On Compromises
Brian Price
I.
When discourses of film theory and political philosophy converge, it is often in a mutual
state of unhappiness—one that can only be remedied by appeals, it seems, to notions of
autonomy. For instance, where John Stuart Mill saw happiness in the key of
compromise, as the tension between Liberty and Authority—which is just one way of
describing happiness as the ground of affable and productive social relations in which
gross social inequities are more closely tended to than are private satisfactions—radical
film and political theorists have regularly viewed compromise as something forced.
Freedom is understood strictly in terms of what can only be found outside of any social
unity. 1 Compromise is what happens to us—hence our unhappiness—and not
something we choose to do for the sake of being happy together inasmuch and as often
as possible.
This is, for example, the general drift of Jean-Luc Comolli and Jean Narboni’s influential
essay “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,” in which they understand film as:
…ideology presenting itself to itself, talking to itself, learning about
itself. Once we realize that it is the nature of the system to turn the
cinema into an instrument of ideology, we can see that the filmmaker’s
first task is to show up the cinema’s so called “depiction of reality.” If he
can do so there is a chance that we will be able to disrupt or possibly even
sever the connection between the cinema and its ideological function. 2
If the filmmaker can recognize what is understood here as a direct and causal relation
between representation and the social, one in which representation nevertheless
organizes the social on a strictly illusory and always involuntary basis, then what will
be disrupted is the false sense of need and illusory sense of unity that mass art provokes:
Certainly there is such a thing as public demand, but “what the public
wants” means “what the dominant ideology wants.” The notion of a
public and its tastes was created by the ideology to justify and perpetuate
itself. And this public can only express itself via the thought-patterns of
the ideology. The whole thing is a closed circuit, endlessly repeating the
same illusion. 3
What Comolli and Narboni go on to do here is to enumerate a list of types of films,
privileging those that “throw up obstacles” to ideology by adopting more a reflexive
strategy over those that give it free pass, as if the construction of a taxonomy of
progressive and regressive styles were itself unburdened by ontological suppositions.
But most importantly, what we see here is a distinction between the popular and the
avant-garde that is meant to effect a sense of autonomy, which, once achieved, will
collapse any sense we may have of the popular, or more simply, what can be united
under the pretense of false consciousness. And this division in the social body can only
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take place, one supposes, if we are forced by the filmmaker to give up what might
otherwise be said to bring us pleasure, or the happiness we might experience by virtue
of what we share, even if all that we share is our delusions about the social. If the
enlightened filmmaker denies us the familiar conventions of popular cinema, then we
may not find happiness, but we will be in the service of truth. However, this presumes
that once we rid ourselves of one illusion no others will present themselves, and, more
importantly, that truth is there to be had if we can just learn content ourselves with a
less social conception of what it means to be happy. The decision, in either case, does
not belong to us and there can be no compromise between categories.
In terms of political theory, we might consider the example of Trotsky’s Terror and
Communism, written in 1920, at the height of the Russian Civil War. After suggesting
that there is nothing logical about revolutionary terrorism—indeed that it would be
better understood as a necessary response to tsarist violence—Trotsky nevertheless
suggests that it is also above reasonable moral reproach:
The state terror of a revolutionary class can be condemned “morally”
only by a man who, as a principle, rejects (in words) every form of
violence whatsoever—consequently, every war and every rising. For this,
one has to be merely and simply a hypocritical Quaker. 4
By Trotsky’s logic, the existence of any violence whatsoever, even a use of violence that
we may oppose, cancels out the possibility of opposing revolutionary violence wherever
it may occur. The possibility of compromise—an appeal made in words—is ruled out in
advance as hypocrisy. And if something is ruled out on the grounds of hypocrisy, it is
because of a perceived lack of moral consistency, a mendacity that only violence can
correct because violence is conceived of as the truth beyond or beneath representation.
The assumption of an originary violence—of a truth in violence—makes impossible any
discrimination between what might otherwise and more productively be understood as
historical contingencies. What the truth of violence covers over is the decision of the
one over the many, even if in the name of the many; a certainty that brooks no
disputation and regards that certainty as secondary to what has been proven inevitable
simply because it has happened before. Violence is not logical, Trotsky says, just
necessary and true.
What binds these two works—one, an instance of film theory, the other a famous work
of political theory—has to do with a general mistrust of representation, whether as
images or words. Truth is rendered in both as that which is guaranteed only in
suffering, in the displeasure that we will never choose for ourselves. And in both cases,
displeasure leads to autonomy, which is understood as liberty, even though it is hard to
know in what sense. For Trotsky, violence was necessary to the final overthrow of
tsarism and the realization of the Bolshevik state, but the appeal to violence as a truth
beyond disputation leaves no theoretical (and thus practical) basis upon which any
dispute within the newly formed bloc might be resolved. That is, violence might
produce a new unity, but what it does more enduringly and consistently is to dissolve
them. For Comolli and Narboni, a truly resistant, autonomous work must conform to
certain aesthetic prerequisites, and thus earn for itself a sense of belonging to a category
of image production predicated on autonomy, precisely because anything that might
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cause pleasure can only be understood in terms of ideological mystification. Every unity
is understood as a false unity. For this reason, so much of radical film theory demanded
a kind of violence to the image (albeit a very different kind of violence than what
Trotsky was defending), and thus the spectator.
