Letter to the Defunct Cineaste

Kenneth W. Harrow

3.

The psychodynamics that Žižek proposed in the study of Hitchcock’s films links the following four elements: a dying patriarchy; the rise – first of women (and now, for us, of children) in place of the patriarch; an increasingly portentous materialism, as seen in the overwhelming presence of the commodity; the declining agency of the subject; the shift from liberal capitalism to globalized economies. Just as Williams destabilizes the notion of false consciousness by stressing the material nature of the social process, so too must there be a destabilization of the metaphysics of presence.

I want explore how both Williams and Žižek might offer new points of departure. For that I must bid adieu to Moolade, which was your swansong to a great career; to La Petite vendeuse, much as I hold onto the sight of “la petite” riding into the light; and even to the most recent work of Bekolo – Les Saignantes, who are only the postmodern end of this trajectory. We are now long into the effects of globalization where the postmodern was only its beginning.

I am looking at Daratt for the new engagements – at the long, sweet passages from Césaire in La Vie sur terre; looking for that autobiographical narrative which gestures outward towards the public in Si Gueriki. Especially at those voices which are speaking to us in some highly personal way, Teno in Afrique je te plumerai, Bekolo in Aristotle’s plot, and that gravely woman’s voice which  evokes the presence of Mevundu in much of Les Saignantes. Those detached, often sarcastic moments, as when Marie, in Afrique, je te plumerai, lifts her arms in mockery of de Gaulle and intones, “je vous comprends,” give us that Achebian irony which Clyde Taylor signals as the strongest possible mode of resistance to the Despot.

Williams asks us to push the limits of materialism until it becomes the frame within which a relationship between base and superstructure can become something we can envisage – less a cause and effect than a continuum. He conveys this by problematizing the separation between material social process and language when he states: “The same pressure can be observed in attempts to interpret the Marxist phrase ‘the production and reproduction of real life’ as if production were the primary social (economic) process and ‘reproduction’ its symbolic or ‘signifying’ or ‘cultural’ counterpart. Such attempts are either alternatives to the Marxist emphasis on an inherent and constitutive ‘practical consciousness,’ or, at their best, ways of specifying its actual operations. The problem is different, from the beginning, if we see language and signification as indissoluble elements of the material social process itself, involved all the time both in production and reproduction” (33 CP). Without this sense of a continuum on which materiality is always functioning, we are locked into an ideological determinism in which the interpellations of the apparatuses do all the calling, with our subjectivity responding in automatic fashion. Likewise, our resistance to the globalized economy has to be performed as we skirt along the edges of those social patterns of class, political engagements, economic pressures which always result in the poor, semi-employed youths in Africa clambering onto unsafe skiffs and risking their lives to get to some El Dorado constructed out of the detritus of television shows from the north.

Now is the time to reinvent Fanon. All of yeserday’s anger and rage will not help any more. There is no way to pick up arms and answer the call to action; there is no place to refer to when calling for the sacrifices that will insure a better future. The dreams on the street are now transformed into unrecognizable signs, whose powers are derived from such drug induced states of intoxicating mall-shopping that no cash economy can ever satisfy, while back in the quartier the lights continue to go out, the water to be shut off and the traffic clogged. Ben Okri could not create such a world – the African urban landscape that has become home for most Africans, and that has to become the mise en scene for the films of tomorrow. Our criticism must emerge from that space alone – one that is excessive, in the sense of exceeding the frame. Like a melodrama.

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