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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Catastrophic events like the bombing of Hiroshima, Hurricane Katrina's devastation of New Orleans, and drone strikes periodically achieve renewed political significance as subsequent developments summon them back to public awareness. But why and how do different conceptions of time inform and challenge these key events and the narratives they create? In this book, Michael J. Shapiro provides an approach to politics and time that unsettles official collective histories by introducing analyses of lived experience articulated in cinematic, televisual, musical, and literary genres. His investigation is framed by questions of our responsibility to acknowledge those victims of violence and catastrophe who have failed to rise above the threshold of public recognition. Ultimately, by focusing on time as an active force shaping our conception of political life, we can deepen our understanding of complex political dynamics and improve the theories and methods we rely on to interpret them. This bold and original book will be of interest to students and scholars of political theory, cultural studies and cinema studies looking for a new perspective on the temporal aspects of political life.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
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Table of Contents
Title page
Copyright page
Preface
Notes
Acknowledgments
1: Critical Temporalities: Thinking the Event
Introduction: The Battle of Okinawa
Events
From Literature to Cinema
Level Five
Notes
2: Hiroshima Temporalities
Introduction: Endings
Other Returns to Hiroshima
Mushrooms and Jellyfish
The Morality of Forms
Kolbowski's and Another after
A New Kind of War and Another “New Weapon”
Conclusion: Media, the Ethics of Attention, and Another Hiroshima
Notes
3: Hurricane Katrina Bio-Temporalities
The Discourses of Environmental Disaster
Early Katrina
Later Temporalities: Katrina in Popular Culture Genres
Conclusion: Katrina's Will-Have-Been
Notes
4: Keeping Time: The Rhythms of Work and the Arts of Resistance
Introduction: The Dance and Critical Thinking
Choreographies
A Post-Fordist, Fordist-Looking Future: Alex Rivera's
Sleep Dealer
An Aesthetic Intervention: Storytelling
Artistic Choreographies: Suborned and Resistant Bodies
Cinema Articulated with Dance: Lars Von Trier's
Dancer in the Dark
Dance Yet Again
Conclusion: “The Corporate Sublime”/“The Sweatshop Sublime”
Notes
5: “Fictions of Time”: Necro-Biographies
Introduction: A Weapons Sublime
Media Genres and Attention
Heeding Drone-Killing Atrocities
The Eye and the Gaze
From the Drone Queen to the Drone
Dispositif
Biographies and Counter-Biographies
Biography and the Problem of Truth
CIA Fictions: “Terrorist” Biographies
Robert Greenwald's Counter-Biographies
“All Plots End in Death”
Ethical Space and the Sight of and Framing of Death
Conclusion: Media Encounters
Notes
Afterword
Pursued by the Sublime
An About-Face
Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Figure 1.1 The eyes of Gutete Emerita
Figure 1.2 The café's oven
Figure 1.3 The celestial group
Figure 1.4 The eclipse on the buildings
Figure 1.5 Laura in front of the computer
Figure 1.6 Access denied
Figure 2.1 Yasuko Yamagata's drawing from
Unforgettable Fire
Figure 2.2 Elle's and Lui's crossed watches
Figure 2.3 The Tule Lake
Figure 2.4 Hiroshima bombing
Figure 2.5 Kolbowski's lovers
Figure 3.1 Walker image
Figure 4.1 The Del Rio Corporation
Figure 4.2 Casa Cruz
Figure 4.3 A futuristic Fordist factory
Figure 4.4 Maquilapolis women pantomiming their work rhythms
Figure 4.5 Cvalda, from
Dancer in the Dark
Figure 4.6 Gumboot dancers
Figure 4.7 The subRosa installation
Figure 5.1 Aayan returning the gaze
Figure 5.2 Brandon Bryant
Figure 5.3 Soccer ball and overhead plane
Figure 5.4 Tariq Aziz
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Start Reading
Preface
CHAPTER 1
Index
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Copyright page
Copyright © Michael J. Shapiro 2016
The right of Michael J. Shapiro to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2016 by Polity Press
Polity Press
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Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
350 Main Street
Malden, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-0780-1
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-0781-8(pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Shapiro, Michael J., author.
