All these savages have little feeling for the beautiful in moral understanding, and the generous forgiveness of an injury, which is at once noble and beautiful, is completely unknown as a virtue among the savages, but rather is disdained as a miserable cowardice.
Immanuel Kant, Observations on Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1763)
[1]
The opening shot of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s masterpiece treatment of moral anomie and vacuous alienation, Uzak (“Distant,” 2002) pulls the central figure of Mahmut (Muzaffer Özdemir) from the depth of a distant village in a magnificent long shot, long take, that imperceptively waits until the languorously approaching Mahmut gets closer to the road where the camera is patiently waiting for him—before it ever so gently pans to the left, brings an approaching bus into its ponderous frame, now hugging Mahmut and ushering him into the bus, before it wisely blacks out and off to the heartland of an estranged cosmopolis, thus dispatching the unwieldy protagonist of Uzak, posing as an ordinary character, into an ordinary cosmopolis, while marking the strange contours of their extraordinary cohabitations.
[2]
Where is the cosmopolis of Ceylan’s normative habitation of alienated anxieties? As the cosmopolitan site of urban anomie, Istanbul is Goethe’s Ost-Westliche Diwan writ topographically large—it is neither in the East nor in the West (“La Sharqiyyah wa la Gharbiyyah,” as the Qur’an would say); and thus it is the center of everywhere, while the point of departure for the here and now—history, power, and the insignia of the Ottoman Empire written all over its confident urbanity. Its classical glory now a matter of national pride, a lucrative tourist industry, nostalgic Imperium of Suleiman the Magnificent, and Orhan Pamuk and Elif Shafak’s fictive meanderings, Istanbul is the mirror image of Seville, Granada, and Cordoba in one—reflected in the shimmering uncertainties of the Mediterranean, the bookend balance of where Europe ends and the world begins.
Between Europe and the world, Istanbul (as all other worldly cosmopolis from Cairo to New York) sustains and balances the imaginative geography of a globe otherwise flattened by its colonial division on an East/West axis. “Its capital is not in Europe,” objects the former French President Valery Giscard d’Estaing, “95% of its population live outside Europe,” and the concluding, “it is not a European country.” The now-famous backslap of the former French President was a prelude to his publicly insisting with Le Monde in November 2002 that people who backed Turkey’s accession to the EU were in fact “the adversaries of the European Union.”1 According to the BBC report, “the man shaping the future constitution of the European Union was quoted … as saying Turkey’s entry into the EU would be ‘the end of Europe.’” The BBC report further adds that
there is continuing debate among member countries about whether Turkey is culturally and geographically compatible with the European Union … [and] a broad strand of opinion … says it is not.2
The concern of the EU about Turkey had quite obviously intensified following the victory of the AK Party, with its not so distant roots in the banned Islamist Virtue Party. “Turkey knows,” BBC report states openly, that “it has to fight against those in Europe who are inclined to regard the EU as a Christian club.” Meanwhile the Turkish foreign ministry insisted that, “Turkey was unquestionably part of Europe ….”
The reluctance of Europe to accept Turkey on its face value and insisting on certain cosmetic surgery before it will consider its application to be European is less against the inclusion of a Muslim country in its domain and more against acknowledging the presence of Muslim communities already inside Europe. Turkey is not accepted into Europe not because it is not physically inside Europe but because it is not inside the European geographical imaginary. Further down South and to the East, Israel has no problem being part of Europe, for it is. When recently the Iranian President Ahmadinejad said that if Europeans feel guilty for the atrocities they committed during the Jewish Holocaust (after he consented that it has actually happened), then they should take Israel to Europe; he did not quite get it that in the European racist imaginary “the Jew” has always been the Other of the European, while the Ashkenazi Zionism became the normative expansion of European colonialism, and thus when the British finally gave Palestine to the Zionists they thought they were doing so from their own bank account. Turkey has no such privileges for if Turkey were to be accepted inside Europe, then it’s inevitable Islamic disposition will underline (1) the already present and evident Muslim population of Europe, all the genocidal atrocities of the Serbs in the former Yugoslavia notwithstanding, (2) the already aggravated Muslim immigrant communities in Europe, and thus (3) add the political might of a Muslim nation-state with a particularly militant imperial history behind its back and thus invoke a bit too much of an Ottoman memory of the European nightmare. Here it is imperative to keep in mind that at the height of the Ottoman power, Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail (“Abduction from the Seraglio,” 1782)—composed and performed in Vienna during the reign of Sultan Abdulhamid Khan I (1774–1789), soon to be followed by that of the great reformer Sultan Selim Khan III (1789–1808)—was the clearest manifestation of the European Orientalism of envy and not of the Orientalism of conquest, which would not start in earnest until early in the next century.
