Theory & Event

As the world changes so also do wars and conflicts. At earlier times, states tried to procure territories from other states and nations; generals could draw new lines on their maps according to the success or failures of their troops. This old geopolitical frame still dominates current thinking, even though contemporary enmities tend to be between states and networks. The new network structure of conflicts makes it difficult to follow what is going on and where. People no more identify themselves simply as members of a nation-state. Identification is based on various cultural, ideological, religious, ethnic and political factors. Members of a network may reside anywhere. This implies that they have to be searched everywhere. The fight against the enemy spreads all over the world. The space of war is distributed in a complicated way. The frontiers may be visible or invisible. Prisoners of war may be visible or invisible. There are “no-places” like Guantanamo and secret prisons of CIA, which form “a global patchwork of gulags”, as Michael J. Shapiro writes.

For Shapiro, critical films prove useful and efficient in investigating and analyzing this new violent cartography. Examining films such as The Searchers, The Deer Hunter, Hiroshima Mon Amour and The Fog of War, and drawing parallels to novels of Milan Kundera and others, he shows how montage and juxtapositions conceptualize the scene of war and terror, which is so complex and heterogeneous that it cannot comprehended from a single standpoint or perspective. Even though (quoting Fredric Jameson) “We cannot grasp the truth about our world as totality,” critical cinema gives tools for navigating in this world of various conflicts and contradictions, antagonist viewpoints and opposing interests, tools for telling the difference between relative truths and plain lies. Cinema allows the disorganized multiplicity that is the world to emerge.

Shapiro positions his project in relation to a number of historical intellectual trajectories (the scientific, the Humean, and the Kantian), each of which both allows for a new kind of politics and delegitimates others. The first, and most overt, is the way in which he sees concrete experience of the world as opposed to science, especially the positivism of social science. Shapiro quotes Friedrich Kracauer as stating that science’s objects are stripped of the qualities which give them “all their poignancy and preciousness.” This is somewhat surprising. In what way does science strip these qualities? Shapiro’s endnote reveals the context: Kracauer is quoting John Dewey, but the source is not mentioned (and Dewey’s name does not appear in Shapiro’s index). Kracauer likely refers to The Quest for Certainty where Dewey criticizes a certain philosophy of science, namely a strong version of scientific realism where the manifest image (concrete everyday objects) is displaced by the scientific image, the theoretical objects of natural science which constitute the real world. Dewey criticizes this view and points out that in actual practice science does not ignore concrete everyday objects, and I think this is a sound standpoint also in this context. Science (properly understood) and cinematic epistemology are not as different as Shapiro supposes.

Shapiro and his major conceptual resources, Deleuze, Kracauer and Rancière, all contend that there is no “center of anchorage and of horizon,” that cinema provides “a critique of the sovereign subject,” and that “the world has many middle points.” Dewey’s analysis of natural science leads to similar conclusions. He criticizes classical correspondence theory of truth according to which it is possible to reach eternal and immutable truths about the real object of knowledge. Instead, truth is always relative to a viewpoint determined by concrete live bodies and material instruments of science. This does not amount to extreme relativism because the viewpoint(s) determined by bodies and (other) instruments is objective, bodies and instruments being real material objects. Foucaultian objective power relations are analogous, in that they too are constitutive of truth. It is possible to use abstract principles, rules and calculations as a “truth weapon”, as a conception that can...