What is this book about, in a nutshell? In science, many good ideas are transferred into popular consciousness through the use of a metaphor, or analogy, to enable greater access to complex knowledge for everyone. I will try to emulate this clarity as best I can, with an original short story about an installation artwork of my imagining, at the centre of which is a box which does and does not contain a cat, or cats. I make no claims to the genius of a Nietzschean aphorism, or to the succinctness of one of Slavoj Ž iž ek’s risqué jokes. Still, there is nothing like a ripping yarn, and stories and songs, after all, are how humans have always remembered histories. It should begin appropriately, then:
‘Once upon a time … ’
We enter a gallery space in a charming post-industrial conversion somewhere in a bustling metropolis, the capital of one of the world’s former imperialist powers which remains embedded within the affluent Global North. We are told by a telescreen that world history is a lidded box. We can see the box on the floor, and notice that it is the size of a large shoebox. Inside, we are told, there is a pair of shoes. These shoes are an older version of the ones we are wearing now, which were worn by our forefathers. When our forefathers wore the shoes, we are told, they travelled great distances to build bridges and roads and cities and trains, all of which helped the world as we know it now to develop into the hi-tech state it is in. Our current shoes enable us to carry on in the footsteps of these forefathers. They are, effectively, an evolutionary update on the original pair, continuing in this developmental tradition: making us faster, enhancing our stamina and range, our resilience and our adaptability.
Many who visit the gallery believe this. Yet others think this may be a lie. Some because they have been told – elsewhere – that, in fact, their forefathers wore different shoes, or no shoes, or were killed by people in shoes that sound suspiciously like those in the box. Others because, no matter what they do, the shoes they wear no longer seem to give them an edge to enhance their lives, as they apparently did for their forefathers. Gloomy art critics are quick to point out the resonance between the very idea of such shoes being stored away and exhibited with such ancestor-worship-like veneration, and that of the bleak Orwellian image of the future – of a human face being trampled by a boot, in perpetuity. If the shoes are world history, they argue, then they encapsulate the violence of several centuries of what is, from the Renaissance onwards, a colonial (in many places, settler colonist) modern epoch.
Luckily, most people think these critics far too melodramatic, not to mention a little bit prone to showing off. In general people accept the story, or have a wee think about whether, or to what extent, they agree with it. Albeit, understandably some are too uninterested, busy, or tired, to really have the time to care. There are other things to think about, after all. So everyone just gets on with their day, making breakfast for the kids and so on.
In the usual run of things, such an artwork might expect to come and go within a few weeks or months. Except, on this occasion, something unusual happens. Something which, to this day, no one can definitively be sure was an intended aspect of the installation all along, or a genuine reaction to it. Whatever the case, suddenly, a dynamic guerrilla force called ‘the filmmakers of a world of cinemas’ (sadly, they decided their name by committee) break into the gallery one night. Following their radical new manifesto, they drill what appear to be ventilation holes in the box, and then place several small screens on its outside, showing moving images. These additions give the impression – to anyone who is curious enough to look at them, that is – that inside the box there seems to be a cat. It is only ever possible to catch a glimpse of the seeming cat as it moves about. Perhaps a piece of a paw pressing at the glass, or the swish of its furry tail, or occasionally a feline eye stares out of the box directly at the one looking inside. Then, it is gone. Moreover, whilst all the filmmakers seem to agree that it is a cat in the box, something about the cat seems a little different wherever in the world they are filming. And so the impression is of many different cats, all impossibly squeezed into the tiny box. Some visitors speculate that the cats might be, somehow, virtual cats.
The gallery decides to leave the artwork as it is. The guerrilla filmmakers have certainly captured the public imagination, and the artwork gets much more attention this way. So, the board concludes (the following quote is taken from the minutes), ‘Well, you know, it’s a win–win, isn’t it?’ They even extend its run, as its fame spreads, and it transpires that it has some longevity. As time passes, each screen goes blank, but in a few years there is another break-in, and another film about a cat reappears from somewhere else. It turns out each time that it is not exactly the same guerrillas. Sometimes it is a new generation who have been influenced by predecessors, but who are also bringing their own ideas, probably in a new manifesto. Others, however, strongly deny they have anything to do with such clandestine political agendas, and quite sensibly question why they have to break in every time they want to show one of their films. They argue instead that they are simply filming cats because it seems like the right thing to do, or, even, just a thing to do. Some filmmakers even joke that their interests are closer to those of gorillas than they are to guerrillas! Sometimes such protestations are disingenuous, but other times they are simply the truth. Although figuring out which can, at times, be confusing, mostly the filmmakers seem well intentioned. At any rate, at least in their earlier works.