Nevertheless, I do not wish to suggest that we abandon radical political film theory, nor
radical politics more generally. Just the opposite. What I would suggest instead is that
we might take more seriously the dead-end that radical theory takes in its insistence
only on displeasure, which is, as I am suggesting here, always predicated on a claim that
truth is an unhappy event. For one, if we abandon the idea that the work of the political
is the excavation of truth—and it is tempting not to do so precisely because we are so
accustomed to denying the status of truth to any image that offends us—we might be in
a better position to see the work that images can do in and for the social, especially as
we come to understand the social as something that cannot be, and should not be
thought to be, beyond representation. Likewise, if we understand the movement of the
social as a process of representation, then we are in a better place to understand just
how important it remains to think images politically, but to do so on the promise of
pleasure instead of violence, happiness instead of deception. We might begin, then, by
thinking about the terms of compromise and recognition rather than identification and
interpellation. To proceed in this way is to bring moving image theory even closer to
political philosophy, and allow us to both understand and effect change in the social
along more peaceable and productive lines.
II.
My title is borrowed from an essay written by Lenin on September 1, 1917. The plural
of compromise should be noted, even if it is less pleasurable to pronounce—significantly
less tidy on the page and far too wobbly off the tongue. To speak of compromise in the
singular, as we have seen in the case of Trotsky, is to offer nothing of the sort—a
demonstration only of the relative and dangerous inflexibility of belief and certainty.
This is the one thing I can do, and I will do nothing more. The singular is aggressive,
stubborn, and entirely unhappy.
The compromises that Lenin was entertaining when he wrote this essay were, by
contrast, multiple and related to his ongoing cooperation with the Mensheviks and the
Socialist Revolutionaries in the Provisional government to achieve the dictatorship of
the proletariat by peaceful means. The compromise could be struck only because the
Mensheviks and the S.R. agreed that a government could not be formed with the
Kadets. Most importantly, this moment was one in which a distinction needed to be
made between a forced compromise and a voluntary one. The former was represented
by the Bolshevik’s participation in the Third and Fourth Dumas. The voluntary
compromise, by contrast, was what could be struck with the S.R./Menshevik block,
which Lenin imagined as a true democracy:
The medley of voices in the “bloc” is great and inevitable, for a host of
shades is represented among the petty-bourgeois democrats—from that
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of the completely ministerial bourgeois down to the semi pauper who
is not yet capable of taking up the proletarian position. Nobody knows
what will be the result of this medley of voices at any given moment. 5
Lenin did have an idea, or at least a worry, a lingering skepticism about how well the
compromise would work—which is a normal effect of any compromise, so long as that
worry remains de-emphasized. Lenin expressed this worry in a long footnote, which I
quote here in its entirety:
The above lines were written on Friday, September 1, but due to unforeseen
circumstances (under Kerensky, as history will tell, not all Bolsheviks
were free to choose their domicile) they did not reach the editorial office
that day. After reading Saturday’s and today’s papers, I say to
myself: perhaps it is already too late to offer a compromise. Perhaps the
few days in which a peaceful development was still possible have passed
too. Yes, to all appearances, they have already passed. In one way or
another, Kerensky will abandon both the S.R. Party and the S.R.s
themselves, and will consolidate his position with the aid of the
bourgeoisie without the S.R.s, and thanks to their inaction…Yes, to all
appearances, the days when by chance the path of peaceful development became
possible have already passed. All that remains is to send these notes to the editor
with the request to have them entitled: “Belated Thoughts.” Perhaps even
belated thoughts are sometimes not without interest. 6
What Lenin’s worried note makes clear is the temporal dimension of any compromise. It
can come too late. Made at the wrong time, it can also fail—becoming less an instance
of compromise than a trace of deceit. Compromise, in the moment of a failed mutuality,
has to be understood instead as strategic failure. But if something can be described as
strategy then it is no longer a compromise. Not, in any case, for the deceived. To
compromise, I would suggest, is to decide without agency in the moment of a mutual
suspension of instrumentality, and for the sake of the greater good for all parties within
a bloc. This is why Lenin concludes that “On Compromises” might be better understood
as “Belated Thoughts.” Belated, he says, but not without interest. Not without interest
because any voluntary compromise—we can only infer—retains the promise of
revolution without violence, change without bloodshed.
A belated thought is not without interest because it can also become timely; peace
should always be on time, and yet it seems to be the one thing that always comes too
late, as Derrida so often reminded us. One feels this tardiness very strongly in the
history of revolutionary political theory—for instance, in Fanon’s pained realization in
The Wretched of the Earth that decolonization would not be the result of a “friendly
understanding,” especially as the colonial subject—in most instances—grew up with a
gun at his nose and barbed wire around his block. To be, for the colonized, was already
to be compromised; it was to live in a permanent state of risk and disenfranchisement
that was always someone else’s decision. One cannot compromise when one has nothing
more to surrender.
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We might also consider, and by sharp contrast, Žižek’s analysis of the 2005 riots in the
Paris suburbs as an instance of superfluous violence, one that nevertheless occurs and
occurs as unnecessary:
If the much repeated commonplace that we live in a post-ideological era has any
sense, it is here. There were no particular demands made by the protesters in the
Paris suburbs. There was only an insistence on recognition, based on a vague,
unarticulated ressentiment. Most of those interviewed talked about how
unacceptable it was that the then interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, had called
them “scum.” In a weird referential short circuit, they were protesting against
the very reaction to their protests. “Populist reason” here encounters its
irrational limit: what we have is a zero level protest, a violent protest act which
demands nothing. 7
Žižek’s description of the riots as a short circuit, in which the protestors only protest
the way that the protest itself was described, is entirely ungenerous. It presupposes, for
one, that North African immigrants in the suburbs were unaware of the discriminatory
character of French modernity and the development of the suburbs in the first place, not
to mention the sense of disenfranchisement that immigrant populations live with daily.
