Meek, 'Guides to the Electropolis: Toward a Spectral Critique of the Media', Postmodern Culture v7n1
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Guides to the Electropolis: Toward a Spectral Critique of
the Media
by
Allen Meek
Massey University
ameek@massey.ac.nz
Postmodern Culture v.7 n.1 (September, 1996)
Copyright (c) 1996 by Allen Meek, all rights
reserved. This text may be used and shared in
accordance with the fair-use provisions of U.S.
copyright law, and it may be archived and
redistributed in electronic form, provided that
the editors are notified and no fee is charged
for access. Archiving, redistribution, or
republication of this text on other terms, in
any medium, requires the consent of the author
and the notification of the publisher, Institute
for Advanced Technology in the Humanities.
[1] One of the most compelling sites in which the
methodologies of psychoanalysis and marxian cultural
theory intersect in contemporary critical writing is
in the figure of the ghost. The political significance
recently ascribed to this figure suggests a paradigmatic
shift in cultural studies taking place where the
poststructuralist death of the subject encounters both
the collapse of Soviet communism and the "revolution" in
global telecommunications. The historical situation in
which Western critical theory finds itself at this
moment has called for a renewed engagement with
psychoanalysis, attentive to questions of mourning and
collective memory. As particular examples of this
project I will cite Jacques Derrida's _Specters of Marx:
The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New
International_ (1994), Margaret Cohen's use of the term
"Gothic Marxism," and Ned Lukacher's notion of a
"phantom politics," all of which work in the intertexts
of psychoanalysis and politics, history and literature,
but none of which are focused explicitly on what Derrida
has called the "*spectral* effects" (Derrida, 54)
produced by electronic media.
[2] While Derrida's reading of Marx "conjures" (Derrida
characteristically enumerates the various meanings
of this word) the specters of Marx, taking care to
reveal Marx's commitment to and ambivalence toward
this figure, Cohen shows how the question of the
spectral in Marx's text has developed in those who
have followed him and inherited from him, particularly
Andre Breton and Walter Benjamin. Derrida interrogates
the figure of the specter at the "frontier between the
public and the private" that is "constantly being
displaced" (Derrida, 50) by technology. Cohen's
genealogy of Gothic Marxism reminds us that this
frontier has long been the subject of research at
the experimental front of Marxian cultural theory.
Between Cohen's and Derrida's respective discussions
lie also the legacies of psychoanalysis, including
Freud's primal scene reconstructed by Lukacher as a
methodological invention of continuing historiographical
and political significance. It is in the psychoanalytic
notion of "working over" that a spectral critique of the
media comes into focus.
[3] In the face of the multinational corporate media's claim
to transmit all significant "world events," a spectral
critique would seek to confront those ghosts who call
into question the legitimacy of this representational
system and its ideologies. The globalization of
electro-tele-presences seeks to usurp the place of, as
it carries with it the traces of, a more general
phantasmatic economy. Flows of electronic images and
information allow for the proliferation of what Marx
called the "phantasmagoria" of commodity capitalism,
amidst which the conjunction of spectral imagery I am
pursuing here begins to accumulate another kind of
value and currency. In _Specters of Marx_ Derrida
pursues a "*politics* of memory, of inheritance, and
of generations" (xix) arising out of a sense of
responsibility toward the ghosts of our collective
histories: the victims of war, imperialism,
totalitarianism, and political, social, and
psychological oppression in all of its forms. For
Derrida it is this sense of responsibility that we
inherit from Marx that will help us "to think and to
treat" (54) the spectral presences made available by
global telecommunications. So for those who today wish
to be rid of Marx and Marxism once and for all (the
particular example of this position under investigation
by Derrida is Francis Fukuyama), his and its ghosts
always threaten to return. It is a condition of the
so-called "End of History" and the ends of Marxism that
they will never have arrived--and this is also the
condition of their messianic promise and of the
ethico-political imperatives that they precipitate:
"Not only must one not renounce the emancipatory desire,
it is necessary to insist on it more than ever" (75).
