Papers by Sudipto Basu
A Peer-Reviewed Journal About, 2020
In a world-order where planetary computational networks have restructured nearly all spheres of e... more In a world-order where planetary computational networks have restructured nearly all spheres of existence, what is not already networked lies in wait merely as standing-reserve. Today, it seems as if the network and the world are naturally interoperable. Thinking through Harun Farocki’s work on operational images, I however locate a zone of friction or incommensurability between the network and the world. Revisiting Norbert Wiener’s anti-aircraft predictor – a founding episode in the history of cybernetics – I show how this gap was bridged by a logic of (en)closures that reduced the living human form and the world to narrow operational ends; banishing the openness and indeterminacy of both life and nature into undesirable contingency. However, cybernetics’ relentless expansion into a universal episteme and planetary infrastructure since the Cold war necessarily floods the network with contingency; which it wards off by feeding on a disavowed living labor. I argue that this living la...
Visual Past, 2023
This paper addresses the recurrence of monster tropes in narratives or allegories of catastrophic... more This paper addresses the recurrence of monster tropes in narratives or allegories of catastrophic climate change through the experimental documentaries Leviathan (dir. Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verene Paravel, 2012) and Behemoth (dir. Zhao Liang, 2015)-which depict the turbulent frontiers of extraction in deep sea fishing and mining respectively. Taking extractive frontiers as critical zones, I propose monstrosity in one sense as a master trope for the scalar mangle-or derangement-typical of the Anthropocene, and critique the localist bias underpinning Latour's analytic of the critical zone. In another sense, I take the monstrous in both films as figures of what Georges Bataille called the formless: the irreducible excess excluded by capitalist reason in every act of subsuming nature (or the outside). Monstrosity, I argue, lets us understand the dynamic of separation and exclusion on both social and material realms at the extractive frontier. The monstrous is both the waste matter that is excluded in the extractive act and the racialized surplus populations who perform the labor of extraction. In the last section of the paper, I consider Leviathan and Behemoth in Thomas Hobbes's political philosophy as monstrous prefigurations of paranoid political ecology today-figures created in a mortal fear of the horizontal. Against Hobbesian catastrophism, I suggest, Bataille and the films Leviathan and Behemoth propose an ecological ethic that allows us to live better in Anthropocenic turbulence by reconciling with the otherness subtending our finite human existence.
Keywords: Monstrosity, Scalar Mangle, Extraction, Formless, Horizontality
Critical Collective, 2023
A study of the Indian state's struggles to set up a regulatory body for the Hindi film industry i... more A study of the Indian state's struggles to set up a regulatory body for the Hindi film industry in the 1960s, and the alternate movement it gave birth to in the process.
Transmediale 2021: Research Refusal Newsletter, 2021
A short manifesto (of sorts) and newsletter on logistical capital and resistance to it in the Glo... more A short manifesto (of sorts) and newsletter on logistical capital and resistance to it in the Global South, from our research collective Logistical (B)orders - Eylul, Geoff and me.
This newsletter was made collaboratively as part of the Research Refusal workshop in transmediale 2021 (organized by DARC, Aarhus University and partners), after a few months long exchange of ideas via a listserv. The design/execution of the newsletter is by Open Source Publishing (osp.kitchen).
See other transmediale research workshop newsletters at https://darc.au.dk/publications/peer-reviewed-newspaper/
IIC Quarterly / India International Centre Quarterly, 2021
In this essay, I analyze a dominant generic style in contemporary Indian cinema/web series that I... more In this essay, I analyze a dominant generic style in contemporary Indian cinema/web series that I call cynical realism (think, as an analog, Mark Fisher's notion of capitalist realism). Through a close reading of the recent, critically acclaimed web series Paatal Lok (a succinct, pithy representative of this style - perhaps the best of its kind), I try to trace its precedents within a certain genealogy of filmic realism in India - which extends into the hinterland cop film and the new Bollywood noir - and the way this generic mode negotiates developmentalist desires and the failure of revolutionary politics.