Recognition is the demand; its lack, the source of ressentiment. The gap between lived
experience and the way in which that experience remains absent as both news and as
popular culture produces antagonism. Moreover, with the increasing popularity of rap
in France at the time—especially as the nation began to embrace popular
representations of suburban immigrant life around figures like Diam’s and Kery
James—one can imagine how easy it would be to contemplate one’s abjection and to
revolt. Resentment emerges when one realizes that things could be otherwise.
This is why and when violence becomes thinkable as possible, but not—I would
submit—thinkable as necessary. To decide that it is necessary is to be certain, in turn,
that the violence of 2005 in the suburbs of Paris is contextually identical to the violence
of the F.L.N. in the years of decolonization. The moments are related, but not identical.
The difference is where the prospect for a peaceful revolution resides. The protestors of
2005 are the inheritors of a revolution whose violence was entirely just and for the
reasons described by Fanon. Moreover, we are speaking here about a generation of
North African immigrants now living in low-income housing produced during the
Algerian War in an effort to return France to the French, Paris to Parisians, as the
racist logic of colonial France goes. For this reason alone it would be difficult to imagine
how the residue of French colonial policy would not be felt in the suburbs, the lack of
representation and equality felt today as a result of deeply sedimented values in French
culture. These are the values that made possible Sarkozy’s call, following the riots, to
rid France of the sans papiers in the first place. The call, for many, was effective because
it was recognizable—it no doubt felt right, and felt so as historically familiar and
objectively true.
To speak here of sedimentation is to invoke the relation between sedimentation and
reactivation that Ernesto Laclau expropriates from Husserl in New Reflections on the
Revolution of our Time in an effort to understand the ways in which “the sedimented
forms of ‘objectivity’ make up the field of what we call the social.” 8 Reactivation, by
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contrast, is the means by which the constitutive activity of thinking is restored to what
has become sedimented. Or as Laclau puts it:
The moment of original institution of the social is the point at which its
contingency is revealed, since that institution, as we have seen, is only possible
through the repression of options that were equally open. To reveal the original
meaning of an act, then, is to reveal the moment of its radical contingency—in
other words, to reinsert it in the system of real historic options that were
discarded—in accordance with our analysis above: by showing the terrain of
original violence, of the power relations through which that instituting act took
place. This is where Husserl’s distinction can be introduced, with certain
modifications. Insofar as an act of institution has been successful, a “forgetting of
the origins” tends to occur; the system of possible alternatives tends to vanish
and the traces of the original contingency to fade. 9
Reactivation, then, is the disruptive work of the political, as Laclau has defined it. The
political produces the social and is also what can remain buried. As an imaginative act—
as the articulation of an absence in the social that must be rectified—the political is
what, as Laclau says, prevents the social from “merely reproducing itself through
repetitive practices.” 10 We might say, then, that the 2005 riots exposed the radical
contingency long concealed beneath the repetition of social forms that were instituted in
the 1950s; it was a moment of recognition, the reawakening of historic options long
repressed that will now need to be acknowledged and modified.
As an opening for the political, recognition—which produces reactivation—is also what
would allow for change without bloodshed, which is largely what the 2005 riots
involved. The violence done was largely to private property—to cars and public
buildings, which do not obtain the status of being in any instance. Moreover, private
property, in this instance, bears an important relation to Žižek’s supposed short-circuit,
and the rioters outrage about the manner in which their own protest is being
represented back to them by the then Interior Minister of France. We can only assume
that Žižek understands representation here as merely epiphenomenal, ancillary—at
best—to what is, to the cause of what appears unmediated beneath and as truth. If the
protestors are absurd for being angry about being represented as scum, then the real
problem can only be said to reside outside of discourse, outside of the realm of the
political. We can only presume that what is, in this instance, is the absence of a stable
ground upon which the validity of any given claim can be measured.
Sarkozy could only agree. To refer to the protestors as “scum” is to produce at the level
of political discourse the very terms of social objectivity. It could only reactivate what
had appeared as objective, and did so by way of an eidetic reduction that can only ever
succeed on the basis of a willed consistency within representation itself. What appeared
as the essence of North Africans—“scum”—could only appear so because the political is
the ground of the social. It is what makes the appearance of certain cars and certain
buildings in certain neighborhoods seem natural and inevitable. Car burning and
window breaking is a rupture in representation, an effort to reactivate the discourses
that appear to us not as discourse but as what is. Here is where these cars belong in and as
nature. If these acts provoked Sarkozy to refer to the protestors as scum, it was only in
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an effort to justify force by reference to the truth of the social—the horrible essence of
the North African and the poor—and to silence the re-awakening of an awareness of the
contingent character of social relations. It is not that the protestors demanded nothing;
rather, they proceeded from it, were energized by the nothing and nowhere that gives
ground, but gives it only because ground is both contingent and necessarily unstable. If
the ground of the social is the political, what is can only ever be organized by
representation. And that’s a good thing, provided that representation is understood as
both political and contingent; social objectivity more properly understood to be a dream
of the metaphysician.
An appeal for recognition, then, is not a demand for authenticity—for an authenticity
gone absent but still capable of being recovered nevertheless. Recognition is better
understood as a question of representation. It is not a matter of finding in an image or a
discourse an essential self—this image of me that has been waiting for me to arrive,
where I shall find myself as it—but of seeing in an image or a discourse pure possibility;
options for how things may be different. As Alexander García Düttmann has very
convincingly shown, the one who seeks recognition and the one from whom recognition
is sought can never be One, just as any single representation will never constitute my
entire being. Thus, recognition is, in Düttmann’s terms, a relation of non-identity, even
though what one goes in search of when one seeks recognition is, in fact, identity. As
Düttmann puts it:
If one wished to define recognition as a pure relationship of otherness, then one
would not be in a position to explain how it is possible to relate to the other
without a moment of sameness; if, conversely, one wished to define recognition
as a pure relationship of sameness, then one would not be in a position to explain
how it is possible to relate to the same without a moment of otherness. Finally, if
one wished to define the relationship between sameness and otherness as a
purely dialectical one, recognition becoming the conceptual epitome of a positive
dialectic, then one would not be in a position to answer the question of what it is
that distinguishes a recognition resulting from the sublation of otherness from a
recognition, from that knowing-oneself-in-the-other that sub-lates difference in
the non-identical in the unity of an identity, and that, rather than requiring or
needing recognition, already comprises it within itself. 11
Recognition thus presumes a multiplicity in being, difference-within-itself, even while
felt as whole. Because being is multiple, and each being differently multiple, marked by
consistencies and inconsistencies at once—though never in a state of incommunicable
alterity—there is a spacing that makes recognition possible; room enough to perceive an
other in some aspect. I perceive the same in the other precisely because the other is only
same in some ways, other in other ways; always at once, but not in any stable
proportion or relation. Thus, as Düttmann has shown, recognition cannot be conceived
of in terms of a pure dialectic between same and other; a dialectic, presumably, that
leads to a becoming-one, which is conceivable only in metaphysical terms, and as a
statement of pure essence. Recognition should instead be understood as a function of
reactivation, which I would like to understand here as the beginning of the work of the
political. It is an impossible origin of representation—a process in which I imagine
myself to belong to a community that I nevertheless constitute in an imaginative
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process that proceeds from a lack I perceive myself to be experiencing. The plenitude I
seek initially appears to reside in, and be conferred by, a being or beings in some partial
way that will produce a sense of unity by way of a sublation of otherness that I require if
the ground of the social is to be reactivated and exposed as contingent.
This way of understanding recognition poses an intriguing relation between
recognition and compromise. If there is a multiplicity in being, then recognition itself
can be understood as an act of voluntary compromise. If there will be a unity between
the one that seeks recognition and the one or the many in whom, or by way of whom,
recognition is sought, then what I am agreeing to in the act of recognition is the failure
of any relation of identity, and I make this agreement for the sake of a solidarity
provoked by an imagining, by any instance of representation. A representation can seem
like me—must seem like me in some way, like the me I think I am but am nevertheless
yet to become—but can only ever partially be so, lest the potential for recognition
disappear beneath an all consuming otherness, or an all consuming sameness, to return
to Düttmann’s terms. If the sublation of otherness is fundamental to recognition, then
what is other in the other remains present as other and thus productive of some other
possible unity in which what was other once can also appear as same at some point and
for some time. If being is open and multiple, then the act of recognition itself becomes
context-dependent. Or as Düttmann suggests: “The fact that the recognizing
relationship is one of inconstancy and tension, both homogeneous and heterogeneous,
symmetrical and asymmetrical, reciprocal and interrupted by a caesura, indicates its
dependency on determinate contexts.” 12
Context, however, is not a fixed totality, an unbroken frame in which the recognizing
relationship settles into an order that could have been predicted. Another way of
understanding the problem of context can be found if we think not of recognition, but of
crisis. In “Criticism and Crisis,” for instance, Paul de Man recounts the story of
Mallarmé’s 1894 lecture at Oxford, La Musique et les letters, where he passionately
proclaimed a crisis in poetry brought about by a younger generation of French poets—
influenced by Mallarmé himself, of course—who were defying the rules of verse. His
audience, as de Man tells it, was clearly nonplussed; they failed to see what all the fuss
was about since “English prosody had not waited for some rather disreputable
foreigners to start tampering with free verse; free and blank verse were nothing very
new in the country of Shakespeare and Milton, and English literary people thought of
the alexandrine as the base supporting the column of the Spenserian stanza rather than
as a way of life.” 13 The point, for de Man, is that the trouble of identifying any crisis—
that is, of locating a stable and indisputable referent—has to do with the lack of a
transcendental observer:
Historical “changes” are not like changes in nature, and the vocabulary of change
and movement as it applies to historical process is a mere metaphor, not devoid
of meaning, but without an objective correlative that can unambiguously be
pointed to in empirical reality, as when we speak of a change in the weather or a
change in a biological organism. 14
For the sake of our discussion here, then, we should understand context as a question of
crisis. For de Man, context is untranslatable, untransferable, and—worst of all, from the
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point of view of one who might prefer to believe in a transcendent observer—most
apparent at the moment in which a crisis is named. Context, especially as it is
summoned in the naming of a crisis, is antagonistic and productively imprecise. Any
crisis, once named, becomes catachrestic; it becomes the point around which a series of
figures, forms, and events can be collected, or contextualized. It is catachrestic—a slight
misnomer that nevertheless becomes productive of meaning—because there can only be
disagreement about the terms of the crisis. De Man, for instance, notes that Mallarmé
makes a stunning and odd omission from his list of young poets who are effecting this
crisis: namely, Rimbaud. Historical context is always under the angular sign of
catachresis; productive and always inaccurate, insofar as inaccuracy summons rival
formations that it cannot ignore since historical change can only be articulated
metaphorically. But in this way “crisis” is also constitutive. Mallarmé’s “crisis” is an
instance of the political. It sets forth the terms of representation by which this
community will come to exist—supposing, of course, that others might agree. It is a
demand for recognition. And because it is an instance of the political, the call itself—as
de Man’s characterization of an unimpressed audience of Oxford intellectuals makes
clear—will reactivate a series of related “crises” in the history of Western prosody.