[4] The emancipatory impulse that should guide cultural
critique is called forth in the form of a ghost: one
who will challenge the hegemonic claims of the corporate
media and unsettle the world order it seeks to impose.
The ghost recalls those forgotten or repressed histories
that compose the collective unconscious of our mass
mediated society. Cohen's reading of Breton and Benjamin
conjures the ghosts of revolutionary struggles that
haunt the streets of Paris amid the phantasmagorias of
an emerging consumer society. Derrida's specters are
called forth on the stage of our own contemporary global
politics. What are the legacies of the Surrealist
experiments of the 20s and 30s and how can they be
approached in the sphere of the new trans- and
multi-national electropolis? To begin to answer this
question we need to consider Derrida's and Cohen's
specters in the context of critical theories of the
media.
[5] Derrida's specters of Marx should not be made
equivalent to that "other scene" of politics and
eroticism submitted to rigorous ideological analysis
by the marxian school of %Cahiers du Cinema%. I will
argue that Derrida's application of intertextual montage
in pursuit of specters implies a different ontological
order to that of the materialist histories made
available by Althusserian criticism which, while it
helped us to understand that ideology was not simply a
phantom to be dispelled but itself a mode of operation
with its own structures (Harvey, 90), did not offer a
model for a therapeutic encounter with the specter or
for what Derrida understands by the work of mourning.
If Althusser's analysis of ideology as an imaginary
process enabled marxian cultural analysis to depart
from a crude model of culture directly reflecting
the material basis of social organization, Derrida's
insistence that "mourning is work itself, work in
general, the trait by means of which one ought to
reconstruct the very concept of production" (97)
demands a reconsideration of the practices of cultural
studies.
[6] Indeed the range of interpretive strategies and critical
approaches loosely collected in the Anglo-American
academy under the rubric of Cultural Studies employs
various syntheses of marxian, psychoanalytic, and
structuralist theories, but there remains very little
work in that field that acknowledges the full scope of
Derrida's methodological critique of those theories.
The critical response to the media that emerged amid the
uprisings of May 1968 in France has had an enduring
effect on the development of film and television
studies, primarily through Althusser's application of
Lacanian psychoanalysis, but (with a few notable
exceptions) Derridean deconstruction has had a much less
direct influence on critical media studies. Now Derrida
has published for the first time an extensive meditation
on Marx, inviting renewed speculation about the place
that deconstruction might have in the context of marxian
theories of media.
[7] Important precedents for considering how such a critical
practice might proceed are made available by Margaret
Cohen's and Ned Lukacher's work. Cohen's _Profane
Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of
Surrealist Revolution_ (1993) sets out to reconstruct a
neglected politico-aesthetic tradition which she calls
"Gothic Marxism," or "the first efforts to appropriate
Freud's seminal twentieth-century exploration of the
irrational for Marxist thought" (2). She inquires into
the intertexts of French Surrealism and Walter
Benjamin's historiographic application of montage in the
Arcades Project. Benjamin's relation to Surrealist
texts, on one side, and Soviet experiments in cinematic
montage on another, continue to suggest forms of
critical engagement with a mediatized culture that
remain largely unexplored. Derrida explicitly cites
Benjamin's messianic interpretation of Marx as a
precursor text to his own project. Both Cohen's and
Derrida's excavations of the ghosts of Marx are
anticipated in Lukacher's _Primal Scenes: Literature,
Philosophy, Psychoanalysis_ (1986), which elaborates a
"phantom politics" based in the Freudian reconstruction
of the forgotten event and Marx's period underground
after the failure of the 1848 revolutions. Cohen shows
how Surrealist novels like Breton's _Nadja_ present a
mode of counter-memory that haunts the facade of the
modern state-supported consumer society which emerged
after 1848. But where is the possibility of such an
alternative tradition in the mediatized society after
the interventions of 1968? Or the challenges to State
Communism of 1989?
