Allen Meek

Massey University
ameek@massey.ac.nz

 

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 “spectraleffects” (Derrida, 54) produced by electronic media.

 

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 André 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.

 

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).

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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?

 

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

 

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.

 

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).

 

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 as well 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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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

 

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.

 

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?

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

Works Cited

 

• Appadurai, Arjun. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.” The Phantom Public Sphere. Ed. Bruce Robbins. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993. 269-295.
• Benjamin, Walter. Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. Trans. Harry Zohn. London: Verso,1983.
• Cohen, Margaret. Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: U of California P, 1993.
• Davis, Mike. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. London, New York: Verso, 1990.
• Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: the State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. Intro. Bernd Magnus & Stephen Cullenberg. London, New York: Routledge, 1994.
• Denitch, Bogdan. Ethnic Nationalism: The Tragic Death of Yugoslavia. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994.
• Eisenstein, Sergei. Film Form: Essays in Film Theory. Ed. and Trans. Jay Leda. San Diego, New York, London: HBJ, 1977.
• Friedberg, Anne. Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993.
• Harvey, Sylvia. May 68 and Film Culture. London: BFI, 1980.
• Jameson, Frederic. “Marx’s Purloined Letter.” New Left Review No 209 (Jan/Feb 1995): 75-109.
• Lukacher, Ned. Primal Scenes: Literature, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis. Ithaca & London: Cornell UP, 1986.