FINDING OURSELVES AT THE MOVIES Excerpt

118

f i l m a n d t he s o ci a l ima g inary

uncontrolled violence, on the other. We have claims that we are threatened by Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, but there are no weapons.

We have denials of what everyone knows and affirmations of what no one believes. No one is invested in any particular representational claim because no one believes in the truth of what is said. Words are spoken for their effect, not their truth. Political speech is always on the verge of being exposed as falsehood. Actions taken become the immediate object of regret, for we believe we were not truly ourselves at the moment that we were persuaded. Thus, America goes to war in Iraq in what comes rapidly to be seen as an act of bad faith. We want to affirm the meaning of the combatant’s death as an act of sacrifice, but we cannot actually say for what he died. It was “the wrong war,” but we are not sure we can find the right one.

All of this should remind us of the nuclear dilemma with which we have been living for decades. Nuclear weapons announce the sacrificial character of the sovereign: for the sake of sovereignty, we will give up life itself—all of it and everyone. But we can make no representational sense of these weapons. They advance no one’s interests; they can be directed at no articulate purpose. We are literally in a world of “strange love,” for what kind of love is it that will destroy not just the self but the beloved in an act of sacrificial violence? These weapons of absolute destruction express the inarticulateness of ultimate meanings, but that which cannot be said has become absurd. This is precisely our anxiety: we want to affirm the sacrificial meaning of the sovereign, but we cannot justify the act. We cannot attach text to act. At that point the violent act becomes merely destructive.

The Criminal Is (Not) the Enemy of Humankind The modern nation-state managed a complex relationship between identity and representation by and through its capacity to control the meaning of violence. The act of sacrifice is the moment of sovereign presence; that moment must be read as the foundation of the political narrative. Identity and representation—sovereignty and law—meet at that point. If narrative cannot claim the sacrificial act, we will find

Violence and the State 119

ourselves outside of law in one of two ways: sovereign presence without voice or senseless death. These, of course, have a way of turning into each other. Contemporary forms of anxiety, however, are less about the resurgence of revolutionary terror (sovereign presence) than about the failure of violence to register a public meaning at all (senseless death).

There is nothing new in this. The law of the state has long been a script read off the body of the citizen-soldier. Lincoln spoke of this in his famous Lyceum speech, when he linked law to revolution through the body of the Revolutionary War veteran. Those bodies provided “a history bearing the indubitable testimonies of its own authenticity, in the limbs mangled, in the scars of wounds received, in the midst of the very scenes related—a history, too, that could be read and understood alike by all, the wise and the ignorant, the learned and the unlearned.”41 A state that can no longer read law off the wounded body is one that can no longer call on its citizens to sacrifice. Lincoln worried that we cannot have reverence for law without the willingness to sacrifice. His own life and death became a test of this proposition linking identity and representation.

Today, our Lincolnesque worries are not presented in formal lectures at the local lyceum but in the imaginative production of film. The longing for the unity of sacrifice as the point of intersection of identity and representation was my first topic in this chapter. It provides the archetype upon which a film like Gran Torino relies. The failure of sacrifice when violence resists representation was my second. This produced the anxiety of senseless violence, that is, a violence that could not be read.

This is the archetype we find in a film like Inglourious Basterds. A similar anxiety arises from the other direction, when representation cannot attach to identity. Now, representation closes in on itself; it becomes a symbolic system in which the elements point only to other elements in the system. It has then the closed character of a code. The code knows only itself; it offers no answer to the question “Who am I?” This generates a Kafkaesque anxiety of representation entirely displacing identity.

This is a situation in which identity can get no purchase, for it is always outside the borders of representation. If law is a code, how can it be a domain of freedom? The citizen must see through the representational order of the state—law—to the popular sovereign. If the citizen can never see beyond the code, if law leads only to more law, then politics will no longer be an expression of freedom.42