The paradox that Europe thus faces, even if it were to overcome its fear of the “Ottomans/the Turks,” is that the addition of Turkey to Europe will consolidate its economic might, now almost deliberately calibrated against the imperial modulations of the United States in the region. It is for that reason that the economic interest of EU in effect is going against its Christian disposition. In the expansive crevasses of that dialectic dwells the terms of an aesthetic emancipation of what it means to be a (non) European—the shifting landscape of a moral imaginary that is rooted in the economics of a planetary reconfiguration of power, and that particulars of whose aesthetic is yet to be assayed.
[3]
Between Ceylan contemplating the contours of the deep-rooted urban anomie—not just in his Uzak (2002) but equally so in his most recent Iklimler (2006)—and Valery Giscard d’Estaing standing guard at the gate of Europe, Turkey as an idea and Istanbul as a cosmopolis posit the shifting landscape of a global reconfiguration of power and politics that cannot but frame the aesthetic terms of a similar debate.
The transcontinental shift of Turkey, as a nation-state, from Asia into Europe, with the Turkish officials pushing the landscape toward Europe while the European sentiments that Valery Giscard d’Estaing represents pulling it in the opposite direction is now the principal horizon of the shifting landscape of a globalized neoliberalism that still does not quite know why it must insist on boundaries as it is redrawing them.
The inclusion of Turkey in the European Union (EU) will in a number of exceedingly significant ways—from economic to strategic—consolidate the hold of the greater Europe on a vast territorial claim that will posit it as a major contender against the US global design for domination. If George W. Bush’s war on terror and the evident reluctance of some major European powers like Germany and France to get along with the project marks the end of the idea and practice of “the West,” the potential inclusion of Turkey in EU will forever seal its death certificate. As a pestiferous and power-basing binary, “Islam and the West” has been the principal demonic device to divide the world along moral and material basis to rule it better. As “the West” became the moral repository of good, “the East” (“Islamic, Chinese, African, Indian—“Oriental” in general) became the pre-political moment of history, its exotic domain, the navigational error of History as Hegel regulated it. As Islam, China, India, and Africa were colonially forced to play along and paint themselves in colors deigned and designated for them by this fictive “West,” the dialectic of reciprocity that the strategy entailed worked itself out for more than two centuries with no other malignancy more responsible for the continued operation of the colonial project than the entire project of Orientalism, as today best represented by Bernard Lewis. The mere debate over accepting or not accepting Turkey into EU is the symptomatic ledger of the end of “the West” and the commencement of intercontinental changes in the moral imaginary of the planet at large.
In this context, the proposition of examining film and media in “European Context” poses the obvious paradox of contextualizing Europe from outside the European context and yet call it in the European context. Fanon’s famous proposition that “Europe is … the creation of the Third World”3 has now assumed an added significance. For if the European colonialism created power and prosperity at the heart of its cosmopolitan centers on the broken back of the colonized world, and if the normative imaginary of a superior white race called “Europe” is built on the moral denigration of the rest, then the dialectic of the master–slave hegemony that occasions the consent of that normative measure is in fact being reinstated and re-inscribed by the Turkish insistence to be counted European.
In the aesthetics realm proper, the problem we face is not limited to Turkey or Europe, but in fact extends well into the larger world now held hostage in a frightful balance between terror and war on terror. At least in part because Turkey remains within the European Oriental imaginary it cannot enter into the domain of the beautiful and the sublime the way Europeans have theorized and understood them at least since the time that Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) wrote his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1763). Here, at the gates of “Europe,” Turkey stands for the world.
[4]
Kant’s exclusion of what he calls “the Orientals” (practically the entirety of humanity minus Western Europeans) from “the feelings of the sublime and the beautiful” effectively anticipates what Baudrillard has termed “the Transaesthetics of Indifference.”4 To work toward an articulation of a transaesthetics that continues politically to matter and thus make a historical difference we must begin with Kant, come to Baudrillard, and rest our case where a regeneration of a transaesthetics of relevance must, and cannot but, sustain the terms of a renewed trust in the sublime and the beautiful.