Context, then, is that which brings a relation into focus as contingent and necessarily
unstable. It sets the terms by which something or someone can be recognized in a
particular way, but only by way of a misnomer. And as a misnomer, the sign can never
be identical to that which it refers. For instance, when George W. Bush declared of his
antagonists in Bentonville, Arkansas in 2000, “They misunderestimated me,” two
meanings came to the fore in the same moment: misunderstand and underestimated—
neither of which he was capable of articulating. “Misunderestimate” refers, in the logic
of the misnomer as we make sense of it, to misunderstanding. Thus, the misnomer
proceeds by a relation of non-identity. It refers to a meaning not related in the
conventions of standard usage to that word (misunderstand), while producing sense on
a different register—i.e., we understand all too well that we could, and should, lower
our estimation of him even further. The misnomer re-routes the signifier away from
what we would normally be inclined to think of as its proper referent, and in so doing,
reveals the contingency of language that renders the notion of a mistake impossible by
way of the impossible relation between sign and referent that it most comically
announces. If we get the joke—and it cannot be overemphasized that Bush probably did
not intend it as such—we do so by way of a context that we share imperfectly. The
misnomer finds sense in our frustration with the repeated acts of brutality authorized by
this man who seems not to grasp the most basic elements of language and is (was)
charged with the highest degrees of responsibility and agency in the U.S. The context is
shared imperfectly because our understanding does not depend on our experience and
memory of the same exact instances in a specified, closed quantity. It does not matter
whether I’ve seen five press conferences, in which this unsettling mixture of brutality
and stupidity are present, and that you’ve seen twenty-five. Recognition of the joke’s
meaning—supposing that a joke’s meaning can be unintended and still be a joke—
merely requires some overlap and will appear at some historically contingent moment.
Some may even get the joke later (the ones, I can only suppose, who need a little more
convincing). If we require a more determinate temporality and a requisite quantity of
instances, then we no longer have a context, but a system. Moreover, we fail to
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understand the representational basis of the misnomer that makes context possible and
productive, but only ever as one possibility among others.
Seen as such, recognition presents an opening to compromise. It is bound up with
compromise precisely because the historical context in which I find myself preparing to
respond to what appears before me is a vast field of historical contingencies, whether
recovered in reactivation (Laclau) or merely in what appears to us now as yet another
series altogether. In voluntary compromise, I remain open to what is possible, knowing
that once possibility disappears—when the social appears objective—any compromise
will be forced. A forced compromise can only ever lead to violence since it involves only
subtraction without decision—a subtraction that nevertheless fails to appear as
subtraction, owing to a totalizing sameness or a totalizing otherness, which follows
from the sedimentation of the political within the social. No risk, then: what is given up
is what has already been demanded of me. When I go to the airport and disrobe with
strangers in a hurried fashion I am engaged in a forced compromise. It is something I
have to do. This, as we know, fuels resentment—a resentment that is gradually
disappearing beneath the weight of so much sedimentation. This is simply how things are
now. I can no longer remember what used to be allowable. If I can no longer remember how it
used to be, my forgetting might become the ground of a new utilitarianism in which I
participate by dint of my own forgetfulness. It is an agreement that I cannot help or be
helped to make, and that implicitly occurs for the assured safety of all who pass. And we
all know what happens when we let our resentment in the airport emerge—how much
longer it takes us to go on with everyday life.
III.
The idea of voluntary compromise in the service of peaceful change that I have in mind
has to do with our relation to popular culture as an instance of the political, as the
imagining of a better way. We could say that the revolt of 2005 was internal to the logic
of the suburbs themselves, but I can’t help but think that it had more to do with its
constitutive outside: the representation of something better than what is already
present, even if it is not exactly what we all want—precisely because no representation
can ever be exactly what we all want. A voluntary compromise, in which I imagine a
unity of fellow sufferers, may also come about in more negative representational terms,
in an image of me (“scum,” for instance) that demands resistance, lest what offends me in
that image be hypostasized as the true essence of me, and the “they” to which I will be
said to belong. Popular culture can be the very thing that cues recognition, insofar as it
reveals a lack, which in turn amplifies resentment and triggers reactivation. But as an
instance of voluntary compromise, reactivation will occur in a more peaceful form, even
if the moment of recognition was expressed, initially, as violence.
If we carry this understanding of recognition and voluntary compromise back to film
theory, some unexpected possibilities present themselves. The form of popular culture
that I have in mind is classical narrative cinema—the recurrently bad object of radical
film theory. 15 The form itself is universal—the name bequeathed to us by Aristotle—
and has been under protest in Marxist and psychoanalytic film theory for decades for
precisely this reason. As a universal form, classical narratives are most often understood
as a three-fold operation: in the first act, an antagonism is stated; in the second, the
antagonism is expanded; in the third act, resolution is found and order restored. 16 In
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Aristotelian terms, the spectator undergoes an experience of catharsis in which his or
her unhealthy emotions—which find temporary expression on screen—are purged.
Pleasure is also said to be what secures us as peaceful—or one might say pacified—
citizens of the state. In this way, the experience of catharsis is also the work of
mediation, the establishment on screen of a sense of moderation that follows the onscreen expansion of crisis, conflict, and disorder. Most classical narratives depict crisis
as a way of establishing context: a group of people, a closed set of places, and a finite
temporality (finite, that is, in the context that the crisis names and then collects).
