Marco Abel

Don DeLillo’s “In the Ruins of the Future”: Literature, Images, and the Rhetoric of Seeing 9/11

This essay explores the rhetorical strategies deployed by Don DeLillo in his essay on 9/11. What distinguishes the essay is less what it says about 9/11 than how, in responding to the event, it puts the question of response at stake. Resisting the demand to speak with moral clarity and declare what 9/11 means, he instead shows that response is always a question of response-ability, or the ethical “how.” To image 9/11, DeLillo rhetorically activates a neorealist mode of seeing that differs ethically from other accounts of perception, such as those of (neo)phenomenology. Whereas the latter locate the perceiving subject’s perspective outside an event, DeLillo insists that point of view—the act of seeing—is immanent in the event. Responding to this immanence, DeLillo’s rhetoric of seeing suspends and questions any representational judgment of 9/11. (MA)

Speeding Across the Rhizome: Deleuze Meets Kerouac On the Road

[E]verything important that has happened or is happening takes the route of the American rhizome: the beatniks, the underground, bands and gangs, successive lateral offshots in immediate connection with an outside. [. . .] And directions in America are different: the search for arborescence and the return to the Old World occur in the East. But there is the rhizomatic West, with its Indians without ancestry, its ever-receding limit, its shifting and displaced frontiers. There is a whole American map in the West ̧ where even the trees form rhizomes. America reversed the directions: it put its Orient in the West, as if it were precisely in America that the earth came full circle; its West is the edge of the East. —Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

Introduction: what was politics in “1968” in West Germany?

This special issue on the question of what politics was in West Germany in “1968” – a cypher we will return to below – has emerged out of a three-day seminar we had organized for the 2013 annual meeting of the German Studies Association in Denver, Colorado. “Nineteen sixty-eight,” we had suggested in our call for participants, marked the culminating point of a global wave of protest movements and a major turning point in postwar German history and politics. The student protest movement’s challenges to the traditional order reverberated in West German politics, society, and culture; and while East Germany did not see the same level of turmoil, youthand student-inspired protests in the West and other parts of the Eastern Bloc affected the German Democratic Republic (GDR), too. Yet, for decades, interpretations of the events were dominated by those who at the time actually participated in the debates and battles: the Achtundsechziger (sixty-eighters) and their detractors. The past decade, however, has witnessed the publication of numerous groundbreaking scholarly works (selectively discussed below) demonstrating these events’ multifaceted nature and offering new perspectives on the politics of the time, perhaps not least due to these scholars’ greater historical, but also emotional and ideological, distance from the actual events. Our seminar, therefore, sought to move beyond the many commonplaces about 1968 with which we have become overly familiar (not least from a steady diet of media indoctrination) and tried to reopen the question of what politics was in 1968; we asked participants to present on materials that might serve as provocations both to rethink these very commonplaces and to demonstrate how more recent scholarship of and approaches to 1968 has yielded, and might yet yield, new insights into these tumultuous events. When we first conceived of the seminar question, however, we did so based on our own scholarly interests as, respectively, an historian interested in the history of American GIs in West Germany after World War II and a scholar of German film history with an emphasis on post-unification cinema. Neither of us is a scholar of the Sixties per se, yet we discovered that our own current scholarly interests – revolving around the question of the role GIs played in West German culture in the 1960s and how their presence intersected with the political developments of that decade on the one hand and, on the other, around the question of the history of the notion of “political” cinema in West Germany as it emerged in conjunction with those same political developments – intersected precisely on the notion of the

Underground Film Germany in the Age of Control Societies: The Cologne Group

The problem is no longer getting people to express themselves, but providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don’t stop people from expressing themselves, but rather, force them to express themselves. What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, or ever rarer, the thing that might be worth saying.” (Gilles Deleuze, “Mediators” 287–288)

German Cinema Since Unification, edited by David Clarke. London: Continuum, 2006

helps to explain a central effect in Godard’s series. Just as the cinephile goes back and forth over his favorite moments on the VCR, Godard rewinds and fast-forwards the same passages from Ford, Hitchcock, Renoir, and Welles. Godard’s video series situates itself as a species of sophisticated cinephilia that takes place in the video and post-video age. Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma surely performs a kind of cinephilia, but a wide-ranging cinephilia that shows how many, many different ways there are to love. In The Searchers, Ethan’s love for Debbie is only a breath away from homicidal violence. That must be why Godard keeps quoting that passage. Many of the sequences in the Histoire(s)du cinéma feel celebratory, even nostalgic (especially the celebration of Italian cinema at the end of 3A), but altogether the love of cinema is scarcely simple. Godard repeatedly provides the perfect quote for Keathley’s need to preserve mystery: “The cinema is neither an art nor a technique, but a mystery.” But alternating with images of angels and resurrection are pictures of Holocaust camps and a century-long atmosphere of violence and horror. On the one hand, the cinema is a kind of miracle and thus worthy of our love. But, on the other hand, to love movies is also to love what is ultimately celluloid, vacuity, and absence. Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma provide a visual answer to Keathley’s call for cinephiliac moments in a non-linear history, but one which refuses to separate aesthetic pleasure from ideological critique, and which shows how many guises love wears, even unto nightmarish disgust.

