Four Theses on Contemporary Art

12. Non-imperial art must be as rigorous as a mathematical demonstration, as surprising as an ambush in the night, and as elevated as a star.

13. Today art can only be made from the starting point of that which, as far as Empire is concerned, doesn't exist. Through its abstraction, art renders this inexistence visible. This is what governs the formal principle of every art : the effort to render visible to everyone that which for Empire (and so by extension for everyone, though from a different point of view), doesn't exist.

14. Since it is sure of its ability to control the entire domain of the visible and the audible via the laws governing commercial circulation and democratic communication, Empire no longer censures anything. All art, and all thought, is ruined when we accept this permission to consume, to communicate and to enjoy. We should become the pitiless censors of ourselves.

15. It is better to do nothing than to contribute to the invention of formal ways of rendering visible that which Empire already recognizes as existent.

- from Alain Badiou's Fifteen Theses on Contemporary Art. Longer excerpt here

Media Strategy (Essential Reading)

I don't even know which bits to excerpt, so much of it so good.

"You Don't Understand Our Audience"
What I learned about network television at Dateline NBC
By John Hockenberry


via

Komedie om geld

The Trouble with Money (or, as the Dutch title would have it, A Comedy About Money) is perhaps my favorite Ophuls film, and one of the richest of his films precisely because it is thematically uncharacteristic. Ophuls' only Dutch film is concerned mainly with systems of exchange and the moral taint they leave on those who participate in them.

Themes of performance and deception in money matters become the heart of the film, but this is not an exploration of the means necessary to avoid poverty (though at times we get glimpses of this). Instead, the most frequent and serious deceits come from those who are successful with money. The performance of deception by the moneyed classes is Ophuls' focus, though it's hard to tell if they deceive because they have money or if they deceive in order to achieve their position. The film explores the problems of the mechanisms of exchange by asserting that money itself is inextricably tied with deceit.

The film is introduced by a ringleader in heavy makeup, shown in a traveling shot in which the ringleader travels with the camera against a static background. This artificiality - along with meta-presentational song that serves as a preface - clues us in to the film's themes of performance, class, money, and morals. The first scene in the film proper confirms what the song only references: a man walks along a pier, trying to sell his dog to a wealthy couple on a boat. He haggles with the couple, and brings the dog aboard, making them promise to take good care of him, and explaining that he doesn't want to sell the dog but he does need the money. The man then goes safely away and whistles, signalling the dog to run away and back to his original owner. The scam seems to be one he's repeated, not just because it's executed so fluidly, but also because the security men who call the police mention that these victims are only the latest.

The man relies on his brother-in-law Brand, an upstanding, moralistic bank runner, to keep him away from trouble (even the police know that Brand is above suspicion). But when Brand loses 50,000 pounds he's charged with delivering to another bank, he is accused of embezzlement. Acquitted, he's nonetheless fired by his bank, which can't afford the damage to its reputation. In the world of money, impression is more important than reality.

Unable to find work, he attempts suicide but is saved by an offer he can't refuse: to run a company that develops housing for the poor. He is offered the job - far above his previous station - because all assume that Brand has hidden the 50,000 pounds and has it at his disposal. This, according to his new boss Mr. Moorman, constitutes "credit," which will allow the debt-ridden company to take on new investments. As Moorman explains, by denying that he has any money to offer, financial partners will assume he does in fact have the money; on this basis they will invest in the project.

This notion of credit, in which financial knowledge is predicated on guesses about unknown information, depends on the abstraction of credit into 'money' (i.e., into a medium of exchange). Ophuls criticizes this abstraction at a moral level, because 'credit' then becomes another opportunity for misrepresentation to further one's financial benefit. Credit is based on confidence - as in: 'confidence man.' It's also important to note that the confidence instilled in Brand is based on the assumption that he is an embezzling thief. Ophuls implicates the system of money exchange as morally tainted, and confirms this with the final song from the ringmaster who introduced out story. [I've left out much of the plot, by the way.]

The rich cinematography is less self-consciously poetic than most of his work, but this is to the film's benefit. Even the most dramatic shots fit easily in the narrative without falling prey to an overt romanticism. Narrative structure and juxtaposition makes Ophuls' moral arguments points deftly: on either side of Brand's nightmare-montage, we hear comments about the worries of money and how they affect sleep; the dream itself is about the affects of, rather than the cause of, his worries. The Trouble with Money may currently be seen as a 'minor' Ophuls due to its rarity, but it is anything but. instead, it is one of Ophuls' major statements, an examination of the way participation in a system of exchange is both dehumanizing and de-moralizing. A chance to see this fine film is not to be missed.