In the domain of film proper (the site of media at large opens an entirely different Pandora’s Box), my contention here is that at the very core of the European reception of what they call “world cinema” (a successive selection of nationalized cinemas selected randomly first by Cannes and then by extension other major Western European film festivals) is in effect an aesthetic appropriation (e.g., politicization) of the world by casting its artists to the point of the pre-political. The globalized operation of European film festivals, very much banking on the authority invested in the term ‘Europe,” ranges from the curatorial curiosities of festival directors to lucrative commercial transactions that encompass from production to distribution, and above all to a banal and corporatized journalism.
In assimilating various formations of national, mutated into world, cinemas into a European notion of the beautiful and sublime, contemporary European festival directors, art curators, and literary, art, and cultural critics remain categorically Kantian—convinced as he was that “the Orientals” are constitutionally incapable of the sublime and the beautiful in terms domestic to their own moral and material particularities. Baudrillard’s lamentation that art has died out and that an aesthetics of indifference is now fast upon us is itself a post-Kantian postmortem to the effect that if “the European” cannot see art and feel beautiful and sublime then there is no art, nor indeed partake in an aesthetics that matters and makes a significant difference.
The point of my argument here is that from the denigrated and dismissed corners of post/colonial modernity a rapid need is emerging to theorize the liberating terms of an aesthetics that matters and that makes a political difference—in terms at once domestic to the world of the migratory labor and the disenfranchised masses and yet global in their emancipatory lexicon.
To work toward a transaesthetics of difference that does not wish to jump from the frying pan of Kant into the fire of Baudrillard, we must, ipso facto, navigate our argument through the shifting landscape of a planetary politics of power. To work our way toward that articulation, we need at once take the Kantian question of cogito on its face value and yet take it to task at the post/colonial edges of a universe he did not disregard at all, but in fact made a conscious point to dismiss and denigrate.
As Hegel was chiefly responsible for having written the colonial out of world history in the course of European modernity, Immanuel Kant was principally in charge of articulating a European subject at the cost of all others—thus othered by being denied historical agency, moral autonomy, normative behavior. Read in this light, the three principle critiques of Immanuel Kant are not three innocent philosophical treatises in constituting a universal sovereign subject. Read in this vein, the first critic, Critique of Pure Reason (1781 and 1787), constitutes the European (and the European alone) as the solitary knowing subject—sovereign and presiding over the world. In its metaphysics, epistemology, cosmology, psychology, and ultimately theology, the First Critic is exclusionary, territorial, Christian, European. In articulating the Transcendental Doctrine of Elements, Kant in effect posits a European subject presiding over both a Transcendental Aesthetics (Space and Time) and a Transcendental Logic (both an Analytic and a Dialectic). Whether we move in the Analytic direction of Concepts and Principles or in the Dialectic direction of Illusion and Pure Reason, the European knowing Subject has placed itself in the advantageous position of the omniscient narrator of this categorical destiny. The moral imaginary of that destiny ends at the banks of Danube—as its colonial claims hover around the globe. In the form of his moral philosophy, Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason (1788) offers freedom of will as the normative force of a knowable world that he puts at the disposal of the European knowing subject he had earlier articulated in the Critique of Pure Reason.
