a deep restructuring to restore the common good. Rather than propose a mere tax on oil corporations, it questions the very idea of anyone such as the Koch Brothers actually “owning” a public good such as oil and exploiting it for profit to the detriment of the populace and the planet. Such utopian ideas are usually dismissed as naïve, but the point is not the immediate realizability of the proposal but rather the directionality of the critique. Currently proliferating in the writing of figures as diverse as Naomi Klein, Slavoj Žižek, Vandana Shiva, Elinor Ostrom, David Graeber, Jacques Rancière, Peter Linebaugh, Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri, “the commons” haunts privatizing neoliberalism with the specter of communalizing egalitarianism. The term evokes resistance to “enclosure” in all its forms, from its early proto-capitalist form of fencing in shared European land, to its colonialist form of appropriating indigenous land, on to its contemporary global capitalist form of the “second enclosure”—that is, the marshaling of juridical “patent” and “intellectual property” to assert the corporate ownership of ideas. In the wake of the fall of communism and the crisis of capitalism, the “commons” calls up the planetary struggle to reclaim the “common wealth.” Many recent protest movements have taken place, revealingly, amidst the leafy vestiges of the traditional commons, in the form of public squares and parks.

The popularity of the commons trope was triggered, perhaps, by the disenchantment with nation-state-based forms of socialism and communism, by the crisis in productivist forms of Marxism, by the growing visibility of indigenous-led resistance, and above all by the rapidly worsening climate change, which is generating a widespread consciousness of capitalism as a menace to the planet. Naomi Klein speaks of Blockadia as a “roving transnational conflict zone” of resistance to the extractive projects of corporations.⁶ From a leftist perspective, meanwhile, David Harvey has delineated the conjunctural complexities of the “commons.” Some provisional enclosures, he points out, might be necessary to protect the commons in a broader sense.⁷ Elinor Ostrom has shown that the commons which actually last are not completely “open” or “free,” but rather “stinted” with restrictions.⁸ The challenge is to avoid fetishizing private property, and yet preserve creators’ rights to make a living while also protecting privacy as an inalienable right against the panoptical surveillance of corporations or of NSA. Small-scale indigenous societies, paradoxically, might want to “enclose” their collective “privacy,” their biodiversity, their herbal remedies, and spiritual secrets to safeguard them from new-age Indian wannabes and predatory pharmaceutical companies. Free-software enthusiasts sometimes forget that, in many communities, certain kinds of knowledge are restricted to tribal insiders, or to men, or to women, or to the initiated. In this sense, the libertarian metaphor/fantasy of absolutely free circulation can operate in tandem with overly romantic (often exploitative) attitudes toward indigenous forms of knowledge circulation. In Australia, Aboriginal activists protested the virtual appropriation of a major sacred site (Uluru, in English: “Ayers Rock”) in the virtual world of Second Life in 2003.⁹ Édouard Glissant speaks of the right to opacity, that is, the right of first peoples or other besieged groups not only to represent themselves but also to refuse representation in the name of a communal form of opacity.¹⁰

Contemporary enclosure forms a direct threat not only to indigenous people—threatened with the loss of their land, streams, biodiversity, and even knowledge—but also to the ecological sustenance of the entire planet. At the same time, enclosure sabotages artistic and political creativity by fencing in the commons of artistic ideas and human creativity. A number of films have portrayed the historical commons within Europe. Nominally based on David Caute’s 1961 novel Comrade Jacob, Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo’s film Winstanley (1975) chronicles the eponymous hero’s (Gerrard Winstanley) efforts to maintain a communal experiment in Surrey during the 1640s—the determination to dig up and collectively manure this piece of land exemplifies a rage against the royal enclosure that robbed the English poor of their land. Early on in the film, strategically placed quotations from Gerrard Wins...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 An Aesthetics of the Commons
• 2 The Upside-Down World of the Carnivalesque
• 3 Political Modernism and Its Discontents
• 4 The Transmogrification of the Negative
• 5 Hybrid Variations on a Documentary Theme
• 6 Hollywood Aristotelianism, the Fractured Chronotope, and the Musicalization of Cinema
• 7 Aesthetic/Political Innovation in the Digital Era
• Index
• End User License Agreement