[8] In the context provided by Derrida's discussion of Marx,
I will attempt to situate Cohen's notion of a Gothic
Marxism by comparing it with Anne Friedberg's _Window
Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern_(1993). Taken
together with Cohen's _Profane Illumination_, _Window
Shopping_ helps to pose the question of what an
application of Gothic Marxism to the postmodern media
environment might be like. What is initially striking
about the juxtaposition of these two books, however, is
that in Friedberg's analysis of shopping mall culture we
witness the disappearance of those darker social forces
that form the political unconscious of postmodernity but
which it is the project of Gothic Marxism to make
visible. Through a comparative reading of Cohen's and
Friedberg's books, in the intertextual space that these
two theoretical works define, I aim to bring the project
of a spectral critique toward a more direct application
with regard to the imagery of electronic capitalism and
to show how the critical force of psychoanalytic
reconstruction can be reconsidered in the postmodern
culture that presents history as a perpetual re-make.
Genealogy
[9] A spectral critique takes its place between the
experimental practices of the %avant-garde% and the
marxian analysis of capital and in the context of the
dissemination of new audiovisual technologies. Freud's
experimental reconstructions were contemporary with the
invention of cinema, both of which share a prehistory
in all of the picture puzzles (rebus, anamorphosis) and
visual machines (zoetrope, stereoscope) that had already
accumulated throughout the modern period. The
revelations of psychoanalysis were first thought in
conjunction with the appearance of film and, as Benjamin
suggested with his notion of an "optical unconscious,"
the filmic zoom, close-up and the development of montage
extended this parallel attention to the microscopic
details of everyday life. The conjuration of the hidden
picture and the other scene could be understood as
either an unconcealment or a contrived illusion, or
both. The ghost-effect (think of Melies' celebrated
inventions) takes place at the seam between two texts,
in the overlay of different discourses, the encounter
between different modes of representation, or at the
interface of different media. For Derrida between
_Hamlet_ and _The Manifesto of the Communist Party_, for
Cohen between Benjamin's Arcades Project and _Fantomas_.
[10] A spectral critique would seek to redirect the insights
of psychoanalysis regarding the therapeutic value of
mourning toward a politicized critique. But what needs
to be mourned? Cohen's Gothic Marxism is positioned as
a response to a "post-revolutionary" situation and a
sense of the failure of Communism that she claims is
anticipated in Benjamin and Breton's responses to
Stalinism (11) and she wants to revise vulgar Marxist
notions of a direct causal relationship between base
and superstructure as a way of explaining ideological
meanings manifest in cultural artifacts. Althusser
provides her with the systematic theorization she finds
missing from Benjamin's notes on the dialectical image
(19). In this way she can reformulate Benjamin's
psychoanalytic Marxism in the following phrase: "the
ideologies of the superstructure' express the base in
disfigured products of repression" (33).
[11] In contrast to Althusser's "scientific" Marxism,
however, Benjamin's method is "therapeutic" (37-38).
Cohen lists the positions of Gothic Marxism as the
following:
(1) the valorization of the realm of a culture's
ghosts and phantasms as a significant and rich
field of social production rather than a mirage
to be dispelled; (2) the valorization of a
culture's detritus and trivia aswell as strange
and marginal practices; (3) a notion of critique
moving beyond logical argument and the binary
opposition to a phantasmagorical staging more
closely resembling psychoanalytic therapy,
privileging nonrational forms of "working through"
and regulated by overdetermination rather than
dialectics; (4) a dehierarchization of the
epistemological privilege accorded the visual
in the direction of that integration of the
senses dreamed of by Marx...; accompanying this
dehierarchization, a practice of writing of
criticism cutting across traditionally separated
media and genres...; and (5) a concomitant
valorization of the sensuousness of the visual:
the realm of visual experience is opened to
other possibilities than the accomplishment
and/or figuration of rational demonstration.
(11-12)
One might speculate briefly, without reverting to a
McLuhanite determinism, on how many of these positions
would serve as effective critical responses to media
culture, with its collapsing of fact and fiction into a
general flow of electronic text. Yet cultural studies,
particularly as it has inherited the Birmingham model,
has rarely incorporated any such experimental practices
into its methodologies.