Classical narratives, we are told, make us moderate, and our moderation, in turn,
perpetuates the social in its more sedimented form. Or as Siegfried Kracauer once put it:
A producer…will never allow himself to be driven to present material that in
any way attacks the foundations of society, for to do so would be to destroy his
own existence as capitalist entrepreneur. Indeed, the films made for the lower
classes are more bourgeois than those aimed at finer audiences, precisely because
they hint at subversive views without exploring them. Instead, they smuggle in
respectable ways of thinking. 17
For now, Kracauer’s description will have to stand in for the Marxist and
psychoanalytic critique of classical narration as it was developed in increasingly
specified terms throughout the last fifty years. It is, suffice to say, the kind of film that
Comolli and Narboni had in mind when they wrote “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism.”
What Kracauer points to is a Marxist logic of base and superstructure, one that assumes
the image—this respectable way of thinking—to be causally related to the economic
base that it protects in turn. In other words, the image masks the source of structural
inequality. For this reason, film theorists on the left—with whom I feel a deep sense of
belonging—have called over the years for the development of a counter cinema. It is
what underlies every claim for the autonomy of the avant-garde—namely, that the
autonomy of the subject can only follow from the autonomy of the aesthetic. However, it
might just be that the aesthetic autonomy demanded by political film theory may very
well be beholden to a logic of causality. To insist on it might very well be to occupy a
category of forced compromise—a site of relative autonomy in which the political
becomes less likely to reactivate the social. For one, the development of counter cinema
practices—no matter how important they are, and how much I admire them—have not
had the revolutionary effect so long hoped for in Marxist and radical psychoanalytical
film theory. If we accept the category of the avant-garde as that which is to be
distinguished from the popular—if we content ourselves with notions of aesthetic
autonomy or advanced art—we merely reinforce our minoritarian position in
oppositional terms, which any dominant class will only ever respect by referring to us as
elitist, incommunicable, or merely arty. 18 Moreover, the superstructural images of
moderation described by Kracauer and others have obviously not imploded. For them to
do so, capital—as Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe have shown us—would have to
contain within it the seeds of its own undoing, a scenario which assumes in turn that
capitalism is causally motivated and that antagonism itself resides within capital—
indeed, that capital has an inside. 19
What I would suggest, instead, is that classical narratives are merely fables of causality;
their universal character—their structural repetition through time—is what produces
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sedimentation. If crisis becomes the point around which a context is formed, then the
repetition of crisis in each instance, in each new film, takes on the appearance of an
essence. Crisis is what always recurs, and does so as context; it gathers together beings
in a place in order to solve a crisis that nevertheless brings the world we are watching
together in a particular way, again and again. The pleasure of classical narratives—the
happiness they seem to afford us—should thus be understood as the pleasure of
sedimentation, which is another way of describing apperception. Classical narratives are
fables of causality precisely because the lack they work to fill is contingency itself. Crisis
is thus constitutive of narrative, and in turn the repetition of narrative in its classical
dimensions effects a sense of essence that it cannot support since crisis, as I have argued,
is catachrestic. And if crisis is catachrestic it is also a misnomer. Crisis always leads to a
gathering, but what is gathered in every instance is something altogether different, even
if the movement through three acts persists as a cultural form. A classical narrative
presents us with images of a world ordered by causality, but it does so on the basis of a
misnomer, according only to a sign that can only gain its clarity by what it gathers and
not by that to which it can actually be said to enduringly and causally refer. In this
sense, we could say that every classical narrative is an affront to both metaphysics and
the religious conception of origin—no matter what stories they tell, and even when they
tell religious stories. That is, if we agree that classical narration is a political form, then
we can only mean that it works to foment collectivity around something that has gone
missing—namely, causality itself. And until we can irrefutably prove that the universe
is not contingent, classical narratives are likely to remain with us—but they will only
do so as representations of something that does not exist and that will likely go on not
existing.
This, of course, is also the danger of classical narration. The same sedimented field of
objectivity that allowed for Sarkozy’s racist calls for the removal of the sans papiers to be
heard—and felt as right—is the work that classical narrative can do. Because what
recurs beneath the content of any particular instance is a fable of causality: a structure
without any particular content. It can also move us in a direction that I will not agree
with, depending on the moment in which I experience it. And yet, if we agree that
classical narrative, as a universal form, is always concerned with producing a sense of
moderation in the spectator, and that it reproduces images of causality in every instance
and through time—and what is more, that they do so because of a lack that will likely
never disappear, since the lack in this case is causality itself—then we would also have
to admit its possibility as a progressive political form. To understand the work of
mediation that classical narrative does in terms of the production of moderation is thus
to recognize, in turn, that what these films continually present to us is the appearance of
voluntary compromise. Of course, not every voluntary compromise will work out, as the
lesson of Lenin attests. The effectiveness of any compromise is always itself historically
contingent. But in this way, we can also say that once recognition occurs in a particular
moment, a demand can be made, and the political emerges as an imagined alternative—
an alternative without any particular content.