I originally wanted to make a larger argument about why cynical realism is tailormade for OTT/sVOD content because it inculcates an interfacial passivity, but it's just kept to a stray line or two in the coda/conclusion. Hopefully I'll get a chance to tease out these thoughts later.
Firstpost, Aug 3, 2020
[Article arguing for the historical roots of nepotism in Bollywood via political economy]
Firstp... more [Article arguing for the historical roots of nepotism in Bollywood via political economy]
Firstpost blurb:
Nepotism is encouraged, above all, by a film industry marked by high risk and volatility. Under such circumstances, the star – who accumulates an almost divine aura in his person – comes to be the biggest investment the producer makes to guarantee a film’s success.
APRJA (A Peer Reviewed Journal About), 2020
In a world-order where planetary computational networks have restructured nearly all spheres of e... more In a world-order where planetary computational networks have restructured nearly all spheres of existence, what is not already networked lies in wait merely as standing-reserve. Today, it seems as if the network and the world are naturally interoperable. Thinking through Harun Farocki's work on operational images, I however locate a zone of friction or incommensurability between the network and the world. Revisiting Norbert Wiener's anti-aircraft predictor-a founding episode in the history of cybernetics-I show how this gap was bridged by a logic of (en)closures that reduced the living human form and the world to narrow operational ends; banishing the openness and indeterminacy of both life and nature into undesirable contingency. However, cybernetics' relentless expansion into a universal episteme and planetary infrastructure since the Cold war necessarily floods the network with contingency; which it wards off by feeding on a disavowed living labor. I argue that this living labor is an uneasy reconciliation of mechanism and vitalism, which we may call habits. Drawing on the Marxian notion of general intellect, I posit how habits are key to generating network surplus value, and to cybernetic expansionism. Habits shape, prepare the outside for its subsumption into the network. Yet they are not given the status of productive activity, and consequently disavowed and vaporized by networks. I propose that this living labor be given a specific name-interfacing-and, following Georges Bataille's critique of political economy, speculate on the reasons for its disavowal. Drawing on Bataille's idea of the general in 'general economy' (that which is opposed to utilitarian or operational ends) and Hito Steyerl's How Not to Be Seen, I try to imagine what an interface contiguous with the general intellect might be.
Critical Collective, 2020
In this short paper, I give an overview of the experimental turn of Films Division documentaries ... more In this short paper, I give an overview of the experimental turn of Films Division documentaries (especially the most intense phase from 1967-69) focusing on the shift in governmentality during these years. Coinciding with Indira Gandhi's rise to political power during a key "moment of disaggregation" and concurrent changes in media policy, these experimental films register the discontents of Nehruvian modernity (its austere governance of the senses) and open up a medial space, so far restricted to bureaucratic-state actors, to outside claimants. Ultimately, I argue, the sensory intensification captured by these films point to the explosion of the hegemonic bureaucratic frame in India's national politics and predict the authoritarian-populism to come 1970s onwards.
Critical Collective, 2019
Review of Naeem Mohaiemen's solo exhibition dui (two), which showed in Experimenter Kolkata (Hind... more Review of Naeem Mohaiemen's solo exhibition dui (two), which showed in Experimenter Kolkata (Hindustan Road) from August 23 to November 5. Artworks in the exhibit are: Baksho Rohoshyo (Chobi Tumi Kar?); Rankin Street 1953; and Volume 11 (A Flaw in the Algorithm of Cosmopolitanism).
Commissioned by and published in Critical Collective on 22 October 2019.
Review of Johnnie To's breakout film, The Mission (1999), written for the blog for ‘Riding the Wa... more Review of Johnnie To's breakout film, The Mission (1999), written for the blog for ‘Riding the Waves’ — A DC Chinese Film Festival Retrospective of the New Wave Chinese Cinema of the 80’s and 90’s, which ran from September 21-24, 2017.