[12] With a similar attention to therapeutic practices as
offering an analogy for a critical method, Ned
Lukacher's _Primal Scenes_ brings together Freud and
Heidegger's practices of intertextual reconstruction as
a response to the postmodern problematic of mourning
and history. In Lukacher's readings of literature,
philosophy, and psychoanalysis, intertextuality takes
the place of the transcendental ground of history and
memory. Freud's listening for repressed memory in
the speech of his patients and Heidegger listening for
what is left unsaid in the Western philosophical
tradition serve for Lukacher as precedents for a new
historiography. Freud's construction of the primal
scene in the famous Wolf Man case was never able to be
verified by the subject of analysis himself: the patient
could never remember if it actually "happened." So the
theoretical scene, constructed from an intertext of the
patient's dreams, remembered stories, and anecdotes from
his own experience, assumed the place of "true" memory
over the subject's conscious attempts to remember. In
Lukacher's discussion, Freud's term "primal scene":
comes to signify an ontologically undecidable
intertextual event that is situated in the
differential space between historical memory
and imaginative construction, between archival
verification and interpretive free play. (24)
Freud's ontological revolution can now be seen,
retroactively, as an anticipation of (post)historical
consciousness in the global cultural economy made
possible by, among other things, telecommunications.
As Arjun Appadurai has noted, popular perceptions of
history are now characterized by a "nostalgia without
memory" (Appadurai, 272) in which a global audience
looks back on a past they have learned to identify
with through contact with American media culture.
Disparate peoples everywhere now "remember" a collective
past that only ever took place on cinema and TV. Just
as Freud constructed the primal scene at the interfaces
of orality and literacy, of childhood and folk memory
with the forms of memory and analysis made possible by
alphabetic technologies and methods, historiography
today needs to engage with the penetration of individual
and collective memory by electronic media if it is to
excavate its political unconscious.
[13] The implications of such a problematic for contemporary
marxian cultural theory suggests that a materialist
analysis would not be adequate unless it confronted
spectrality in all of its electronic mutations. As
Frederic Jameson has commented with reference to
Derrida's _Specters of Marx_, it is "the problem of
materialism, its occultation or repression, the
impossibility of posing it as a problem as such and
in its own right, which generates the figure of the
specter" (Jameson, 83). Jameson argues that
dialectical materialism needs to be understood as a
set of strategies, a critical praxis, or "an optical
adjustment" (87) rather than an unquestioned ideological
position: materialism can learn from deconstruction.
Here the practices of Gothic Marxism listed by Cohen
also provide a set of valuable leads. Lukacher argues
for an historiographic practice in which "the subject
of history is not the human subject--whether defined
as an individual, a class, or a species--but rather
the intertextual process itself" (13). The tasks of
redefining a "new international" in a "post-communist"
world would include the invention of such an
historiographic practice that would contend with the
ways that data banks, information networks, and
electronic communication technologies are transforming
collective memory.
[14] The intertext through which Derrida inquires into the
primal hauntings of European culture takes place between
literature and politics, between _Hamlet_ and _The
Manifesto of the Communist Party_. The appearance of
the ghost in _Hamlet_ provides the scene by which the
legacies of Marxism can be (re)staged; or, as Lukacher
puts it, "the intertext is the medium through which
history gives itself to thought" (237). Mourning,
writes Derrida, always involves "*identifying* the
bodily remains and...*localizing* the dead" (9). The
problematics of mourning in the New World Order include
the ways in which the experience of cultural identity
is increasingly displaced and national boundaries are
reconfigured or subverted by flows of information and
capital. New forms of agency need to be invented in
the virtual spaces that increasingly define our public
sphere (or the absence of it). The ghost becomes a
signifier for such structuring absences as problems of
mourning.