In addition to the centrality of the Christian God in Kant’s conception of both “pure” and “practical” reason (and thus by extension his articulation of the European sovereign subject), the reason that for him and the European Enlightenment in general the knowing subject is a sovereign European and the knowable world the rest of the world is perfectly evident in black and white, as it were, in his much earlier, pre-critical, text, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1763). Here, Kant leaves no room to speculation as to who precisely the sovereign (knowing) subject is. In a catalogue of racist dismissal of every people on face of the earth except Europeans, his project is far more serious than telling his European audience that they have a superior sense of the sublime and the beautiful. By characterizing the non-Europeans as constitutionally “degenerate,” “unnatural,” “pleasure-prone,” “monstrous,” “hideous,” “despotic,” “miserable,” “ignorant,” and above all “grotesque,” he leaves no room for interpretation as to how we are to read his following assertion, upon the speculation that something that a “Negro carpenter” said “might be … something [that] deserved to be considered: But in short, this fellow was quite black from head to foot, a clear proof that what he said was stupid.”5 The racist aspect of this statement should not distract us from the far more serious point that is at stake here. Kant here is not merely dismissing one human being or even a succession of cultures as constitutionally incapable of the superior European notions of the beautiful and the sublime. As evident in his third critique, The Critique of Judgment, the realm of the aesthetics for Kant is where he puts his first two critics—where he first posits the knowing subject and then places in front of him a knowable world—to test that his constituted European subject is capable of navigating the indecisive subjectivity of the beautiful. Far more than being racially inferior to the European subject in matters of aesthetic, the non-European (“the Oriental”) is part and parcel of the objectified (knowable) world, at the mercy of the European knowable subject.
[5]
The emerging patterns of global labor migration, from the impoverished south and east to the globalized north and west, now posits the United States and the EU as the two principal sites of economic and cultural authority. While the comprador intellectual beneficiaries of the project have so far systematically sought to theorize the event in terms of cultural hybridity, normative border-crossing, newfound freedom, and deterritorialization, such more pertinent problems as renewed forms of racism, sexism, unemployment, social unrest, and normative dissonance between the disenfranchised poor and the globalized civil society remains largely dismissed and entirely under-theorized.
Under these circumstances, the front page of print media, the leading slogans and screamers of major news organizations such as the CNN and Fox News, and the widespread availability of websites collectively constitute the most globally consequential form of “art” exhibitions and collective spectatorship—an increasingly ocularcentric culture that was most effectively and violently put to use in the visual spectacle of the destruction of World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. In the age of visual digitization, with cell phones and podcasts, weblogs, and paltalks as the mobile repository of audiovisual repletion of life ad infinite, Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay, “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” is far too conservative in its assessment of what aura the work of art may have lost and what audacity it may have regained.
Paramount in these developments is the systematic shrinking of the public space, particularly in the domain of visual and performing arts, whereby small-scale public movie theaters are increasingly taken over by mega-sized multiplexes on one side and privatized viewing of CDs and DVDs on the other. While the simulacrum of the public space—pedestrian sidewalks, buses, subways, airports, and airplanes remain visible, within them the atomized individuals are wired to cell phones, iPod, and other gadgets that obviate an evident, however elegantly designed, barrier between the insular self and the surrounding society.
In economic terms, what we witness is the disappearance of labor, the production process, and distribution, and the immediate availability of the fetishized commodity, without any intermediary stage made available or evident to the consumer—the immediacy of the link between the consumer and the fetishized commodity, which was fully evident in the course of the disappearance of the urban centers and the emergence of shopping malls, is now made even more globally fetishized by even the disappearance of the shopping mall and the emergence of online markets of goods and services, from organic vegetables to cyber-sex. In this respect, the appearance of even fabricated nation-states such as the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is perhaps the best example of how an entire nation-state can be fabricated around the fetishized relation of mutation between the consumer and commodity.
[6]
The neoliberal economic expansionism of the globalized capital has accompanied a mode of knowledge production that had to account for massive labor migrations and adjacent bourgeois relocations. While the impoverished peasantry and the urban poor (extended all the way from Latin America to North and sub-Saharan Africa to Southern Asia, all in their seasonal migration to the north) definitive to this global migratory pattern remained entirely invisible and disposable, the bourgeois banality of the selfsame phenomenon has produced its theoretical underpinning in the work of such postcolonial thinkers as Homi Bhabha and Dipesh Chakrabarty, organically linked expatriate Indian intellectuals who have tried to theorize the mixing of cultures, and thus speak of such ideas as hybridity, liminality, border-crossing, an evident deterritorialization, and even of the universality of the Enlightenment modernity. This period of theorizing the relocated and expatriate bourgeois identity politics corresponded mostly with the globalized capital and its respective transnational civil society, which was of course quite at home in the “Metropolitan West” but effectively banked on its status as the intellectual immigrant, or the native informer, in the manner in which Gayatri Spivak has theorized it, where she proposes that the appropriation of the native informant’s position as the metropolitan academic theorist in fact taints radical disposition of Postcolonialism—accusing Postcolonialism itself of being complicitous with Orientalism.6
The more critical issues definitive to the global patterns of labor migration are thus yet to be assayed and theorized. Here Behzad Yaghmaian’s wondrous book, Embracing the Infidel: Stories of Muslim Migrant on the Journey West (2005),7 goes a long way in positing the peripatetic position of the labor migrants journey north, a book that resonates in sociological terms with Xavier Koller’s Reise der Hoffnung (“Journey of Hope,” 1990)—in which a small group of Turkish peasants dare the border-crossing dangers to reach Switzerland for work. In this latter context, problems of racism, sexism, unemployment, urban biases, and more recently the effective mutations of classical European anti-Semitism into Islamophobia, are all the terms of a far different manner of dealing with dislocation—a mode of mobility that requires different analytical instruments than such bourgeois suppositions as hybridity or liminality. Nearly 200 million people now have left their country of origin in search of work, according to a recent UN report.