Thesis Chapters by Sudipto Basu
This dissertation tracks three decades of the relationship between the Bombay film industry and t... more This dissertation tracks three decades of the relationship between the Bombay film industry and the Indian state as it relates to the question of infrastructural reform. This period is bracketed off by 1939, the year of the All India Motion Picture Congress, and 1969, the year the Indian New Wave burst onto the scene.
Briefly, what I show in the dissertation is that the project of reform of the Bombay film industry was always already delayed, missing the mark or slipping by. While the factors responsible for such a state of affairs are too many to enlist, the two main ones can be, at the risk of simplification, be declared outright. One is the failure of the political class which made up the post-Independence state to understand the very nature of cinema: the range of affects it generates, its play with desire. Secondly, and tied to the first reason, is the failure of the Congress-led state to recognize or match up to the dynamics of indigenous capital, which was effectively the determinant economic force within the film industry. In short, what the Congress-coalition missed in its attempt to size up the film industry to the austere ideals of Nehruvian socialism was that this indigenous capital was itself shifting alliances, tapping into newer reserves of popular energy, desire and affect as the 60s were ending. The fast-eroding nationalist consensus between state and capital which, I hope to show, ultimately led to the paradigmatic shifts in the film industry could not in retrospect be contained either by rigorous policymaking, mere censoring of film content or relentless taxing, yet this is what the state unsuccessfully tried to do.
Conference Presentations by Sudipto Basu
Presented at the international conference "Critical Zone," organized by the University of Hamburg... more Presented at the international conference "Critical Zone," organized by the University of Hamburg, Warburg-Haus, Hamburg, February 21-22, 2019.
This paper addresses the recurring appearance of certain mythic monsters as archetypes in contemporary imaginations of the End of the World. I have in mind the titular invocations in films like Leviathan (dir. Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verene Paravel, 2012) and Behemoth (dir. Zhao Liang, 2015); as well as in Donna Haraway’s characterization of the contemporary’s “dynamic, sym-chthonic,” “relentlessly diffracted time-space” as the Chthulucene. (Haraway, of course, both invokes and distances herself from Lovecraft’s misogynist, xenophobic monster.) In Leviathan and Behemoth – experimental documentaries (or ‘sensory ethnographies’), respectively, on deep-sea fishing off the coast of New Bedford and large-scale strip-mining in Inner Mongolia – the mythical monsters loom on the horizon like a virtual presence, trying to orient our vision within a regime of images where the human body cannot serve as an anchor anymore (explicitly so in Leviathan – which revels in a decentered post-anthropocentric gaze by creating images from ‘impossible’, groundless perspectives which nonetheless cohere). These critical zones, life-worlds of ecological precarity require, as it were, a new sort of precarious image which goes far beyond the usual discussions of the digital image’s lack of scale or indexicality (in the context of, say, environmental infovis). An image always at the precipice of a dissolution into blackness (in Leviathan) or a fractalization into shards (in Behemoth). My interest is, then, in understanding how the films reconfigure visuality in the critical zone, suggesting both an extreme intimacy as well as estrangement characteristic of life (a life beyond the human) in this liminal condition.