[15] The intertext of _Hamlet_ and _The Manifesto of the
Communist Party_, then, allows Derrida to re-present
the specter of Communism and to remind us that "this
attempted radicalization of Marxism called
deconstruction" (Derrida, 92) is unthinkable without
Marx or Shakespeare and without _Hamlet_ as the founding
literary text staging the modern European encounter with
the question of the unconscious. Lukacher names the
deconstructive radicalization of Marxism a "phantom
politics" (Lukacher, 245) in which the reference to
tragedy signifies a certain rejection of politics
conceived as conscious self-interest and opening instead
onto an encounter with ghosts.
[16] Another example of this deconstruction of the boundary
between literature and politics is when, through
attention to intertextuality, Cohen reveals Marx to be
not only a master theoretical voice guiding Benjamin's
excavations of Paris but Marx himself a reader,
alongside Baudelaire, of Poe (Cohen, 226). Indeed
Benjamin's 1938 essay "The Paris of the Second Empire
in Baudelaire," is full of references not only to Poe
but also to James Fenimore Cooper's influence on the
French novel of Dumas, Hugo, and Sue. The forerunner
of the postmodern subject of history, the
nineteenth-century reader's imagination was stocked with
fictionalized experiences of the Americas. The long
term effects of this mass cultural imagination could be
seen in the Nazi deployment of myth and are now to be
found in cases like the militia in post-Communist
Yugoslavia dressed in outfits derived from American
movie remakes of the Vietnam war (Denitch, 74). _Rambo_
not only remakes history as film but history also
remakes _Rambo_ as history.
[17] Lukacher compares the theoretical status of Benjamin's
dialectical images to Freud's primal scene. If the
primal scene constructed in psychoanalysis can never
be ultimately verified by conscious memory, it can
nevertheless have a powerful explanatory and potentially
therapeutic effect. In the same way that Freud
investigated the origins of the Wolf Man's psychosis
through a network of signifiers derived from the
patient's dreams and memories, Benjamin sought to
recover from the dream images embodied in archaic
forms of commodity culture those voices that had been
excluded from official histories (Lukacher, 277). For
example, in his essay on Baudelaire, Benjamin discusses
how the atmosphere of Cooper's novels of the American
West is borrowed by French writers in their early
detective novels (Benjamin, 41-42). The direct
comparison of the streets and avenues of Paris to the
prairie and the woods imbued the urban market place
with exotic appeal. Such exoticism masked fundamental
anxieties provoked by the conditions of modern urban
life; so Benjamin cites Baudelaire: "'What are the
dangers of the forest and the prairie compared with
the daily shocks and conflicts of civilization?'" (39).
In this situation, the popular *physiologies* provided
journalistic stereotypes to simplify the bewildering
strangeness of the city. French authors invoked the
figure the Indian tracker to describe the vigilant
detective in an alien landscape. Contained in the
wish image of the American west was a displaced memory
of colonialist genocide. Through attention to the
intertextual construction of urban experience, a
political unconscious registering the global catastrophe
of capitalism becomes manifest as an image. This image
of the Native American, however, is not as much
*dispelled* in Benjamin's historical investigation as
*conjured*, appearing as a guide to the ideological
territory that Benjamin is traversing.
Guides Noires
[18] In order to bring the ghosts of our collective histories
into visibility on the postmodern scene we can assume,
as the legacy of Freud and Breton, that the practices of
everyday life make their way along the royal road to a
collective unconscious. Benjamin's insight was to
understand the Paris arcades as an entry into the
repressed memories of High Capitalism. One of the more
provocative observations in _Window Shopping_ is that
the design of the Bibliotheque Nationale (where Benjamin
worked on the Arcades Project) served as a precedent for
the shelving in department stores (Friedberg, 79).
While the nineteenth-century shopper adapted the
browsing practices of the scholar, studying displays of
commodities like titles arranged on library shelves,
the postmodern cultural theorist has been made-over in
the image of the TV viewer, with shopping channels and
the internet today conspiring to make the activities of
writing and consumption identical.