Some 191 million people now live outside their country of origin—up by about 36 million since 1990, a United Nations report on migration says. The report by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan says most migrants have gone to rich countries—one in five of them to the US. In some countries money sent home from abroad accounts for a large proportion of the national income. Mr. Annan said migration was a now a major feature of international life. He described his report to the UN General Assembly as an “early road map for this new era of mobility”. His report found there were an estimated 191 million migrants around the world in 2005. This compares with 155 million in 1990. Most migrants moved to wealthy countries, although some 75 million people moved from one developing country to another.8
This body of evidence requires an entirely different mode of subaltern and postcolonial studies than those offered by Chakrabarty and Bhabha—in whose work we witness the effective mutation of critical thinking entirely limited to the psychopathologies of transnational bourgeoisie, making the postcolonial relocation of the professional middle class compatible with the transnational bourgeoisie and its necessary need to partake in a postcolonially updated Eurocentricity of the Enlightenment. Meanwhile the task of reading and responding to the subaltern has remained on the presumed periphery of the capital and left the ipso facto mobile and always emerging transnational immigrant laborers—made up entirely of the impoverished peasantry and the urban poor—entirely unattended and un-theorized.
The globalized capital, its neoliberal economy, and globalized imperial designs have all produced their economics in Jagdish Bhagwati’s In Defense of Globalization,9 its political strategist in Samuel Huntington and Bernard Lewis, its normative and transformative imaginary in Francis Fukuyama, Irving Kristol, William Kristol, and Gertrude Himmelfarb, its literature in Salman Rushdie and Azar Nafisi, its journalism in Christopher Hitchens, its historiography in Foad Ajami, its propaganda machinery is CNN and Co., and its way stations for rest and relaxation in MacDonald and Starbucks.
The resistance to this collective banality must be the restoration of the polyfocal cosmopolitanism of local cultures, by way of producing regional pockets of resistance to neoliberal economy and geopolitical imperialism. The moral and material antidotes of the empire are within it, while the equivocations of empire are morally vacuous and normatively amorphous.
[7]
The self-alienated and cumbersome character of Mahmut in Ceylan’s Uzak (“Distant”) posits a measured reading of moral anomie and vacuous alienation in terms domestic to the cosmopolitan disposition of Istanbul, a cosmopolitanism at once internal and global to the metropolitan globality of the cosmopolis—irreducible to the east or west of its geographical imaginary. As articulated in the normative imaginary of old Muslim cartographers and travelers from Ibn Hawqal to Ibn Battuta, Istanbul is the center of the universe, as was Jerusalem, Cairo, Isfahan, Mumbai, Beijing, or even New York, if they were to visit it today. Positing an ordinary character in an ordinary cosmopolis in Ceylan’s cinema marks the strange contours of a cohabitation that collapses to no distancing theory of aesthetics and thus commands the attention of a whole new perspective into what is sublime and beautiful, enabling and emancipatory. Any theory of aesthetic that does not or cannot account for the cosmopolis of Ceylan, Pamuk, or Shafak’s Istanbul is wanting of not just historical accuracy but of moral imagination.10
That in Istanbul one is and one is not in Europe does not make Istanbul liminal, but it certainly makes Europe too conscious of its shimmering anxieties of origin, of its fictitiously fabricated whereabouts. Istanbul is Istanbul whether Europe accepts or rejects it. But Europe is not Europe except by systematically denying its fabricated peripheries their autonomous claim to cosmopolitan globality. The shifting boundaries of the world, a miasmatic transmutation of time and space that has forced the presumed cultural and civilizational boundaries of the world to renegotiate and/or rearticulate their geopolitical positions, are not just in economic and political terms. The gradual formation of EU has already threatened the US imperial supremacy, while it has equally dismantled the very categorical assumption of “the West.” Coterminous with the economic and political re-articulation of regional powers in the more planetary operation of globalization, the shifting boundaries of the economic and political factors ipso facto contain their necessary cultural correlations, and in specifically aesthetic terms the re-articulation of the sublime and the beautiful.