Yet, I am also intrigued by a second line of enquiry: that Leviathan and Behemoth happen to be the titles of Thomas Hobbes’ famous treatises on governance – on the foundation of a kingly sovereignty that can overcome the chaotic ‘State of Nature’ of the English civil war. As Carl Schmitt’s commentary on Hobbes indicates, the essence of the biblical Leviathan-as-sovereign is that it plays the role of the katechon (“Restrainer”) by founding a new order of politicized time superseding the normal: the state of exception. The state of exception, as the time preceding the coming of the Anti-Christ, is an apocalyptic time-before-the-end in which History is at its most intense. In repeatedly invoking visions of an ‘apocalyptic primordiality,’ the films Leviathan and Behemoth point to the ambiguous temporality of the critical zone: where both life passes into death (in the ‘End of History’) and new forms of life are born from the old. The question for these films, contra Schmitt, is if this inauguration of a new time necessarily has to pass through the forms of sovereignty tied to a vertical, human, landed existence. Through Georges Bataille’s theorization of sovereignty and its antinomic relation to horizontality, I shall argue that this is the political import of Behemoth and Leviathan’s willful defiance of a vertical mode of seeing (whose most ideal form is Renaissance perspective). It is their founding of a new aesthetic form, a new image that resists the recapture of a sensory precarity into apparatuses of security (as Schmitt would prefer to have it).
Presented at the international conference, "Disciplinarity in a Digital Age : An Exploration into... more Presented at the international conference, "Disciplinarity in a Digital Age : An Exploration into the Transformation of Disciplines," organized by the Dept. of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Delhi, 10-12 January 2019.
This paper studies the emergence of cybernetics as a historical/political transformation of disciplinarity at the dawn of the digital age in Cold War America. It proposes that blackboxing the world as unknowable in-itself paradoxically gave cybernetics a productive positivism, a practically unlimited ability to do things: what could not be known immediately could nonetheless be grasped for a specific purpose by feedback-corrected modeling. This broke down erstwhile disciplinary boundaries in the natural and human sciences, re-structuring their epistemes, even as it integrated them under the dominance of an almost universal claim of scientificity. I shall map this re-structuring of disciplines through the oft-elided exchanges between cybernetics and post/structuralism.
But I’m also interested in something else. A contemporary of Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics treatise, Georges Bataille’s Accursed Share proposed that social systems are situated within a cosmic General Economy that is defined by the inexhaustible circulation of energy initiated by the sun’s gift of heat/light. Furthermore, it ruled, the resulting surplus in the world means that excess has to be burnt up through sacrifice or squander. Though both general economy and cybernetics emerged just after the War with a claim to be new universal disciplines, between them remained an irreducible political chasm (which might explain their widely diverging fates within the academy). Born within the ‘closed world’ of the Cold War military-industrial complex and yoked to a global process of securitization and accumulation, cybernetics was an anxious discipline where the encounter with an inhuman, cosmic totality almost immediately produced a deep desire to smuggle back the human. General economy, I argue, showed another ethical possibility for a universal discipline: it privileged the unconscious proliferation of the surplus, celebrated useless consumption of the excess and had no trouble accepting the sacrificial dimension of society. It proposed an acephalic disciplinarity not subservient to the One of a polarizing closed world discourse: opening to the Earth as a space of regeneration far from closed to the future. My sense is that this conjunction of general economy and cybernetics might allow us to better understand the stakes of the disciplinary turn around the Anthropocene, where so much theory is being produced through a similar interdisciplinary ‘bleeding’ to avert the spectre of a disaster.