1 20

f i l m a n d t he s o ci a l ima g inary

The imaginative linking of representation to identity does not just create the possibility of political freedom; it is the exercise of that freedom. In our ordinary political life we realize this freedom in the task of interpretation—a theme I developed in part 1. Because identity is an unlimited source of meaning, while law is a finite system of representation, the gap between the two can never be eliminated, only temporarily bridged. We can never close off the debate over the meaning of law because it always stands in relation to that inexhaustible source of meaning that is the popular sovereign. When we argue over the meaning of a constitutional norm, we are taking up the task of interpreting who we are. Interpretation is an endless effort to cross the gap between representation and identity. There is no “right” interpretation; there are only more or less persuasive interpretations. To take up this task of persuading and being persuaded is to exercise political freedom.43 Closure of the system of representation would sever the link to popular sovereignty. It would undermine the claim that law is the product of freedom. Here we have the origin of the “democracy deficit” attributed to European Union law: we have law—endless law—but we have no sense that it is our law. The code manages itself as if it were the product of disembodied reason. Technicians of the law constantly adjust the elements of the law to each other through proportionality review.44 This law no longer creates history; instead, it manages the present. Interpretation is no longer a free act of rhetorical persuasion building the connection between the transcendent value of sovereign presence and legal representation. A law that is pure representation, we might say, represents no one at all. The more complete the code, the more we gaze upon it from the outside. A law that represents no one can be a global rule, at which point the distinction of inside and outside loses any sense. Such a law would apply to everyone but belong to no one.

The fictional response to this displacement of identity through the closure of representation is to go to war with the code. Violence becomes a performance of human freedom. We are again imagining the refoundation of the political order in an act of sacrifice that will link identity to representation. Thus, the anxiety of code is a reverse image of the anxiety of violence described in the last section.

When the legal realists argued that those who believe in law as a formal system are speaking “transcendental nonsense,” they were saying

Violence and the State 1 21

that a closed system of representation can make no contact with the real forces that determine political practice.45 Law closed in on itself is blind and therefore without any force. This is the benign form of a closed code: a fiction that cannot do the work of social regulation. More common is the anxiety that a closed system of representation is authoritarian. This was Kafka’s charge, and it continues today. This perfect system of representation tends toward a specific signature in film: representation becomes code, and code becomes machine. The dystopian vision matches human against machine.

The supercomputer HAL, in 2001: A Space Odyssey, was an early expression of this symbolic equation of machine, code, and authority.46 The more complete the order of representation, the more complete the denial of freedom. A computer that can operate by itself will dispense with human beings entirely. The struggle against the computer is, accordingly, a struggle to maintain control over human destiny. The film explicitly draws the connection between representation and tool.

The capacity to use tools relies on the same epistemic conditions as the capacity to form a proposition. Human beings arrive on the evolutionary scene with the capacity to work with tools, which is inseparable from the capacity to talk. Language and tools evolve together such that the final tool is the computer. We fear that we will lose control of our lives to what had been brought into being only as a means. The story line is no different from that in which money—another tool of representation— comes to be an end in itself. Computers, money, law—all systems of representation—threaten this inversion in which humanity becomes the victim of its own free creations.47 Contemporary films deepen the anxiety over this dystopian vision as the net has increasingly become a part of our everyday life. Is the net a tool for realizing our freedom, or is it creating a closed code? A perfectly ordered representational world is one in which machines govern. They do not govern through violence but through controlling representation.

We are in the dystopia of The Matrix. The machine no longer has just a “mind of its own.” Rather, it makes our mind its own: representation grasps us so deeply that identity is no longer even imagined as a free act of self-creation. We are caught within the web and cannot get out.

The Matrix shows us a world in which representation is wholly detached from identity and thus is completely closed to interpretation.

122

f i l m a n d t he s o ci a l ima g inary

The matrix is a perfect system of representation, on the one hand, and a completely illusory world, on the other. Representation is coherent (or nearly so). Every proposition is linked to every other. There is a logic— the code—that guarantees coherence. Nevertheless, there is nothing on the other side of the representational propositions—not identity but illusion. We might find ourselves arguing about events and their significance within the matrix, but we are arguing about nothing. At stake in this argument is never who we are, because we are not there at all. In the end the argument itself is nothing more than a further twist of the code.

To see the closed character of the code is to discover that the freedom one thought one had was only an illusion, for everything we have done has been determined—a thought that already troubled Descartes almost four hundred years ago.48 He, however, had to imagine the closed system of code as a sort of dream induced by an evil genius. We have the net. Genuine freedom of the will requires a violent act set against the code. Identity begins with the willingness to sacrifice—an act that cannot be explained by the code. Identity is reconnected to representation through the act that places the body, the real body, at risk. The body must take on a meaning to ground representation in identity. Thus, the point of connection between the representational world of the matrix and the reality of identity is death: to die in the matrix is really to die.