[19] Both Friedberg and Cohen account for their respective
projects through chance encounters in everyday
experience that put the present and past in startling
conjunction. For Friedberg this encounter is seeing a
Hollywood remake of Godard's _Breathless_ in an L.A.
strip mall (xi). For Cohen it is coming across "at a
sale of used French books...a card advertising the
services of one Eugene Villard, private eye, dressed in
a fantomas outfit and holding a key" (75). The image of
this detective--with its caption "%Qui suis-je%"--
triggers for Cohen an association with the opening line
of Breton's _Nadja_. Friedberg sees her geographical
move from New York to Los Angeles in the mid 1980s
participating in a shift of greater historical
significance--New York being "the quintessential
*modern* city (Capital of the Twentieth Century)" and
Los Angeles "the quintessential *post*-modern city
(Capital of the Twenty-First)" [xi]--which frames her
transportation of Benjamin's %flanerie% in the Paris
arcades into the motorized landscapes of Southern
California and the phantasmagoric spaces produced by
electronic technologies.
[20] The original title of Friedberg's book, _Les Flaneurs
du Mal (1)_, installs a palimpsest--Baudelaire/Benjamin/
Friedberg--in which her precursor figures are summoned
as guides conducting passageways between the nineteenth
century and the present. Baudelaire's %flanerie%
presents for Friedberg an early form of what she calls
the "*mobilized virtual gaze*" (2): an experience of
locality and identity made possible by the technological
simulation of travel through time and space. Cohen's
_Profane Illumination_ also begins with the figure of
the guide, in this case tourist guide books. Cohen
notes the existence of a special genre of guide book,
the %Guides Noirs%, "guides to the Gothic sides of
familiar places" and relates this mode of tourism
"devoted to the irrational, illicit, inspired,
passional, often supernatural aspects of social
topography" (1) to the set of practices she calls
Gothic Marxism.
[21] Cohen confronts these practices most directly in her
interpretation of Breton's _Nadja_, a surreal "novel"
which she compares to the discourse of the analysand
in psychoanalysis (66). Breton investigates his own
subjectivity as haunted, opening onto a realm of ghosts.
Cohen discusses tourist guides to historic Paris and
uses _Nadja_ as a counter-example of %flanerie% devoted
to the bizarre and marginal, as opposed to the most
official, monumental sites of the great city. Nadja
serves as Breton's guide to the *noir* sites of Paris.
For Cohen, _Nadja_ provides a significant example "of
writing surrealist historiography by applying a Freudian
paradigm of memory to collective events" (80). Cohen's
juxtaposes passages from early twentieth-century tour
guides against the sites of Breton's surreal
explorations, drawing attention to the bohemian and
lumpen populations that have haunted them and reveals
Paris--as Benjamin's essays on Baudelaire do also--a
memory theater containing a revolutionary history around
every corner.
[22] The value of comparing Cohen and Friedberg's different
approaches to the Arcades Project lies in their mutual
exclusiveness. Friedberg demonstrates, in her
translation of the Arcades Project onto the contemporary
loci of the shopping mall and freeway, how the
postmodern moment suspends historical consciousness.
The memory theater of the urban streets that Cohen's
Gothic Marxism aims to make readable strikes one as
impossible in the world described by Friedberg: "The
mall creates a nostalgic image of the town center as a
clean, safe, and legible place, but a peculiarly
timeless place" (113). The mythic topos of small town
America encloses (as does TV in the domestic space) and
services the desires of an insulated middle class that
has effectively removed itself from the public sphere
as a domain of political contest and struggle.
Benjamin "asserts that Baudelaire cannot bring the urban
crowd to direct representation but rather occults it,
much as the neurotic represses a formative psychical
trauma" (Cohen, 209). This mode of reading, informed by
psychoanalysis, is not at work in Friedberg's study of
Los Angeles shopping malls.