The first conference paper I presented on the an-archival impulses and mediatic/conceptual/percep... more The first conference paper I presented on the an-archival impulses and mediatic/conceptual/perceptual expansions of the "experimental" phase of Films Division, India. Presented at the "Encountering World Cinema in India" international conference organized by the Dept. of Film Studies, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, November 3-4, 2016
While the emergence of today’s big data infrastructure with the military-industrial complex has b... more While the emergence of today’s big data infrastructure with the military-industrial complex has been thoroughly studied (its origins in the military laboratory, etc.), my paper locates a cultural logic working beneath this familiar history. Preliminarily, I suggest that the emergence of big data as a cultural form, interpellating us all into its web, is linked to a sensory precarity first felt globally during the Cold War. The constant threat of instant nuclear annihilation created subjects wary of sensory excess, withdrawn from the world; who had to delegate vision (and speculative sensing) to intelligent machines tasked with pre-empting disaster. This led to the creation of a virtual Earth (holding out the promise of habitability), in turn precipitating a new aesthetic logic, a new framing of experience by technology. My contention is that, at the time, cinema too had to reconfigure itself in order to better understand this precarious world condition. Drawing upon two experimental filmmakers, Godard (the Sonimage period, 1974-79) and Harun Farocki, the paper argues that one locus of big data’s emergence is the transition of modern visuality from a cinematic regime to a regime of the operational image. Unlike the cinematic, the operational image exists primarily to autonomously act upon a process operation: it enmeshes visual sensing, (re-)presentation and action within a cybernetic loop, subordinating it all to a defined function. Both Godard and Farocki understood at their historical juncture that the imminent new media condition required the frame of cinema to undergo mutations, to expand across multiple screens, in order to be able to respond to a slippery sense of reality. The paper traces through them how an evidentiary impetus – a drive to uncover what Baudrillard called the ‘perfect crime’ (the ‘murder of reality’) – therefore constitutes the politics of big data: impelling both filmmakers to chart planetary visuality via spectral histories (or media archaeologies) of cinema.
Drafts by Sudipto Basu
Not a paper, properly speaking, but an assignment for a Research Methods course I took during my ... more Not a paper, properly speaking, but an assignment for a Research Methods course I took during my M.Phil coursework in Monsoon Sem, 2017 at SAA, JNU. It required us to speak of the historiography of screen media workers through certain assigned texts (Ross, Christopherson, Curtin/Sanson, Farocki), with the freedom to choose whatever else we found relevant. Putting it online since I find it to be a somewhat useful guide to labour historiography within film/media history. Would ideally want to get it converted into an intro sort-of chapter if anyone is interested.
Teaching Documents by Sudipto Basu
Uploads
Papers by Sudipto Basu
Keywords: Monstrosity, Scalar Mangle, Extraction, Formless, Horizontality
This newsletter was made collaboratively as part of the Research Refusal workshop in transmediale 2021 (organized by DARC, Aarhus University and partners), after a few months long exchange of ideas via a listserv. The design/execution of the newsletter is by Open Source Publishing (osp.kitchen).
See other transmediale research workshop newsletters at https://darc.au.dk/publications/peer-reviewed-newspaper/
I originally wanted to make a larger argument about why cynical realism is tailormade for OTT/sVOD content because it inculcates an interfacial passivity, but it's just kept to a stray line or two in the coda/conclusion. Hopefully I'll get a chance to tease out these thoughts later.
Firstpost blurb:
Nepotism is encouraged, above all, by a film industry marked by high risk and volatility. Under such circumstances, the star – who accumulates an almost divine aura in his person – comes to be the biggest investment the producer makes to guarantee a film’s success.
Commissioned by and published in Critical Collective on 22 October 2019.
Thesis Chapters by Sudipto Basu
Briefly, what I show in the dissertation is that the project of reform of the Bombay film industry was always already delayed, missing the mark or slipping by. While the factors responsible for such a state of affairs are too many to enlist, the two main ones can be, at the risk of simplification, be declared outright. One is the failure of the political class which made up the post-Independence state to understand the very nature of cinema: the range of affects it generates, its play with desire. Secondly, and tied to the first reason, is the failure of the Congress-led state to recognize or match up to the dynamics of indigenous capital, which was effectively the determinant economic force within the film industry. In short, what the Congress-coalition missed in its attempt to size up the film industry to the austere ideals of Nehruvian socialism was that this indigenous capital was itself shifting alliances, tapping into newer reserves of popular energy, desire and affect as the 60s were ending. The fast-eroding nationalist consensus between state and capital which, I hope to show, ultimately led to the paradigmatic shifts in the film industry could not in retrospect be contained either by rigorous policymaking, mere censoring of film content or relentless taxing, yet this is what the state unsuccessfully tried to do.
