Work in Progress

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WORK IN PROGRESS:

(IV) Producing Forms of Cinematic Cultural Capital: Circulation, Movement, and Thought, Volume I.  This textual project on cinema as a form of thought and of politics that promotes new forms of freedom and equality for the twenty-first century contains 125,000 words. The endeavor deploys writings on cinema by Giorgio Agamben and Gilles Deleuze, Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of history, Pierre Bourdieu’s social theory, Fredric Jameson’s engagement with the Marxian problematic, and Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory. Also enlisted are Jacques Lacanian-Slavoj Žižekian theoretical psychoanalysis, Jacques Rancière’s “indisciplinarity” and axiomatic of an equality of intelligence in his account of the appropriation of the sensible and of the politics and aesthetics of cinema, and Bernard Stiegler’s pharmacology and notion of the era of disruption. The study aims to differentiate new post-capitalist utopian forms of capital in circulation, of movement and of thought for the elucidation of new forms of life and so of what can be enacted, discovered and seen with the cinematographic image. In so doing it aims to discover for the active spectator new non–sadistic and non-authoritarian ways of moving, circulating, thinking and being within the cinematic frame. As against the dominant cinematic apparatus and economic system of circulation and circulationism, the active spectator in this study engages with the cinematic image for a novel progressive form of circulating and movement force, the cultural capital of egalitarian and cooperative ‘non-power’; or, put otherwise, the ‘un-power’ of cinematic cultural ‘non-capital’. This subversive circulationism deactivates things for the conditions of possibility of an emancipated subject and future. The study thus constitutes an account of a conflict over the sensible with regard to circulation, movement, and thought. Objects analyzed include gestures, ideas, movies, and scenes from the superstar directors D.W. Griffith, Fritz Lang, F.W. Murnau, Orson Welles, Michelangelo Antonioni, Alain Resnais, Chantal Akerman, and Terrence Malick.

(III) Working on a textual enterprise on Forms of Experience & Commodity Culture: Transnational Cultural Modernisms in USA literature as well as in the Continental European writings of Theodor Adorno, Georges Bataille, Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, and Joyce’s 1922–39 Paris Project, Finnegans Wake.

(II) Writing a treatise on Forms of Cinematic Cultural Capital: Circulation, Movement, and Thought, Volume II. See the above description of Volume 1. Objects analyzed include gestures, ideas, movies, and scenes from the superstar directors Buster Keaton, Carl-Theodor Dreyer, Dziga Vertov, Sergei Eisenstein, Orson Welles, Andrei Tarkovsky, Michelangelo Antonioni, Maya Deren, Hito Steyerl, Yasujiro Ozu, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

(I) Producing a treatise on Forms of Life; or, Melancholic Subjectivity, Modes of Production, and the Utopian Rhetoric of Shakespeare’s ‘King Richard II’ (c. 1596). The textual project contains 50, 000 words, and owes its genesis to an essay I wrote for a Pomona College Senior Seminar in Spring Semester 1989 on King Richard II under the teaching of Martha Andresen, Paul Mann, and Cristanne Miller.