If Istanbul were to be taken as the cosmopolis of the non-European world—a distinction equally shared by Damascus, Cairo, Casablanca, Mumbai, or Beijing—then how could we articulate an aesthetic awareness of its sense of the beautiful and the sublime has global consequences beyond the pushing and pulling of a magnificent cosmopolis in and out of its European and Asian contexts. Here it is imperative for us to keep in mind that Kant’s, and by extension the entire pedigree of European Orientalists’ tradition, denying the Orient any possibility of knowing or experiencing the sublime and the beautiful is not just an indication of his and his entire continental racist prejudices—but in fact the landmark of something far more insidious—that the Oriental is not the agent of history, for he and she are always already integral to a knowable world, and as such the object of the European knowing subject. Kant’s denial of the sublime and the beautiful, as a result, needs to be read on a plane far above and beyond its aesthetic proclamations. What Kant believed to be true about Africans pretty much sums up his conception of what he called the Orient: “The Negroes of Africa,” believed the author of “What is the Enlightenment” (1784),
have by nature no feeling that rises above the trifling. Mr. [David] Hume challenges anyone to cite a single example in which a Negro has shown talents, and asserts that among the hundreds of thousands of blacks who are transported elsewhere from their countries, although many of them have even been set free, still not a single one was ever found who presented anything great in art or science or any other praiseworthy quality, even though among the whites some continually rise aloft from the lowest rabble and through superior gifts earn respect in the world. So fundamental is the difference between these two races of man, and it appears to be as great in regard to mental capacities as in color.11
On another occasion, Kant quotes a statement about women that is attributed to an African and reported by a certain Father Labat, to which the author of Critique of Pure Reason adds, “And it might be that there were something in this which perhaps deserved to be considered; but in short, this fellow was quite black from head to foot, a clear proof that what he said was stupid.”12
One has to be the least distracted by the racism of these pronouncements and far more concerned about the philosophical foregrounding of Kant’s deliberately denying the Oriental historical agency—and “the Orient” for Kant meant the entirety of the humanity at large, from the Danube all around the globe, north and south, eastward and westward until just about enough space to cross the English Channel and embrace England. The Europe that Kant thus envisioned as the supreme arbiter of the sublime and the beautiful is the selfsame Europe that Fanon thought was the dialectical invention of the Third World, and the selfsame Europe that up to this day and every year at Cannes, Venice, San Sebastian, or Locarno decides the fate of what it casually calls and codes as “world cinema.” As a category, “World Cinema” is a trap that unless carefully rescued, rearticulated, theorized and posited as the repository of alternative visions and the vernacular of an ocular luminosity it will remain a sponge word and a quagmire into which will plunge and disappear all the best and all the worst dreams of nations and peoples struggling for a pride of place in history.
From major European film festivals to art biennials wrapping around the globe, the Tower of Babel that has led Baudrillard to suggest that what we are witnessing today is tantamount to a transaesthetics of indifference, where everything goes and nothing means anything, is still haunted by the spirit of Immanuel Kant. The negated other of the Kantian theorization of the sublime and beautiful is the Orientalized oddity for which he had one abiding sentiment: grotesquery. At the heart of European enlightenment, the Orientalized other—which is, again not just what they have termed and called “the Middle East” or “India,” but in fact the entirety of the world, from Asia to Africa to Latin America, the whole planet in fact minus Western Europe—is thus systematically vilified, exoticized, and as such made into the object of European curiosity and discovery. To this day, that abiding sentiment is very much present and evident in Europe, where non-European cinema or art is something that European film festivals like Cannes or art biennales like Venice get to discover, know, name, map out and introduce to the world at large—very much on the model that their colonizing ancestors from Christopher Columbus to Joseph Conrad’s Kurtz did the same with unknown and obscure islands and territories. In the domain of cinema in particular, filmmakers from around the world compete and fall head over heel to get accepted at Cannes, Venice, Berlin, San Sebastian, or Locarno, for unless and until they are thus anointed it is as if they do not exist. All the other film festivals around the world, from Mumbai to New York, from Rio de Janeiro to Dubai get their clues and aesthetic principles from precisely these European film festivals.
