Philip Rosen — Between Geopolitics and the Spectacle? On Cinema and the World System
A still from Society of the Spectacle (Guy Debord, 1974)
For some time now, prominent social, cultural and political theorists and critics have developed highly elaborated arguments that the contemporary world is undergoing fundamental transitions, even a historical rupture. They have done so with varied emphases on geopolitics, social formations, cultural practices, technologies, and economics, including mutations of global capitalism. Significant film scholarship has been aligned with this tendency. Just a few major examples would include mobilizing theories of postmodern media, concepts of post-cinema, and positioning cinema within new forms of public spheres. One overarching idea is that films are now are produced, distributed and received as components of a vast, qualitatively expanded multi-media universe, resulting in comprehensive changes in practices, experiences, and the status of cinema.
Yet, over and against the idea of a break, one may find predecessors in film/media history. This suggests that, even if one accepted a premise that a qualitatively new kind of multi-media universe, there remain historical inheritances and continuities. On the theoretical level, examples include Horkheimer and Adorno's concept of the culture industry, or Debord's concept of spectacle. There are also ongoing debates about film practices that resonate with earlier ones. For example, it can be argued that some of these recent approaches are overly monolithic, obscuring nuances and specificities of film history and current film/media practices; and that they do not take account of strategies emerging from local, national, and/or regional cultures and politics, as well as other kinds of aesthetic, formal, and technical insurgencies in media cultures. Good demonstrations are provided by scholarly research into the history of third cinema, including both its prehistory and its afterhistory and contemporary legacies.
This paper considers how changes in cinema have been conceived in relation to hypotheses of mutations of capitalism. It emphasizes such terms as geopolitics, spectacle, and world systems. It is framed through two canonical proposals: Jameson's "geopolitical aesthetic" and Comolli's revision of Debord's spectacle in order to envision a contemporary "cinema against spectacle." Jameson's formulation appeared in a late 20th century book, written on the heels of the Cold War with reference to world systems theory. Comolli's text was written during the seeming zenith of neoliberalism, which was also the crystallization of what T. J. Demos calls "crisis globalization" or what might be called crisis capitalism.
BIO
Philip Rosen is Professor Emeritus of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, where he is also affiliated faculty in the Departments of American Studies and English. He was founding director of the graduate program in Modern Culture in Media, is a former chairperson of that department, and was previously chairperson of the Screen Studies program at Clark University. He has published extensively in several countries and languages on a wide range of topics related to film and media theory and history, as well as cultural critique and theory, and he has given keynote addresses to several international conferences, including that of the Film Studies Association of Canada (the Martin Walsh Lecture). Among his publications is the book Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory.