One or many faces of the (lost) past?
This book argues that a world of cinemas is engaged in telling the stories of the lost pasts of colonial modernity. Across what Deleuze considers the archive of world memory, groups of films engage with transnational histories that have impacted far beyond, and often long before, any one nation. Yet, to realise this, I argue, entails a racking of critical focus so as to better understand the role of the time-image as entranceway to the labyrinth of the past: to not only world memory, but also world history. It requires a recognition that, at the opening to each such portal lies an encounter not with another, but with another past. This renders the realisation of such transnational histories an ethical concern, akin to that of Enrique Dussel’s focus on the need to recognise the excluded of colonial modernity (although I add, specifically, to recognise their excluded pasts which subsist within world history) if colonial modernity is to be transcended.
It is in this sense that cinema can be realised to be unthinking doublethink, positioning itself against the obliteration of different perspectives on history to that of the Eurocentric vision of colonial modernity. Of course, there is a long history of decolonial and postcolonial thought which has had a marked influence on filmmaking around the world, and indeed, on how cinema is understood (even if the way of taxonomising a world of cinemas in this book is unique). Indeed, as indicated in the Preface, to reconsider world history in this way may be more of a revelation for those on the ‘winning’ side of its long historical trajectory – like the characters Evan (Brionne Davis) in El abrazo de la serpiente/Embrace of the Serpent (Colombia/Venezuela/Argentina, 2016) (see the Introduction) or Costa (Luis Tosar) in Tambié n la lluvia/Even the Rain (Spain/Mexico/France, 2010) (see Chapter 4). Perhaps this is also like that of some readers of this book, in the areas of the world where it will most widely circulate, including in well-funded university library collections like those of Europe and North America. One might even go so far as to argue that this is fitting, as the view of world history being critiqued in these films is not necessarily that held in some other parts of the world (by many indigenous populations, for example). But even so, as with the experience of Evan and Costa in the Americas, it is debateable how world-changing such a potentially fleeting revelation may be. There is a little more, then, to (a world of) cinema being against doublethink.
The analysis of the films explored in this book has led, repeatedly, to the same conclusion: that the coloniality of power functions by freeing itself of its past so that it can repeat its former abuses with impunity. Global events over the past five hundred years indicate that whilst a shared history can consolidate an identity within (national) borders, even so, depending on how the story of (transnational) history is told it can – by contrast – pose an inconvenient truth about such borders. If the way the story is told indicates something of the guilt which may attach to genocide and theft on a global scale (the eradication of lost pasts), this has the potential to counter the desire to repeatedly recreate the global inequality of domination. For the coloniality of power to be successful, the existence of an archive of world memory capable of repeatedly reminding of the virtual existence of lost pasts (which also unground the legitimacy of the imagined borders and identity promoted by the nation-state form) is something of a fly in the ointment. Even if this archive cannot successfully show us lost pasts, precisely because they are lost, nevertheless, just by reminding us – in the briefest glimpse – that they are lost, it throws doubt on the centrality of all that we believe to be history. This is why so many ‘faces’ of the (lost) past address us from the times-images of a world of cinemas: of an endangered species of monkey-spirit (Chapter 3), of a murdered indigenous woman and her massacred tribe (Chapter 4), of the archive of a closed communist newspaper (Chapter 5), of the non-profitable idea of community in general (Chapter 6). To recap the point made in Chapter 1, the encounters they offer are less with the unknowable other, the recognition of which has the power to shake our belief in the centrality of our Cartesian self to the world (as per a Levinasian ethics), than with unknowable other pasts, the recognition of which has the power to shake our Eurocentric belief in the centrality of our pasts to world history (more in line with a Dusselian ethics).
Why is it, then, not necessarily easy to realise the import of the face-to-face encounters with lost pasts on offer in a world of cinemas? Why this book only now? Precisely because this import is denied by doublethink. The Act of Killing (Denmark/Norway/UK, 2012) (see Chapter 5) illustrates the ubiquity and the horror of colonial modernity’s several centuries of historical eradication of its crimes. In particular, its re-creation of the torture and murder of a beloved step-father (with the original murderers – now national heroes – re-enacting their crimes upon the grieving step-son) indicates the ever-present, but silenced, nature of these lost pasts (often only preserved now in personal memories). It is not coincidental, I think, that it is from Hamlet that Deleuze takes inspiration in his discussion of time ‘out of joint’ – both in terms of Western philosophy’s changing perspective on the nature of being in time (1983, vii) and (in the preface to the English edition of Cinema 2) as part of his discussion of the emergence of the time-image (1985, xi).1 Hamlet’s revelation as to what his villainous smiling uncle’s face may hide – ‘one may smile, and smile, and be a villain’ (Shakespeare 1980, 93) – arrives with the realisation that the story of the past which he has known, of his father’s death, is in fact a fabrication used to obscure his father’s murder. This Hamlet is only able to know, however, from the ghost of his father, the virtual memory of his presence, erupting – one might argue quite cinematically – into the present from the past, to throw time out of joint.
History, as Hamlet learns, has a smiling face. For their part, Deleuze and Guattari conceive of the face in its Eurocentric centrality to world history in a manner which illuminates the doublethink underpinning colonial modernity: ‘The face is not a universal. It is not even that of the white man; it is White Man himself, with his broad white cheeks and the black holes of his eyes. The face is Christ. The face is the typical European.’ (1980, 176) The most recent of US presidential elections of 2016 brings home with full force the alignment of colonial modernity’s historical white supremacist underpinnings (see Chapter 4 on the racial contract and 1492) and its latest phase, neoliberalism (see Chapter 6). As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri remind us (see Chapters 2, 4 and 5), colonial modernity is a several-centuries-long history of the repeated victory of the counterrevolution. Thus neoliberalism in the USA, for thinkers like Loï c Wacquant (2009) and Michelle Alexander (2010), sees the War on Drugs labelled the new Jim Crow due to its fostering of divisiveness along racial lines, the resulting mass incarcerations leading to an apartheid-style carceral society (see Chapter 6). Today’s global apartheid, dividing Global North and South (now existing cheek-by-jowl, globally) is but the latest manifestation of colonial modernity.
For colonial modernity’s continuation, such rebranding of former divisions to ensure inequality is perpetuated (e.g. the rebranding of Jim Crow as the War on Drugs) must ensure the repeated re-erasure of the past, the submergence of the many-sided struggle over history which it repeatedly ‘wins’. This is the process which a world of cinemas resists, attempting to archive and then illuminate in the time-image: the struggle for coevalness that characterises colonial modernity (revealing the lost pasts of exploited nature, oppressed peoples, political oppositions, exhausted bodies disconnected from the past – and so on – which characterise its transnational histories). The archiving of world memory enacted by a world of cinemas is potentially revolutionary in its evocation that such lost pasts (by definition, unknowable), persist in virtual form. This is paradoxical, we might say, as lost pasts are not remembered and are unknowable. Yet, whilst Orwellian doublethink eradicates inconvenient pasts, somehow or other a world of cinemas keeps them alive – revealing their persistent presence (even if only via but the merest glimpse) in the crystalline construction of history.
This struggle over the remembrance of lost pasts is what the smiling face of history (‘not … that of the white man … White Man himself’) obscures. It legitimises the wilful eradication of the history of violence through which white supremacy maintains its hegemonic position under the thin veneer of the global promotion of democracy as universally beneficial. In the period of the so-called ‘end of history’ (see Chapter 1), we are now charged with forgetting not only the ideological struggles of the Cold War, but the whole history of popular rebellion against colonial modernity. There is no clearer evidence of this than (as noted in Chapter 4) the continued attempts to ban books like Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (1980) from schools in the USA. But what will we do with all the redundant copies of this forgotten history once they have been banned? Burn them? Presumably. And if so, what then of the non-fascist life?
It is not the national histories we find onscreen which will enable struggles for equality in the context of the global apartheid of neoliberal globalisation. National borders, by definition, are established to maintain division. This is evident every time national conflict emerges over the proposed removal of statues commemorating figures whose deeds are no longer considered to chime with the warp and weft of mainstream values (Cecil Rhodes in the U.K. in 2016, Robert E. Lee in the USA in 2017). The removal of statues, after all, is so evocative of Cold War societal changes, whether the toppling of a statue of Joseph Stalin during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, or the destruction of national heritage during the Chinese Cultural Revolution of 1966–1976 (a state-sanctioned murderous state of exception). In terms of national heritage, perhaps most pertinent to this discussion is the persistence of the White Man overlooking indigenous American lands from Mount Rushmore in the USA. Rather than in national histories onscreen, then, it is the remembering of the transnational histories which unite across and beyond nations which may provide a glimpse of this hoped-for equality.
Colonial modernity, it should be remembered, is entirely precarious. This is due to the manner in which this repetition of violent history takes place. Doublethink asks that we return perpetually to the (mythological) origin, create a repetition of the same, forget the very idea that there could be an alternative possibility, another side to the crystalline history of the world. Yet if it is ‘remembered’ that the past upon which the present rests was a violently exclusive one, people may well try to act differently, to repeat in difference.
The question is, will this be enough?
A non-fascist life? Under democracy? In the Anthropocene?
It is with no small irony that Orwell’s anti-authoritarian 1984, which was so actively promoted throughout the ‘third world’ by the UK and the USA during the Cold War as anti-communist propaganda, seems so relevant today. This is especially so considering that Orwell, a contradictory character in so many respects, was far from unblemished in his own complicity with Big Brother (Shaw 2004; Lucas 2004, 1–42; Rodden and Rossi 2012, 98–100; Keeble 2012, 158–161). The novel, it transpires, is as, if not more, applicable to certain democracies (amongst other forms of governance) under neoliberalism as it was to Soviet or Chinese communist regimes during the Cold War. In this, the latest phase in the world history of colonial modernity, the question (or even, expectation) asked so often in the 1990s (as to whether or when countries like China might become more democratic) recedes into the background of global geopolitics. In some prominent, often formerly imperial, Western democracies, members of the ruling class may be wondering whether it might be easier to control a capitalist economy by executive (in favour of an elite class, potentially at the expense of the rights and living standards of the domestic population) than it is by the messier, much slower, process of democracy. Neoliberalism is global neo-colonisation by the very wealthy minority, a return to pre-Twentieth Century societal divisions. Thus the return of the idea of Orwellian doublethink to the foreground of popular consciousness is not because of a sudden nightmarish turn in contemporary politics, but because the already several-centuries-long history of colonial modernity has entered a phase in which global apartheid is policed worldwide (US presidents scan their own people and fabricate history even as we witness it in the making).
The lessons of the Cold War, when military regimes directly or tacitly supported by Western powers like the USA terrorised national populations, should not be easily forgotten. Whilst nowadays the economic disenfranchisement of youth in parts of the West (and beyond) under neoliberalism (the creation of prohibitively expensive education and housing markets, coupled with insecure labour markets functioning on zero-hour contracts such as those of the UK and USA) is accompanied by a media campaign to discredit ‘Millennials’ as snowflakes, it should be remembered that it only takes a small change in government to suddenly see a more brutal eradication of entire youthful generations. As authoritarian regimes know only too well, if you disappear the young, you remove the potential for political dissent. Then one only needs to remove from history the fact that it ever happened.
There are parts of the world where this is known only too well, as is clear in Gabriel Garcí a Má rquez’s fictional evocation of the United Fruit Company’s massacre of its workers in One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), which I discussed in the Introduction. Nevertheless, the difficulty which even prominent Western scholars have – from Hayden White to Giorgio Agamben (see Chapters 1 and 6) – putting the Twentieth Century’s Holocaust into world-historical perspective indicates that many in the West may live in sheltered ignorance of just what is possible under doublethink.
The destruction of political opposition, whether targeting a scapegoated minority, political organisations or simply the young in general, is not new, and we (anyone) would be foolish to believe that it could never happen to us (anywhere). Within living memory there are numerous examples of brutal acts of state terror against civilian populations, which are suggestive of how difficult it is for anyone to see what is coming around the corner. How many people in Germany in the 1930s refused to believe the stories that were slowly filtering back from the concentration camps? How many mothers and fathers of Argentine children born in the 1950s and 1960s could have foreseen, even imagined in their darkest nightmares, that their young adult children might one day be kidnapped, tortured, murdered and their bodies disappeared forever by the nation’s rulers, including for crimes as innocuous as demanding reduced bus fares for students? In the not-too-distant future, writing a book like this, even, having written a book like this, might get a person imprisoned, exiled, disappeared or killed. Even owning a copy might be dangerous.
Does this sound far-fetched? Not in many parts of the world, and certainly not historically. There should be no flippancy implied by this discussion of Shakespeare’s smiling (white, male) face of history, noted in a book written during changing political times in the UK and the USA. In fact, the times may be more serious than we even realise. The emergence of the English-language adaptation of Alone in Berlin (UK/France/Germany, 2016) – from Hans Fallada’s eponymous novel set during the Second World War – seems to encapsulate the growing fears of many in countries like the UK and the USA that similarities increasingly resonate between this former era of single-party state control and our own. How are we to resist, it invites us to question, even amidst so much seeming connectivity via social media (the postcards left by the protagonist for his fellow citizens are so evocative of this difference of epoch in their antiquated nature), if our lives are atomised to the point that we are effectively ‘alone’ (now that the state has aligned with, or is subservient to, capitalist powers formidably larger than we, and our lives are those of dividuals entangled in the control society)? The horrifying question the film raises on our behalf, is, will the current political direction in countries like the UK and the USA ultimately destroy ordinary families, just as it does that in the film? Or rather, if we know that that was what happened in the past, what can we do now to stop this history from repeating?