Consider, for instance—and as just one possible context—the last few months of the
Bush administration; the months, that is, leading up to what would become the election
of Barack Obama. Many of us in the U.S. had at that point lived for eight years in a state
of forced compromise, living, as we all did, under the state of exception and the Bush
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administration’s willful indifference to the physical and socio-economic well-being of its
constituents. However, as became quite clear in these final months, especially as
Republican candidates began to distance themselves from Bush in an effort to secure
their party’s nomination and eventually the presidency itself, there was a demand—on
the left and the right—to put an end to what had been occurring. Our collective
dissatisfaction—the lack of moderation, reason, and justice that so many of us felt (and
feel)—became, as such, a contingent ground of the political. It united us—eventually
and for some time—in what Laclau has called a chain of equivalence. Equivalence, as
Laclau makes clear in “Why Do Empty Signifiers Matter to Politics?” is not the same
thing as identity. In a chain of equivalence, unification is achieved on the basis of shared
partiality—on the de-emphasization of difference for the sake of unification. What
unites any group is what that group collectively lacks—i.e., lawfulness, reason,
moderation. Or as Laclau has argued, “It is not…something positive that all of them
share which establishes their unity, but something negative: their opposition to a
common enemy.” 20 The differences that pertain between members of a given unicity,
however, remain present. The presence of difference within a chain of equivalence is also
what prevents a hegemonic formation from taking on a totalitarian character, precisely
because it cannot emerge on the basis of identity. The chain of equivalence can be
undone by difference just as easily as it can be formed. What this means for us is that to
be a part of any unicity is also to make a voluntary compromise, such that the demand
articulated at the level of the political—the desire of justice that is currently absent, let’s
say—can be most forcefully heard and effect change in peaceful terms. To change in
peaceful terms means that we have to find a point of agreement across traditional party
lines, compromises that make the chain of equivalence possible; a bloc dense enough
assure the delivery of a new government. Hence, the arrival of the so-called purple state.
During this moment of political upheaval, when both the left and the right seem united
by what each collectively lacks, even if we cannot agree entirely on what we all need,
the repetitive insistence on compromise in classical narratives—the ritual appearance of
moderation and mutual assurance—plays an interesting, and progressive role in the
movement of the social. Indeed, this insistence can—and may very well have helped
to—unite groups that would otherwise remain opposed, and precisely because the
particular content of any given compromise in a universal form is unimportant. It is the
operation of compromise that matters, not what is being depicted in any given instance.
Consider, for instance, The House Bunny (d. Fred Wolf), released in the summer of
2008—in the months, that is, just prior to the election. The film tells the story of Shelly
Darlington (Anna Faris), a Playboy bunny who, through the machinations of a rival
playmate is forced to leave the Playboy mansion and re-enter everyday life, penniless
and without shelter. Shelly wanders into sorority row and the signs of her former life
appear to her: groups of women living together in large homes suggest to her a sense of
belonging. She becomes hopeful; she seeks recognition. Shelly happens on a particular
sorority, Zeta Alpha Zeta, which is on the brink of ruin. Owing to a lack of popularity—
which stems, according the logic of the film, from its members’ status as bookish, tacky,
and unattractive nerds—the sorority has failed to recruit enough young women and
thus faces the possibility of losing its charter and house. Needing a place to live, Shelly
brokers a compromise with the young women: in exchange for being named house
mother, and thus providing her with a place to live, she’ll help the young women to
recruit the rest of the women they need to retain their house. What the film goes on to
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enact, however, is a larger compromise. Shelly encourages the women to become less
bookish and more beautiful, while the sorority sisters encourage Shelly to become less
shallow and more bookish, all in an effort to secure a relationship with a “normal” guy.
As a result, the sorority becomes more popular with men, and thus attracts enough new
female recruits, and Shelly gets her man.
These are, for better or worse, fairly familiar terms in the vernacular of classical
narrative. Indeed, they comprise the kind of arrangement and on-screen compromise
that has worried feminist film theorists for a long time. There is nothing particularly
progressive about the terms of compromise offered in The House Bunny, and the dance
sequence that accompanies the closing credits is enough to make any reasonable
person—or, at least, anyone over the age of sixteen—feel embarrassed. Probably, if you
haven’t seen the film, or even if you have, the compromise on offer—and the terms of
the crisis itself—seem entirely retrograde. Obviously, I don’t believe that women
become more attractive as they become less smart. If I’m being honest, though, I would
admit that the smarter a woman is, the more attractive she would appear. But I also do
not see any reason to generalize my own preferences. Even if I detest the retrograde
gender politics of the film and the specificity of the compromise it enacts—i.e., that
social mobility depends on decreased intelligence and improved bust lines (which is to
say, diminished)—I may take pleasure in the operation of compromise itself, burdened
as I had been by the voice of a lawless, hostile, and ideological administration. I can
forsake my differences knowing that the member of the religious right sitting next to
me in the theater is also getting comfortable with compromise, taking pleasure in the
idea that something has to change rather than insisting on what must remain the same,
at all costs. What matters in this unicity is not what we share but what we all in this
moment lack. I may prefer the compromise that sees Shelly become more worldly and
more self-conscious about her own sexual objectification, whereas the man next to me
might prefer the compromise he sees these sorority girls enacting for the sake of
popularity and solvency. What matters at this moment is, to borrow Laclau’s terms, not
what we share, but what we lack.