What is systematically compromised in the course of the appropriation of world cinema and art in general into the hermeneutic circle of European film festivals—and the larger web of normative affiliations it engenders and accredits in production, distribution, and critical commentary—are the specific aesthetic terms of works of art produced around the world.13 To be sure, cinema in particular is an art form that ipso facto has a horizontal conversation with the visual vocabulary of distant and adjacent cinematic cultures—all the way from Soviet Formalism to Italian Neorealism to French New Wave, to German New Cinema to major national cinemas and their world-renowned masters from around the world—while it is vertically rooted in the visual and performing art of its own more immediate surroundings. Consider the example of the most recently celebrated filmmaker around the world: Abbas Kiarostami’s cinema is deeply influenced by Ozu and De Sica. But the very same Kiarostami is equally influenced by Sohrab Sepehri, one of the most celebrated poets of his generation. The combination of Ozu and Sepehri, just to take one slice of related examples, is thus definitive to the particularity of Kiarostami’s realism, a mode of realism that is radically assimilated into known and knowable aesthetic terms in the European metropolitan lexicons, without a moment wasted on discovering or theorizing its own particular visual vocabulary.
While filmmakers like Kiarostami, Ceylan, or Elia Suleiman posit a serious cinematic challenge to the received assumptions of European cinematic aesthetics, other filmmakers like E. Kutlug Ataman in his “Lola + Bilidikid” (1999) best represent the effective assimilation of a range of (in this particular case) homoerotic sentiments, emotions, and practices back into a singular mode of homosexuality that is Western European and North American in its diction and disposition. What Atman does in his “Lola + Bilidikid” is in fact very similar to the theoretical position of such postcolonial native informers, as Spivak typologizes them, as Chakrabarty and Bhabha who are in fact instrumental in the theoretical pacification of the non-European sites of resistance to neoliberal imperialism. The historical Orientalization (and thus neutralization) of the disparate modes of alternative resistances to imperial imaginary, or to colonial appropriation of regional resistances, thus effectively leads to the homogenization of the heteronomy that threatens its globalized hegemony. The bourgeois international that Chakrabarty and Bhabha best theorize thus tallies well and dovetails effectively with gay and lesbian international, feminism international, etc.—all assimilating alternative modes of cultural practices and positions that can collectively and separately put up normative resistance to the cultural imperialism of the whitewashed Europe.
What the world needs is alternative and desperate resistances to the assumptions and operations of imperial designs upon the globe, so that the selfsame Europe that the so-called Third World was instrumental in cross essentializing will in fact help to dismantle. The centrality of aesthetic theories and practices here is to articulate itself in precisely that mode of anticolonial modernity that has been definitive to its political formation, for here aesthetics is not a mere articulation of the sublime and the beautiful, but through that claim it is a reversal of the Kantian and Hegelian dismissal of the Oriental from history, the constitution of historical agency, and the formation of a worldly knowing subject that for the sake of enabling a very few does not ipso facto disenfranchise and dismiss the overwhelming majority of the people who live in this world.
[8]
Today the dominant sense of the sublime and the beautiful the world over, as indeed in its very inception, remains Kantian and Eurocentric. Here we should not begin our thinking of the sublime and the beautiful with Plato or Aristotle, for they have already been successfully snatched from their Greek origins and contexts and planted as the precursors of “the West.” Plato and Aristotle were translated into Syriac, Aramaic, Arabic, and Persian (and were integral to subsequent philosophical schools in these languages) long before they were translated into English, French, German, or Italian—and yet the Europeanized history of philosophy treats Plato and Aristotle as the philosophical ancestors of modern European philosophy and the Judeo-Islamic receptions and conversations with Plato and Aristotle are delegated to the domain of Orientalist scholarship. Thus it is not with Plato and Aristotle that the Oriental world, an entirely fictive invention of the Enlightenment modernity, through the intermediary of the mercenary Orientalists, is denied the possibility of the sublime and the beautiful but in fact with Immanuel Kant and his constitution of the European subject.