Conference Presentations by Sudipto Basu
This paper addresses the recurring appearance of certain mythic monsters as archetypes in contemporary imaginations of the End of the World. I have in mind the titular invocations in films like Leviathan (dir. Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verene Paravel, 2012) and Behemoth (dir. Zhao Liang, 2015); as well as in Donna Haraway’s characterization of the contemporary’s “dynamic, sym-chthonic,” “relentlessly diffracted time-space” as the Chthulucene. (Haraway, of course, both invokes and distances herself from Lovecraft’s misogynist, xenophobic monster.) In Leviathan and Behemoth – experimental documentaries (or ‘sensory ethnographies’), respectively, on deep-sea fishing off the coast of New Bedford and large-scale strip-mining in Inner Mongolia – the mythical monsters loom on the horizon like a virtual presence, trying to orient our vision within a regime of images where the human body cannot serve as an anchor anymore (explicitly so in Leviathan – which revels in a decentered post-anthropocentric gaze by creating images from ‘impossible’, groundless perspectives which nonetheless cohere). These critical zones, life-worlds of ecological precarity require, as it were, a new sort of precarious image which goes far beyond the usual discussions of the digital image’s lack of scale or indexicality (in the context of, say, environmental infovis). An image always at the precipice of a dissolution into blackness (in Leviathan) or a fractalization into shards (in Behemoth). My interest is, then, in understanding how the films reconfigure visuality in the critical zone, suggesting both an extreme intimacy as well as estrangement characteristic of life (a life beyond the human) in this liminal condition.
Yet, I am also intrigued by a second line of enquiry: that Leviathan and Behemoth happen to be the titles of Thomas Hobbes’ famous treatises on governance – on the foundation of a kingly sovereignty that can overcome the chaotic ‘State of Nature’ of the English civil war. As Carl Schmitt’s commentary on Hobbes indicates, the essence of the biblical Leviathan-as-sovereign is that it plays the role of the katechon (“Restrainer”) by founding a new order of politicized time superseding the normal: the state of exception. The state of exception, as the time preceding the coming of the Anti-Christ, is an apocalyptic time-before-the-end in which History is at its most intense. In repeatedly invoking visions of an ‘apocalyptic primordiality,’ the films Leviathan and Behemoth point to the ambiguous temporality of the critical zone: where both life passes into death (in the ‘End of History’) and new forms of life are born from the old. The question for these films, contra Schmitt, is if this inauguration of a new time necessarily has to pass through the forms of sovereignty tied to a vertical, human, landed existence. Through Georges Bataille’s theorization of sovereignty and its antinomic relation to horizontality, I shall argue that this is the political import of Behemoth and Leviathan’s willful defiance of a vertical mode of seeing (whose most ideal form is Renaissance perspective). It is their founding of a new aesthetic form, a new image that resists the recapture of a sensory precarity into apparatuses of security (as Schmitt would prefer to have it).
This paper studies the emergence of cybernetics as a historical/political transformation of disciplinarity at the dawn of the digital age in Cold War America. It proposes that blackboxing the world as unknowable in-itself paradoxically gave cybernetics a productive positivism, a practically unlimited ability to do things: what could not be known immediately could nonetheless be grasped for a specific purpose by feedback-corrected modeling. This broke down erstwhile disciplinary boundaries in the natural and human sciences, re-structuring their epistemes, even as it integrated them under the dominance of an almost universal claim of scientificity. I shall map this re-structuring of disciplines through the oft-elided exchanges between cybernetics and post/structuralism.