[23] Yet the mall is not ghost-free, for it is certainly
haunted by what Jameson calls "sheer class
%ressentiment%" (Jameson, 86), the hatred that the
dispossessed feel for the privileged and that the dead
feel for the living. The malevolent spirits that emerge
in the wake of the endless series of catastrophes that
Benjamin identified with the advance of technological
progress appear in Friedberg's book as the zombies who
invade the deserted shopping malls in the cult film
_Dawn of the Dead_ (Friedberg, 116-117). As Jameson
notes, these figures are not identical to Derrida's
specters, who embody a "weak messianic power" something
akin to Benjamin's angel of history. Derrida's specters
demand not revenge but social justice. So a gothic
critique would not aim to give voice to this primal
%ressentiment% but rather to open global tele-capitalism
to the enigmas of visibility that call us back to our
fundamental social and political responsibilities: to
the un- and under- employed and represented, to
non-citizens and to all of those whose civil liberties
are diminished or annihilated in the New World Order.
Remake
[24] Three years before the completion of Benjamin's essay
on Baudelaire, Sergei Eisenstein discussed precisely
the same transplanting of literary imagery as he sought
to define the principles of montage in film. Shifting,
like Benjamin, from a discussion of the "science" of
physiogonomy to the French fascination with Cooper,
Eisenstein briefly notes how the ideology of private
property that informs the detective novel is
underwritten by a narrative of colonial imperialism
(Eisenstein, 128). Both Benjamin and Eisenstein were
interested in this example of literary influence for
the same reason: the political significance and
pedagogical potential of archaic wish-images. For if
behind Cooper's narratives there lurked the realities
of ethnocide, there was also in the dream of a faraway
landscape a desire--repressed, or redirected into
colonizing aggression--to return to the utopian society
that the discovery of "primitive" peoples had presented
to the European imagination. Like Freudian
psychoanalysis, Benjamin's dialectical images and
Eisensteinian montage are interested in repressed
memory, but they apply this interest to collective
memory which they seek to awake for the purposes of
inspiring historical agency. As Freud had attended to
images derived from fairy tales half-remembered from
childhood, Benjamin looked to the origins of the
detective novel in images of tribalism. The images
that made the novels of Cooper and Dumas so popular
we recognize in the classic Hollywood genres of the
western and %film noir% as they continue to be recycled
by our contemporary electronic media.
[25] This recycling process tends to produce effects of
arbitrary equivalence rather than historical
consciousness. The postmodern signscape in which "the
hammer and sickle is equal to Marilyn" (Friedberg, 173)
leads Friedberg to consider the cinematic form of the
remake as both an expression but also potentially a
critique of the nostalgia industry (174-175). But the
question of the remake in her argument (one of her
examples is the early _Fantomas_ films) lurches toward
a paradoxical %mise-en-abyme%:
Consider, for example, a Victor Fleming film
produced in 1939, set in 1863, but shown in 1992
(_Gone With the Wind_). Or a film produced in
1968, set in 2001, but shown in 1992 (_2001: A
Space Odyssey_). Or more exactly, a film made
in the city of Paris in 1964, set in a future
world, but seen in 1992 in the city of Los
Angeles (_Alphaville_), or a film made in Los
Angeles in 1982, set in Los Angeles in 2019
(_Blade Runner_), but seen in Los Angeles in
1992. (177)
Or an historiographic experiment produced in Paris in
the 1930s, set in Paris in the 1850s, not published (in
German) until the 1980s and read (about) in America
in the 1990s? The passage demands that we consider
Friedberg's relation to Benjamin's work, as she comments
at one point that the Arcades Project might be best
compared to "a film never completed" (51). Is her own
book to be understood as a remake? If so, how does the
temporality of the postmodern as it is explained by
Friedberg shape her own critical project and its
attendant historical and ethical responsibilities?
[26] On this point an illuminating contrast to _Window
Shopping_ is provided in a very different study of L.A.,
_City of Quartz_ by Mike Davis, which offers a social
and political history of the city in terms of race and
class war--from its exposure of local business interests
overtaken by offshore investment, to its analysis of the
fortress mentality of the white middle class and a new
underclass decimated by unempolyment, drugs, and
gang-police warfare. The criminalization of the poor
in "post-liberal" L.A. that Davis documents provokes a
far more bitter and frightening vision of postmodernity
than that of _Window Shopping_:
contemporary urban theory, whether debating the
role of electronic technologies in precipitating
"postmodern space," or discussing the dispersion
of urban functions across poly-centered
metropolitan "galaxies" has been strangely silent
about the militarization of city life so grimly
visible at street level. (Davis, 223)
Indeed the L.A. of _Window Shopping_ does not provide
any account of the historical or social space described
in _City of Quartz_: those spaces are not to be
traversed as much as escaped through the modes of
virtual travel which Friedberg explores. The
technological mediation of the social transforms the
very notion of a geographical site or a public sphere.