The Shock Doctrine

more info

training them not to think

"Russian television has come a long way from the staid, politically tinged fare of Communist times, and these days there are many channels offering a steady diet of movies, dramas, game shows, soap operas and reality shows — some locally produced, some imported and dubbed.

News programs, which are tightly overseen by President Vladimir V. Putin’s administration, are another story. As in Soviet days, they rarely divert from the Kremlin’s point of view. Barbed political satire, which thrived after the fall of the Soviet Union, has been suppressed.

[...]

Daniil B. Dondurei, editor in chief of Cinema Art magazine, said he saw a darker significance in the success of shows like “Schastlivy Vmeste.”

“Today, people are becoming accustomed to not thinking about life,” he said. “The television is training them to not think about which party is in Parliament, about which laws are being passed, about who will be in charge tomorrow. People have become accustomed to living like children, in the family of a very strong and powerful father. Everything is decided for them.”"
- NYTimes

All Happy Endings are Counterrevolutionary: Theory, practice, image consumption, and knowledge in Minority Report

This is a response to Ted Pigeon's post on Minority Report from March 2, Minority Report: Shameless Product Placement or Scathing Social Commentary?

Read it first.

Ted discusses the contradictory politics of Minority Report's view of the fascism of the market, and the way that consumer society takes over our lives to the exclusion of dissent. Minority Report's use of product placement as the embodiment of this market fascism is undercut by the film's use of real advertisements and product placements. Ted asks, "Is it not possible to use the elements of an unacceptable system to in a sense comment on it and potentially reach the people that it manipulates? Call me an optimist, but I think so." I think Ted's most astute comment in the article might be his summation of the opposite viewpoint: "any act we do to work within these massive systems of the corporations that run the 'free' market to turn their own elements against them is just playing into them further."

Here is why the second statement is closer to the reality of image-consumption:

Spectacle functions by way of presenting knowledge for consumption. The consumption of knowledge sets up a disconnect between large-scale dissent and small-scale assent. Capitalism is a series of small transactions, where the "wisdom" of the market is the aggregation of individual decisions made by consumers at specific moments. Even when we all "agree" on the large-scale solutions in theory, we can still sabotage them through our actions. Global thoughts are subverted by local action.

The commodification of rebellion increases this hierarchy of knowledge above action.
In a movie about the creation of reality and factual dissent, the viewer is given the illusion of intelligence about the (film's) world through MR's 'critique' of the film's social order. This critique is false because it is limited to the realm of knowledge.
Rebellion is not seeing, but doing. Critique does not exist without action.

"The images detached from every aspect of life fuse in a common stream in which the unity of this life can no longer be reestablished. Reality considered partially unfolds, in its own general unity, as a pseudo-world apart, an object of mere contemplation. The specialization of images of the world is completed in the world of the autonomous image, where the liar has lied to himself. The spectacle in general, as the concrete inversion of life, is the autonomous movement of the non-living."
- Guy Debord

"Theory" is the failure of the process of theory. To call something "theory" is to condemn its failure as praxis, to describe it as revolution tangled up in means. Film that functions as theory sets itself up as "an object of mere contemplation" when it ends its critique before the final frame. This is the realm that the cinema resigns itself to when appending a resolution to the narrative of a previously critical film. All happy endings are counterrevolutionary.

In watching a movie, we enter a world which resembles our own (often as a negative/pessimistic image). In the counterrevolutionary pseudo-critical film, the film then resolves the conflict that allows for the pessimistic association, leaving us its obverse optimistic image. It resolves the dilemmas of the negative image, expunging them in favor of the positive image - and that's how you walk out of the theater.

"Thought must play a catastrophic role, must itself be an element of catastrophe, of provocation, in a world that wants absolutely to cleanse everything, to exterminate death and negativity."
- Jean Baudrillard

A film is an emotional journey for the spectator (in most films, mirroring that of the character(s)). The happy ending of the pseudo-critical film restores order and resolves the conflict of the society's flaws. Whatever allegory may have existed in Minority Report is lost in the psychology of resolution. The criticism lives only in the realm of theory, which remains "theory" insofar as it is the failure of praxis. A film with a resolutionary epilogue eliminates the need for action (praxis).

This is Baudrillard called a "trompe-l’œil negation" (in an interview with Le Nouvel Observateur discussing The Matrix). Like The Matrix, Minority Report traffics in these illusions of antagonistic criticism that by their nature as spectacle -- and the audience's fascinated adherence thereof -- forbid any true praxical alternative.