For Kant the sense of the sublime and the beautiful is no mere speculation on aesthetic abstractions—for his theory of aesthetics is in fact the supreme sign of the European knowing subject standing in front of the knowable world appreciating its beauties, deciphering its mysteries, navigating its topography, conquering its anonymities, as indeed positing the ethics of its normative morality. For Kant the sublime and the beautiful are ultimately good, and as good they are right, and as right they are virtuous. Thus the philosophy, aesthetics, politics and ethics of Kant all converge in his theory of the sublime and the beautiful. There is a direct and organic link between the European aesthete observing the beautiful and the sublime, the Kantian knowing subject standing in front of the knowable world and deciphering it, and the European colonial officer roaming through the planet earth and conquering it.
The world, thus Orientalized in order to be made strange, mysterious, and perforce subject to European discovery and deciphering is definitive to the knowable world and as such can never be anywhere near the domain of the knowing subject—thus in the Kantian aesthetics we have no room for a worldly conception of the sublime and the beautiful, for the European notion of the sublime and the beautiful has been ascertained and theorized at the expense of denying the world.
The predicament that Baudrillard now terms the transaesthetics of indifference is thus directly rooted in his Kantian notion of the sublime and the beautiful—for even in Baudrillard still if the European does not see the beautiful and feel the sublime then they are simply not there. The despair with which Baudrillard trembles at the sight of the contemporary work of art is the despair of the Kantian confusion that listens to Indian music and looks at African art and yet all it hears and sees is distorted Beethoven and malignant Michelangelo.
Defying from Kant to Baudrillard, escaping the very curatorial logic of their selection and staging, the rise of world cinema and the globalized nativism of the art scenes are the return of the European repressed, the emancipation of its own incarcerated impossibilities—for by making the world incapable of the sublime and the beautiful the Kantian aesthetics has made the European sublime and the beautiful in effect worldly blind, for if the world is deliberately blinded, the European sublime and beautiful can have no worldly audience, for if no one else other than the European has the aesthetic intelligence to see then there is nothing to see, for in the post-museum age of site-specific art, the European notions of the sublime and the beautiful has itself become museumized.
For a worldly conception of the sublime and the beautiful to emerge we need to begin with the cosmopolitan centers of our worldly whereabouts, from Istanbul to Cairo, from Tehran to Mumbai, from Beijing to Tokyo, from San Francisco to New York, and then from there to come only to London, Paris, Rome, and Berlin via the subaltern tensions of its disenfranchised communities—where the sense of the beautiful and the site of the sublime have a lot to teach a world on the brink of terrorizing itself into nullity and indifference.
*First published in Shifting Landscapes: Film and Media in European Context. Miyase Christensen & Nezih Erdoğan (eds), 2008.
1As reported in BBC, “Turkey entry ‘would destroy EU’” (Friday, November 8, 2002, 18:48 GMT), http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/2420697.stm.
2Ibid.
3Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1963): 96.
4See Jean Baudrillard, “Transaesthetics,” in The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena (London and New York: Verso, 1990): 14–19.
5Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime. Translated by John T. Goldthwait (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1960): 109–110, and 113.
6For more detail see Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
7See Behzad Yaghmaian’s, Embracing the Infidel: Stories of Muslim Migrant on the Journey West (New York: Delacorte Press, 2005).
8BBC News, June 7, 2006.
9See Jagdish Bhagwati, In Defense of Globalization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
10In addition to Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Uzak (“Distant,” 2002), one will have to include Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul: Memories and the City (2006) and Elif Shafak’s The Bastard of Istanbul (2007) to reach for a fuller picture of the imperial city in contemporary Turkish urban anxieties.
11Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime: 111.
12Ibid., 113.
13In two specific cases, Iranian and Palestinian cinemas, I have sought to narrate alternative stories of these national cinemas in terms domestic to their collective character. See Hamid Dabashi, Masters and Masterpieces of Iranian Cinema (Washington, DC: Mage Publishers, 2007), and my edited volume, Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema (London and New York: Verso, 2006).