The visitors to the gallery, for their part, wonder if it might be possible to get to know this cat, or rather these cats, in a more meaningful way. After all, they learn from interviews with the filmmakers, these films seem to have much more meaning in the contexts where they were made, where considering cats of the past seems an important way to think about the present, perhaps even the future. So, the visitors wonder, were they to open the box, might they encounter such a cat? And if so, might there be some value in so doing?
Sadly, were they to cross the line marked ‘Do not touch the artwork’ and lift the lid, they would not find a cat, or even cats, past or present, alive or dead. The situation, it transpires, is a little different from that of the famous thought experiment from the imagination of scientist Erwin Schrö dinger. The cats on the screens were all lost long ago, and now only exist in such reinvented temporary glimpses. All the gallery patrons would find, were they to lift the lid on history, would be a rather unremarkable pair of leather shoes – rather different from the sweatshop-produced plastic footwear of many patrons – which look as if they have been cleaned long ago before being put away. There is no trace of dirt on the soles, and any suspicion that they may once have been marked by blood is not a supposition that could be proved after so long. Or rather, it probably could, due to the powers of science, but what could one do with this information (at best circumstantial evidence linked to a past which nobody is sure of anyway) in a situation where the descendants of the shoes’ original wearers now own the gallery?
But, just thinking about how it is not shoes but a cat, or in fact so many cats, which may be in the box – alive, but dead to our ability to really know them – is enough to make the visitors hesitate with respect to everything they have ever been told about the shoes. Some even believe that elsewhere there might be ways to gain access to the cats. After all, the guerrilla filmmakers found out about them somehow. This hesitation is, one might say, a principle of uncertainty with regard to the veracity of the official story of history. And so minds begin to wonder about how the story of world history is variously told and undermined.
Some turn back to the gloomy art critics in the hope of insight, in spite of the rather intense philosophies they inevitably favour, and their accompaniment, as always, by overly long and mentally discombobulating sentences. Some such critics question whether the artwork exposes Orwellian doublethink and its strategic use of ‘alternative facts’ – in which the victors rewrite history into a one-sided ‘official story’? Others, whether it is, perhaps more positively, an exposition of the Nietzschean/Deleuzian labyrinthine powers of the false – which recuperates the lost and forgotten histories submerged by such official history-making? Then again, yet more critics counter, isn’t that how ‘fake news’ also operates, by inducing cognitive dissonance – such that it is difficult to tell truthful (history) from false – and making people understandably angry because no one knows what the hell to believe in anymore? So, as usual, such critics seem to be of limited practical use, meaning remains unresolved, and everyone goes back to making breakfast for the kids.
And all the while that this circuitous wondering goes on, the wind and rain picks up outside the gallery, making this a much more pressing issue today than perhaps it ever was before. Even so, sadly, the connection between the weather and the shoes just seems a little obscure to many people. Science may be in part to blame for this, but only in part.
The End.
Well, that was the story. Admittedly, it seems unlikely that what someone once dubbed ‘Martin-Jones’s-“prolier-than-thou”-art-gallery-installation-shoe-box-of-world-cinemas-thought-experiment’ will catch on. It’s hardly as neat as ‘Schrö dinger’s cat’ after all. But that’s art for you, it’s not science.
Still, the idea of this book is now hopefully clear: a world of cinemas asks us to rethink something we may believe we already know about history – or rather, Eurocentric world history. It asks us to ‘unthink’ doublethink. This is not necessarily because cinema is different in our post-truth era. Of course, the rewriting of history at odds with how so many have experienced it (doublethink), has been going on for centuries. Cinema, as a consequence, has been engaging with this topic for at least the last several decades of its short life. Indeed, whilst historical revisionism has been ongoing for more than centuries, it has a particular emphasis after 1492 that directly relates to the current state of the world, and it is this which a world of cinemas often resists. This effect, of a world of cinemas functioning against doublethink, is similar whether we encounter a film where it is made, or, like the visitors to this exhibition, many miles away. But, like an art exhibition, at once illuminating, it may also at times be frustrating in the way that its revelations tug tantalisingly at the very edge of our consciousness. It requires us to work at the creation of its meaning from only the glimpses of the fragments of the lost past that it can offer us. That is, ultimately, the point. On the upside, though, in this it is perhaps more useful than the mummifying of time which is found in a museum.
We embark, then, upon a quest to seek Macavity, knowing all along that the mystery cat will not be there. The value in so doing, nevertheless, is … the … hesitation … the search brings.
The Beginning.
[Or, perhaps, rather, as the phantom ladies said in that famous French film, a book like this should start thus:
‘Twice upon a time … ’]