But I’m also interested in something else. A contemporary of Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics treatise, Georges Bataille’s Accursed Share proposed that social systems are situated within a cosmic General Economy that is defined by the inexhaustible circulation of energy initiated by the sun’s gift of heat/light. Furthermore, it ruled, the resulting surplus in the world means that excess has to be burnt up through sacrifice or squander. Though both general economy and cybernetics emerged just after the War with a claim to be new universal disciplines, between them remained an irreducible political chasm (which might explain their widely diverging fates within the academy). Born within the ‘closed world’ of the Cold War military-industrial complex and yoked to a global process of securitization and accumulation, cybernetics was an anxious discipline where the encounter with an inhuman, cosmic totality almost immediately produced a deep desire to smuggle back the human. General economy, I argue, showed another ethical possibility for a universal discipline: it privileged the unconscious proliferation of the surplus, celebrated useless consumption of the excess and had no trouble accepting the sacrificial dimension of society. It proposed an acephalic disciplinarity not subservient to the One of a polarizing closed world discourse: opening to the Earth as a space of regeneration far from closed to the future. My sense is that this conjunction of general economy and cybernetics might allow us to better understand the stakes of the disciplinary turn around the Anthropocene, where so much theory is being produced through a similar interdisciplinary ‘bleeding’ to avert the spectre of a disaster.
Drafts by Sudipto Basu
Teaching Documents by Sudipto Basu
Keywords: Monstrosity, Scalar Mangle, Extraction, Formless, Horizontality
This newsletter was made collaboratively as part of the Research Refusal workshop in transmediale 2021 (organized by DARC, Aarhus University and partners), after a few months long exchange of ideas via a listserv. The design/execution of the newsletter is by Open Source Publishing (osp.kitchen).
See other transmediale research workshop newsletters at https://darc.au.dk/publications/peer-reviewed-newspaper/
I originally wanted to make a larger argument about why cynical realism is tailormade for OTT/sVOD content because it inculcates an interfacial passivity, but it's just kept to a stray line or two in the coda/conclusion. Hopefully I'll get a chance to tease out these thoughts later.
Firstpost blurb:
Nepotism is encouraged, above all, by a film industry marked by high risk and volatility. Under such circumstances, the star – who accumulates an almost divine aura in his person – comes to be the biggest investment the producer makes to guarantee a film’s success.
Commissioned by and published in Critical Collective on 22 October 2019.
Briefly, what I show in the dissertation is that the project of reform of the Bombay film industry was always already delayed, missing the mark or slipping by. While the factors responsible for such a state of affairs are too many to enlist, the two main ones can be, at the risk of simplification, be declared outright. One is the failure of the political class which made up the post-Independence state to understand the very nature of cinema: the range of affects it generates, its play with desire. Secondly, and tied to the first reason, is the failure of the Congress-led state to recognize or match up to the dynamics of indigenous capital, which was effectively the determinant economic force within the film industry. In short, what the Congress-coalition missed in its attempt to size up the film industry to the austere ideals of Nehruvian socialism was that this indigenous capital was itself shifting alliances, tapping into newer reserves of popular energy, desire and affect as the 60s were ending. The fast-eroding nationalist consensus between state and capital which, I hope to show, ultimately led to the paradigmatic shifts in the film industry could not in retrospect be contained either by rigorous policymaking, mere censoring of film content or relentless taxing, yet this is what the state unsuccessfully tried to do.
This paper addresses the recurring appearance of certain mythic monsters as archetypes in contemporary imaginations of the End of the World. I have in mind the titular invocations in films like Leviathan (dir. Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verene Paravel, 2012) and Behemoth (dir. Zhao Liang, 2015); as well as in Donna Haraway’s characterization of the contemporary’s “dynamic, sym-chthonic,” “relentlessly diffracted time-space” as the Chthulucene. (Haraway, of course, both invokes and distances herself from Lovecraft’s misogynist, xenophobic monster.) In Leviathan and Behemoth – experimental documentaries (or ‘sensory ethnographies’), respectively, on deep-sea fishing off the coast of New Bedford and large-scale strip-mining in Inner Mongolia – the mythical monsters loom on the horizon like a virtual presence, trying to orient our vision within a regime of images where the human body cannot serve as an anchor anymore (explicitly so in Leviathan – which revels in a decentered post-anthropocentric gaze by creating images from ‘impossible’, groundless perspectives which nonetheless cohere). These critical zones, life-worlds of ecological precarity require, as it were, a new sort of precarious image which goes far beyond the usual discussions of the digital image’s lack of scale or indexicality (in the context of, say, environmental infovis). An image always at the precipice of a dissolution into blackness (in Leviathan) or a fractalization into shards (in Behemoth). My interest is, then, in understanding how the films reconfigure visuality in the critical zone, suggesting both an extreme intimacy as well as estrangement characteristic of life (a life beyond the human) in this liminal condition.