In my own lifetime, Dussel was expelled from his position at the National University of Cuyo after his house had previously been bombed in 1973, just prior to the Argentine military dictatorship of 1976–1983 which cost the lives of over 30,000 people to state violence (Martí n Alcoff and Mendieta 2000, 21; Mendieta 2003a, xi). Whether the state of exception which presages authoritarian rule emerges because this is the political endgame of neoliberalism, as Agamben thinks, or because – as events in Catalonia in 2017 may perhaps indicate at time of writing – it is the last redoubt of the nation-state attempting to save itself from the regionalism (with global/local connection) encouraged by neoliberal globalisation, the question posed of us may well be the same: whether democracy will remain, or whether national borders will be patrolled by a fascist police state.
Even so, a world of cinemas also indicates that those parts of the world that endured military rule during the Cold War, in some of them as part of a much longer exclusionary settler colonist heritage, may consider the future with some optimism. Otra Historia del Mundo/Another Story of the World (Uruguay, 2017) uses a self-reflexive play with light and shadows (self-consciously meditating on cinema’s ability to investigate the virtual and actual nature of history) to demonstrate an incredible optimism regarding the power, or at least the potential, of film (the medium of shadow-play) to (re)place, or (re)position rather, those excluded by colonial modernity – whose pasts are wilfully disappeared by doublethink – at the centre of world history. A meditation on the Cold War past of Uruguay, standing in for Latin America more broadly, the film’s optimism is, admittedly, in hindsight. But it remains a signal that lessons (hard) learned should be remembered. Democracy was ultimately triumphant, the film emphasises as its message of hope.
Despite this optimism, however, climate change raises a further question of whether a non-fascist life can be maintained in the Anthropocene, even under democracy. Vine Deloria Jr., from the perspective of the indigenous North American underside of colonial modernity, questions whether democracy is entirely compatible with the ecological considerations of our age (Deloria 1972, 59). He may have a point. After all, voting in one’s own interests, with only the next five years of the future in mind (whilst embedded and indebted within the network of individual contracts which perpetuate the control society (see Chapter 6)), is unlikely to provide the longer-term, community-oriented (or at least, collective-oriented) mindset required to address the future of and for later generations. Certainly it may well not be sustainable to hold our desires, our needs, even what we may believe to be our rights, over the responsibility to live in a more connected manner with the planet – and indeed, for this possibility to be extended to all as opposed to just those who can afford it.
In the Andean cultures which were colonised by the forces of modernity centuries ago, and whose (lost) pasts it perpetually works to eradicate, this is called ‘Pachamama, the right to live in harmony (some would say the right to “live well”)’ (Mignolo in Sanjiné s 2013, xix; see also Mignolo 2011, 165–171). Neoliberalism, the present zenith of colonial modernity, stands directly opposed to this responsibility. Not only does it value profit above all else, it also fosters the deterioration of equality under democracy, due in part to neoliberalism’s imbrication with oligarchy (it is no coincidence that, historically, this is the preferred social structure of settler colonist cultures) and the return to a class system more reminiscent of that which existed prior to the Twentieth Century. This, the latest phase of colonial modernity – and, as such, exclusionary by design – can only offer, as Dussel summarises ‘the collective suicide of humanity’ (1998b, 431). If the Twentieth Century is understood, after Dussel, as a struggle over which vision of modernity manages the world system, then even if capitalism ‘won’ this war, new ideas may well be necessary.
Ultimately, of the most recent political forms that have been attempted as ways of managing colonial modernity (democracy, communism, fascism), it is hard to see which would seem more suited to the coming years, and, more to the point, which the most likely to triumph as things stand. The difficulty would seem to be that it is colonial modernity itself – the structural inequality of the coloniality of power – which creates the difficulties encountered by any such attempt at managing the system. Harder still, then, would be whether we can imagine something better, or whether fascism will become, once again, the only promising opportunity for many who may feel that they have nothing left to lose. How, then, can we transcend colonial modernity, how can we become transmodern?