And as long as the social Other reappears only on the
screens inside the fortress, one wonders about the
viability of a spectral critique that might return the
ghosts of the New World Order to consciousness in ways
that can more effectively challenge the postliberal
imaginary "reciprocally dependent upon the social
imprisonment of the third-world service proletariate"
(Davis, 227). _City of Quartz_ provides the analysis
of social struggle absent in _Window Shopping_, as Davis
argues that the restructuring of urban space in L.A. is
a direct response to the race riots of the 1960s (224).
The L.A. mall is to 1968 what the Paris arcade was to
1848.
[27] %Guides Noir% to L.A.? Given that the ambition of
Friedberg's book is to redefine the postmodern in terms
of the central role that cinema and other modes of
technological simulation have had in shaping that
moment's perception of its own historicity and
spatiality, it should be noted that for Mike Davis,
%film noir%--that mix of American and exilic European
sensibilities that left such a mark on classic
Hollywood--"sometimes approached a kind of Marxist
%cinema manque%, a shrewdly oblique strategy for an
otherwise subversive realism" (Davis, 41). Forties
detective fiction in some respects assumed the place
of the abandoned project of thirties socialist realism.
And while the Chandlerian detective that cruises the
%noir% landscape of California might not serve as an
exact analogy to the Baudelairian %flaneur%, he is
surely a mythic--and highly ambivalent--type in whom
a spectral critique would discern a site of redemptive
possibility. What the juxtaposition of Friedberg and
Cohen's books offers is a hope of such a critical
vision: one that can negotiate history in its mediatized
forms and thereby as a ghost history. To begin to write
this history will demand attention to the intertextual
migrations of our cultural legacies. Friedberg's book
is inspired by her encounter with a remake of Godard's
_Breathless_--itself a remake of both Hollywood %film
noir% and Italian neorealist forerunners. More
recently, Godard offers us an image of a post-Communist
landscape haunted by cinematic ghosts in _Germany Year
90_, featuring Lemme Caution, his %noir% detective hero
(resurrected from _Alphaville_) wandering the ruins of
Cold War Europe. Like Benjamin and Eisenstein before
him, Godard has invented a montage practice that works
with hybrid images from European and American traditions
but that stages a critical vision of the dominant mode
of representation.
[28] The primal scenes of Oedipus and the Wolf Man, the
%mise-en-abyme% of _Hamlet_, the social critique of
%film noir%, all serve as precedents for a spectral
critique which must learn to confront and to mourn the
catastrophic losses that haunt the scenes of our
collective memory; they displace the subject of history
with a series of intertextual encounters and overlays
that include both the interfaces of our various
technological media and the legacies of the liberational
struggles to which we remain indebted; they teach us to
recognize our historical situation as formed by the
contradictions of becoming post-communist, -literate,
-modern, -metaphysical, but not yet agents of the social
justice that we must strive to bring about.
[29] In Godard's film an aging man with a suitcase, a
refugee, crosses the borders of East and West: like
Benjamin's %flaneur%, part-detective, part-exile,
bearing testimony to the ruins of both totalitarian
Communism and consumer capitalism. Likewise, between
Friedberg's _Breathless_ and Cohen's _Fantomas_, between
psychoanalysis and cultural studies, emerge images of
those whose labor supports but is rendered invisible by
the smooth surfaces of %fin-de-siecle% consumerism: the
unemployed, the migrant, the homeless--the specters of
our electronic arcades.
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Cohen, Margaret. _Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and
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