The Cinema of the Low Countries

and Stoppard—in which the space of the theatre and the constructedness of the characters has been used as a way of exploring the theatricality and scriptedness of our actual lives. Like Pirandello’s and Stoppard’s characters, many of the major characters in the trilogy offer their own self-reflexive commentary about the “drama” in which they find themselves. For the Merovingian, of course, nothing is outside the script; everything is determined by principles of cause and effect. The Oracle, however, seems to pose a challenge to this principle. Although she herself is just one of the many programs of the Matrix, her task is to investigate “certain aspects of the human psyche” and, in doing so, she necessarily unbalances it, creating the possibility for the “revolutions” of the final film. Indeed, Sheehan notes that love itself is repeatedly shown to undermine the causality and determinism championed by the Merovingian, and Sheehan sets this observation alongside a consideration of philosophers who have refused the “faith” of causality, including Kant, Hume, and, most powerfully, Nietzsche, who saw all reasoned principles as being built on anthropomorphic images rather than on any ground of immanence. Of course, Neo is the ultimate figure to test the hermetic causality of the cyberworld. By the end of The Matrix Reloaded, however, he has realized that he is essentially a “hope machine,” a creation of the Matrix itself, designed to channel and ultimately disperse subversive energies. Even so, Morpheus refuses to concede to this cynical possibility, resting his faith in Neo on a distinction between fate and providence that derives, Sheehan argues, from Augustine. If Neo recovers his Messianic qualities at the trilogy’s closing, however, he is seen to be the providential instrument not of an anthropomorphic god, but of a mega-machine, “and a bleak, retrospective shadow is cast over the Matrix trilogy” (171). Sheehan’s essay is a strong closing to a book, which, on the whole, is rather uneven in depth and facility of argumentation. Certainly, one should expect that the essays in a contributory volume would form more of a hypertext than a monologic text, but those Matrix enthusiasts committed to reading the whole volume may wish that Gillis had imposed a stronger editorial hand. The two large sections into which she divides the book (and which I have largely ignored in this review) do not really facilitate its digestion. And while academics will be able to endure the convoluted style that is practically the hallmark of contemporary academic discourse on culture, the general reader will likely prefer to “take the blue pill” and reimmerse herself in the world of the Matrix.

Review: Trier on von Trier by Stig Björkman, ed. London: Faber and Faber, 2003

Reviewing a book consisting of a series of interviews is fraught with the problem that the digressive nature of such a book’s exigency precludes the summarily extraction of any coherent thesis. Stig Björkman’s book of interviews with Danish enfant terrible Lars von Trier presents no exception in this regard. Indeed, the Danish director himself appears to have initiated this project precisely because he found himself attracted to the format’s meandering quality. As von Trier puts it, “Conversations have no time limit, and they don’t have to end with any well-formulated conclusions. I was asked to do that sort of PR work for Breaking the Waves, but I turned it down because I couldn’t bear it. This sort of small talk is quite liberating, though” (4). Of course, with von Trier, a renowned cinematic prankster, the reader always has to be on her toes. Von Trier’s suggestion that the conversations he conducted with his interlocutor are nothing but “small talk” might easily mislead readers into believing that the subsequent pages may never broach more than the subject’s surface. Yet, despite the digressive nature of von Trier’s comments— notwithstanding the book’s chronological presentation of the interviews, proceeding from von Trier’s childhood and early amateur films, via his “Europe trilogy” (The Element of Crime [1984], Epidemic [1987], Europa [1991]), to his “Goldheart trilogy” (Breaking the Waves [1996], The Idiots [1998], Dancer in the Dark [1999]), to Dogville (2003), the first film of his most recent, “U.S.A. trilogy”—a number of key concerns keep coming up. The repetition of these themes—religion, his need for rules and control, his penchant for manifestos, to name but a few—gradually begin to reveal some surprising facets of a director who is often (in my view unjustly) perceived to be nothing but a cynical, coldhearted manipulator of his artistic collaborators and gullible audience. Von Trier is, of course, best known for having co-authored with Thomas Vinterberg the infamous Dogme 95 manifesto (reprinted in this book together with three earlier manifestos) in which they make their “vow of chastity.” Some critics always considered their ten-point vow as nothing but a clever marketing ploy. It is certainly undeniable that one of the manifesto’s effects was to produce a critical mass for a number of films that by themselves might not have attracted the number of viewers and critical attention that they ended up receiving. Yet, I always thought that much of the discussion about the manifesto remained oddly unresponsive to the document’s rhetorical function. That is, much ink has been spent on comparing the Dogme movies to the actual letter of the manifesto, discussing whether or not films such as von Trier’s The Idiots, Vinterberg’s Festen (1998), or Harmony Korine’s