In such a context, whilst I am not advocating a return to a pre-Columbian ethics of reciprocity, as though with a nostalgic romanticism, even so the link between realising a liveable future and the history of how we got here needs a much more ubiquitous recognition. Certainly there is a greater need to hesitate – to ‘stop and think’ – about whether there were, or are, lost pasts (amidst world memory) from which a better future might be rejuvenated. It is for this reason that Deleuze works so well with Dussel, enabling a line of flight towards the transmodern through the time-image (in which we first return to the lost past, in order to move forward again differently into the future). Key to realising such a hesitant ethics for the Anthropocene, and something which a world of cinemas has been grappling with for some time (if we know where, and how, to look) is the need to recognise otherness as also a recognition of other pasts. Or rather, the realisation that there can be ways of seeing the past (indeed history itself) other than as a single, linear, teleological progression – as in Hegel’s worldview (see the Introduction). What is crucially required now is a realisation of the place within world history of those on the ‘winning’ side of colonial modernity – that feeling of being uncomfortable in our own skins noted of postcolonial scholars like Paul Gilroy (see the Introduction) and experienced by characters like Evan and Costa, and perhaps even those viewers for whom such stories create a sense of hesitation before (world) history. Such a hesitation translates, politically, into a question over whose interests I am acting in: my own, or those of the collective? Put another way, whose history am I in the process of making, mine, or ours?
To recognise the end of grand narratives is not to be postmodern in what, Dussel indicates, remains a Eurocentric sense (see Chapter 1) – entailing an inevitable ‘end of history’ discourse within which nonsensical terms like ‘post-truth’ start to seem to make sense (see the Introduction and Chapter 1). Rather, following more the ‘de-’ of decolonial (indicating a critical process ongoing over several centuries of colonial modernity, as far back as Bartolomé de Las Casas (see Chapter 4)) as opposed to the ‘post-’ of ‘postmodernity’ or ‘post-truth’ (both in very different ways suggesting that something which some might consider ongoing has ended) is to realise the need to decolonise worldviews such that a hesitant ethics can emerge – one more suited to the Anthropocene. It is in this sense that a world of cinemas is against doublethink.
If Deleuze identified a new political cinema arising with the time-image, it was, I would argue, due to its potential to deterritorialise Eurocentric world history by indicating a multiplicity of views from the Global South on world history. Films are now every bit as important as Orwell’s book, just as ubiquitous (as anyone on a long-haul flight can testify) and no less imbricated in complex geopolitics (as the ambiguities surrounding the festival circuit show). Across a world of cinemas, filmmakers provide stories that give access to the vast archive of world memory, the virtual past that is (as opposed to the actualised past that was of doublethink). Not that this will save us from fascism, economic collapse, or environmental apocalypse, but it can at least help to demonstrate what needs addressing most urgently if these very real possible futures are to be avoided: the encounter with (lost) pasts which can relativise belief in the centrality of our own – the decentring of Eurocentrism.
We might even go further than this. As Another Story of the World indicates, the time-image is optimistic. Whilst the analysis of the films explored here has focused on their (impossible) depiction of lost pasts, the potential of the time-image is in its imagination of alternative possible futures which such virtual pasts might inspire. It may be that climate change will return unto dust, unto the Earth, what colonial modernity has built upon the bones of former civilisations. It may be that this, in turn, just leads to more of the same – disaster capitalism, as the practice is now known, such as that which took hold in both the USA and UK as the result of their respective votes in 2016 (see the Introduction) (Klein 2007). Or, it may not. In the time-image there is always hope for another future, built anew upon the virtual past uncovered from world memory. What it will take to realise the impetus for such a systemic change, however, is difficult to foresee.
If 1492 shows us anything, it is that any civilisation, no matter how well established or how dominant within its sphere of influence, may only be a few years away from its sudden and dramatic end. The several centuries of privilege conferred by colonial modernity on the wealthiest in the world could easily be reversed in spectacular ways, most obviously by sudden societal, economic or ecological unravelling and collapse. Thus the most important revelation of all that is offered by a world of cinemas may be that another way of understanding history altogether is necessary for the Anthropocene (see the Introduction). But if there is anyone for whom this is to be a revelation, then it is a character like Evan, or like Costa, or perhaps like the viewer of such films, or the readers (and author) of this book. The broader question which this raises, of how to react positively and meaningfully to such a revelation, is beyond the scope of a book like this. However, what can be concluded from this analysis of a world of cinemas is its importance in keeping alive this particular understanding of world history, against doublethink.
Note
1. The initial work, prior to Cinema 2 (1985) is Deleuze’s Kant’s Critical Philosophy (1984). It is sometimes said that the Cinema books divide into a cinematic history of (Western) philosophy up to Kant (movement-image) and after Kant (time-image).