To be clear, I am not suggesting that The House Bunny is responsible for the election of
Obama, or that its rhetoric of compromise was what finalized the appeal across party
lines for cooperation—in much the way that Triumph of the Will (albeit in distinctly
opposite terms) is so often said to have cemented the Nazi masses. Films don’t organize
the political all by themselves. People do. I am simply suggesting that the context
brought to bear by crisis in the film—Shelly’s loss of community and her traditional
sense of herself, of how and where she belongs—appeared at a moment in which Barack
Obama’s call for unity and cooperation across party lines was gaining traction. Many
other films did the same thing. They always do. At the same time, Obama represented
the terms of voluntary compromise in the broadest and most consistent fashion and his
discourse aligned itself with the universal logic of classical narration. And if we
understand classical narratives as fables of causality, as ceaseless representations of
what is missing in the world—i.e. causality itself—then the movement of the political
can be understood as the alignment of discourses about voluntary compromise that are
themselves united on a larger basis: on the understanding, however implicit, that the
social can be re-organized because there is no determinate and metaphysical ground of
the social. Our being is subject to change, individually and socially, because our
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identities do not exist ahead of us and as a determining essence—which is what these
films suggest on the basis of their repetition through time. One cannot compromise
something that cannot actually be changed. And as I have already suggested, the
trouble with this position—and it is a trouble with no remedy—is that the discourse of
voluntary compromise that every classical narrative enacts on the basis of a crisis could
easily serve discourses that I entirely disapprove of. Nevertheless, those discourses can
only be articulated as truth; they cannot actually be grounded in it. As such they cannot
give direct passage to a determining essence. No one, I submit, would be compelled to
make or see classical film narratives if a determining essence were not what goes
missing in each instance, again and again. One can represent causality, but one cannot
produce it—not, that is, in any metaphysical sense. To be sure, discourses of causality
also find their sedimentation in classical narratives. But those narratives can also
provide a basis for recognition—the voluntary compromise that we will all have to
make in order to form a community that does not yet exist—that produces the
reactivation of the social, and does so precisely because the political, or representation
itself, is the ground of the social. And representation begins when something has gone
missing, or has only ever been missing. Otherwise, we would only ever speak of the
thing itself.
Perhaps, then, the pleasure I experience with classical narratives is not pathological; nor
is it a sign of my interpellation in the system of Capital. Rather, the pleasure that the
endless cycle of such films brings me, even when such films require a temporary deemphasis of difference, is the renewed awareness of the absence of causality. It is,
thankfully, an experience we have been having again and again, and for centuries. It is
also what allows us to make a change in being, individually and socially; to find new
ways of being happy together, even if that happiness can only every be partial because it
is shared and defined on the basis of a lack—the lack in whose name happiness so often
announces itself. But without sharing, there would be no social—something we must
recognize even if it means adopting something like a utilitarian conception of happiness.
How, in other words, would autonomy and solitude be a solution to the problems of the
social? What we say of cinema, we shall also say of the social.
Brian Price is an editor of World Picture.
Notes
1
Consider, for instance, Simon Critchley’s recent call in Infinitely Demanding for a brand
of anarchism that does not mirror the totality of the state that it has just undone. What
he calls for instead is the model of the artistic avant-garde: “It seems to me that the
great virtue of contemporary anarchist practice is its spectacular, creative and
imaginative disturbance of the state. Contemporary anarchists have created a new
language of civil disobedience that combines street-theatre, festival, performance art and
what might be described as forms of non-violent warfare.” Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of
Commitment, Politics of Resistance (London and New York: Verso, 2007), 123.
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2
Jean-Luc Comolli and Jean Narboni, “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,” Film Theory and
Criticism, 6th edition, eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (Oxford and New York:
Oxford University Press, 2004), 815.
3
Ibid.
4
Leon Trotsky, Terror and Communism (London and New York: Verso, 2007), 58.
5
V.I. Lenin, Selected Works, Vol. 2 (New York: International Publishers, 1967), 205.
6
Ibid., 206. The emphasis and ellipses are Lenin’s.
7
Slavoj Žižek, Violence (New York: Picador, 2008), 74-75. The emphasis is Žižek’s.
8
Ernesto Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time (New York and London:
Verso, 1990), 35.
9
Ibid., 34. The emphasis is Laclau’s.
10
Ibid., 35.
11
Alexander García Düttmann, Between Cultures: Tension in the Struggle for Recognition,
trans. Kenneth B. Woodgate (New York and London: Verso, 2000), 62.
12
Ibid., 48.
13
Paul de Man, “Criticism and Crisis,” Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of
Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 5.
14
Ibid., 6.
15
Much of what I am saying here is, I believe, equally true for television. Ultimately,
I am not all concerned with questions of medium specificity. Television, however,
presents an interesting complication, owing to the open-ended temporality of the
narrative it constructs; open-ended insofar as most television shows, I can only suppose,
begin without a definite end in mind, temporally-speaking. So, for the sake of simplicity,
I will just be speaking here of the standard feature length narrative film—but in very
bad faith, where television is concerned.
16
The most influential account of the principles of classical narration in film is no doubt
David Bordwell’s “Classical Hollywood Cinema: Narrational Principles and
Procedures,” in Narrative, Apparatus, Theory, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1986), 17-34. Many other examples could be cited. The proof of its
universality (its sedimentation) are the legions of introductory film texts that rehearse
the same distinction that I have offered above—too many, in fact, to warrant quotes
around my own account. The character and nature of its universality, however, awaits
better definition than one finds in these standard accounts.
17
Sigfried Kracauer, “The Little Shopgirls Go to the Movies,” The Mass Ornament:
Weimar Essays, trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995),
291.
18
In many respects, I owe this idea to Phil Solomon. Speaking at Oklahoma State
University on September 11, 2008, Solomon began by expressing his dissatisfaction
with the term avant-garde, reminding us all that it is a military term for the front line.
And as Solomon pointed out, we all know what happens to those who go to battle in the
front line. Solomon suggests that we might think of avant-garde cinema, instead, as
poetic filmmaking. I’m inclined to suggest that we cease making any generic or class
distinction between types of film and filmmaking practices. If it were up to me, we
would be able to see a film like Psalm II: “Walking Distance” (1999) in the same theater,
and with the same regularity, as any more “mainstream” work.
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19
See Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a
Radical Democratic Politics (London and New York: Verso, 2001).
20
Ernesto Laclau, “Why Do Empty Signifiers Matter to Politics?” in Emancipation(s)
(London and New York: Verso, 1996), 40-41.
17