The sacrificial body is always an expression of love, which is exactly the experience of the unity of identity and representation. Morpheus, the leader of the free subjects, explains the unity of death to Neo, the would-be savior of humanity: “the body cannot live without the mind.”

The deeper point, however, is about the unity of body and mind, or identity and representation, in love. Love refounds the world. In the film love not only supports sacrifice; it conquers death: Neo is brought back to life by the woman he loves, Trinity. Within the matrix, identity and representation can never be brought together. Love, accordingly, will always fight code.

We might take The Matrix as a dramatization of Kant’s transcendental philosophy. Kant believed that our phenomenal experience constitutes the limits of what we can know. We can speak of what must be true for us within this phenomenal world, but we are never in a position to speak of a truth beyond our possible experience. Of the thing-in-itself we simply can say nothing. Experience is structured according to a set

Violence and the State 1 2 3

of categories. Most importantly, everything we experience is causally related to some prior event. The phenomenal world, accordingly, is a complete system of representation that allows no space for freedom.

Thus, Kant faces the problem of explaining the possibility of freedom.

He tries to answer that question by explaining the relationship between identity and representation. We live, he argues, in an epistemic world of representation and a moral world of freely formed identity. We can no more give up our concept of ourselves as free than we can give up the concept of causation. We know ourselves in this double aspect, even if we cannot explain it.

In the cinematic version the noumenal world of the thing-in-itself is not just other than the phenomenal world of the matrix. That world— the “real world”—begins with humans as batteries to the machines.

Humankind must first create itself in a free act of self-appropriation; it must disestablish its link to the machine. Only then can human beings attack the closed world of representation. What then would success look like? It would be a world in which identity and representation are held together, such that we see ourselves in and through the ordered system of representations. In Kant’s terms it would be a world in which we freely give the law to ourselves. In political terms constitution follows revolution. Kant is speaking of morality, not politics, but the point is the same.

If we push the point one step further, we see the structure of the film turn in on itself in much the way that Kant’s transcendental philosophy does. What exactly would the world given by humankind to itself in an act of free self-creation look like? We have no reason to think it would be different from the representational world of the matrix. That world, created by artificial intelligence, may be the best that intelligence can do. It is not without reason that Cipher, one of the free members of the crew, chooses representation—the matrix—over identity. To get there, however, he must betray his comrades—that is, betray love. Better never to have to face this choice, which means to exist securely in the world of the matrix.

This, too, is where Kant ended up: the phenomenal world is our only world. Moreover, who is to say that the occupants of the matrix don’t have their own religious beliefs? Like Kant they can hold to the belief in a greater truth—the truly real—as a possibility beyond this life. The

124

f i l m a nd t he s o ci a l ima g inary

point is that the entire imaginative structure of identity and representation is always seen from a particular position. There is not some transcendent truth from which we literally build the world anew. It is always our world that we recreate in the free act. We are studying the social imaginary, not doing metaphysics.

This same fear of a dystopia in which the computer has turned against humanity is the theme of The Terminator.49 Where The Matrix constructs the tension between freedom and representation in spatial terms—the free space is under the earth—The Terminator uses a temporal frame.

Kant is again the essential reference: space and time are fundamental categories establishing the field of representation. The Terminator begins with the effort of the machines to restructure the past in order to control the present. Causation becomes a malleable representation in the world of code. This thought, too, is very Kantian: if time and space are simply categories of representation, then there is no essential reason why they cannot be altered. A perfect world of representation is no more one thing than another; it is literally plastic, as we see in those scenes of The Matrix in which those who completely master the code can change shape, defying cause and effect.50 To defeat the machines, in The Terminator, man will have to create himself: the child must become father of the man. We are back to the drama of freedom as self-creation, which is now cast against the complete control, including temporal control, of a closed system of representation. To open up that system is to preserve the possibility of freedom.

As in The Matrix, only through a willingness to sacrifice does one seize control of the meaning of one’s own life. To succeed is to link identity and representation. A system of representation—a machine—does not know sacrifice; it does not know love.51 In the closed system of representation that is this dystopia, there are no enemies, only criminals. There cannot be enemies until there is a free man. In The Matrix Neo’s birth into freedom is also his transition from criminal to enemy. He becomes “the One.” He is Christ, prosecuted as a criminal but proclaiming that the truth is not of this world. It is not code but love. What seemed life had been death, while true life is found only through death. The free man literally creates himself, which is just what we find in The Terminator as well. As in The Matrix, we are left to puzzle about the world that the free man gives himself. Having seen the