Yet, I am also intrigued by a second line of enquiry: that Leviathan and Behemoth happen to be the titles of Thomas Hobbes’ famous treatises on governance – on the foundation of a kingly sovereignty that can overcome the chaotic ‘State of Nature’ of the English civil war. As Carl Schmitt’s commentary on Hobbes indicates, the essence of the biblical Leviathan-as-sovereign is that it plays the role of the katechon (“Restrainer”) by founding a new order of politicized time superseding the normal: the state of exception. The state of exception, as the time preceding the coming of the Anti-Christ, is an apocalyptic time-before-the-end in which History is at its most intense. In repeatedly invoking visions of an ‘apocalyptic primordiality,’ the films Leviathan and Behemoth point to the ambiguous temporality of the critical zone: where both life passes into death (in the ‘End of History’) and new forms of life are born from the old. The question for these films, contra Schmitt, is if this inauguration of a new time necessarily has to pass through the forms of sovereignty tied to a vertical, human, landed existence. Through Georges Bataille’s theorization of sovereignty and its antinomic relation to horizontality, I shall argue that this is the political import of Behemoth and Leviathan’s willful defiance of a vertical mode of seeing (whose most ideal form is Renaissance perspective). It is their founding of a new aesthetic form, a new image that resists the recapture of a sensory precarity into apparatuses of security (as Schmitt would prefer to have it).
This paper studies the emergence of cybernetics as a historical/political transformation of disciplinarity at the dawn of the digital age in Cold War America. It proposes that blackboxing the world as unknowable in-itself paradoxically gave cybernetics a productive positivism, a practically unlimited ability to do things: what could not be known immediately could nonetheless be grasped for a specific purpose by feedback-corrected modeling. This broke down erstwhile disciplinary boundaries in the natural and human sciences, re-structuring their epistemes, even as it integrated them under the dominance of an almost universal claim of scientificity. I shall map this re-structuring of disciplines through the oft-elided exchanges between cybernetics and post/structuralism.
But I’m also interested in something else. A contemporary of Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics treatise, Georges Bataille’s Accursed Share proposed that social systems are situated within a cosmic General Economy that is defined by the inexhaustible circulation of energy initiated by the sun’s gift of heat/light. Furthermore, it ruled, the resulting surplus in the world means that excess has to be burnt up through sacrifice or squander. Though both general economy and cybernetics emerged just after the War with a claim to be new universal disciplines, between them remained an irreducible political chasm (which might explain their widely diverging fates within the academy). Born within the ‘closed world’ of the Cold War military-industrial complex and yoked to a global process of securitization and accumulation, cybernetics was an anxious discipline where the encounter with an inhuman, cosmic totality almost immediately produced a deep desire to smuggle back the human. General economy, I argue, showed another ethical possibility for a universal discipline: it privileged the unconscious proliferation of the surplus, celebrated useless consumption of the excess and had no trouble accepting the sacrificial dimension of society. It proposed an acephalic disciplinarity not subservient to the One of a polarizing closed world discourse: opening to the Earth as a space of regeneration far from closed to the future. My sense is that this conjunction of general economy and cybernetics might allow us to better understand the stakes of the disciplinary turn around the Anthropocene, where so much theory is being produced through a similar interdisciplinary ‘bleeding’ to avert the spectre of a disaster.