Title: Politics and time : documenting the event / Michael J. Shapiro.
Description: Malden, MA : Polity, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015049590 (print) | LCCN 2016015994 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509507801 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509507818 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781509507832 (Mobi) | ISBN 9781509507849 (Epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Political science–Philosophy. | Time–Political aspects. | Disasters–Political aspects.
Classification: LCC JA71 .S425 2016 (print) | LCC JA71 (ebook) | DDC 320.01–dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015049590
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Preface
Three brief commentaries on the event of National Socialism in Germany help me to situate my focus in this investigation of politics and time. The first, by the late sociologist C. Wright Mills, addresses the responsibilities associated with the vocation of critical thinking:
When events move very fast and possible worlds swing around them, something happens to the quality of thinking. Some…repeat formulae; some…become reporters. To time observations with thought so as to mate a decent level of abstraction with crucial happenings is a difficult problem. Its solution lies in the using of intellectual residues of social-history, not jettisoning them except in precise confrontation with events.1
Mills's observation raises the question of the event-adequacy of theoretical discourses. To pursue that question, I want to note my accord with answers provided decades later by Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault. When Deleuze famously insisted that philosophy must be worthy of the event, he was not simply suggesting that “events serve to confirm or refute particular theories.”2 He was advocating a philosophy that privileges critical thinking by inventing concepts that create the possibility of something new, by reframing events to allow for new kinds of subjects and new forms of relationship to emerge.3 For Deleuze, such a philosophy must enable an ethics of the event (a perspective I treat more extensively in chapter 1).
While Deleuze's approach to the relationship between thinking/theorizing and events devolves toward an ethics, Foucault's moves toward a politics of discourse. In one of his earlier discussions of the value of a theoretical discourse (framed as a position on how to interpret the statements in a “discursive formation”), he refers to how to “weigh” the “value” of statements:
A value that is not defined by their truth, that is not gauged by the presence of a secret content; but which characterized their place, their capacity for circulation and exchange, their possibility for transformation, not only in the economy of discourse, but more generally in the administration of scarce resources…[a discursive formation in short] appears as an asset – finite, limited, useful…an asset that is, by nature, the object of a struggle, a political struggle.4
In the passage's focus on epistemology, Foucault rejects both representational and hermeneutic approaches to statements, substituting a political pragmatics. What he adds to Mills's observation about the theory−event relationship is a political economy of discourse. Treating statements as assets, he evaluates the discourses in which they function in terms of the resources they differentially deploy, creating spaces for recognition and action by advantaging some subjects of enunciation and disadvantaging others. Similarly, much of my analysis in succeeding chapters offers a politics concerned with the advantages distributed by interpretive practices. As I contrast the mainstream media's with critical artistic genres' interpretations of events, my emphasis is on the way a conceptual framing of events can accord recognition to subjects who are absent in the official discourses that constitute and react to key historical moments.
Crucially, the “subjects” whose recognition to which I refer are not to be regarded as preexisting unities that stand apart from the conceptual frames in which they are allowed to appear. The interpretive practices, resident in a variety of genres, in which subjects are accorded space, participate in fashioning those subjects as historical events. Foucault makes that point evident in his analysis of Edouard Manet's paintings. Manet, he suggests, was the painter most responsible for the emergence of the “modern viewer.”5 In contrast with the world of immobile subjects that had been summoned in prior artistic practices, in Manet's canvases, the spectator becomes “an individual exiled from his certainties regarding his place in the world.”6
The second commentary on the event of National Socialism I summon is by Primo Levi, a Holocaust survivor (who did not survive his survival). Levi provides an account of a micro event within the larger event of the Holocaust; it's an utterance by a child in his barracks in the Auschwitz Lager, where he was a prisoner. The child, Hurbinek, was “the smallest and most harmless among us…the most innocent”: “Hurbinek was a nobody, no one knew anything of him, he could not speak and he had no name, that curious name Hurbinek had been given to him by us, perhaps by one of the women who had interpreted with those syllables one of the inarticulate sounds that the baby let out now and again.”7 Levi and his barrack neighbors were attentive to Hurbinek's sounds: “During the night we listened carefully…from Hurbinek's corner there occasionally came a sound, a word…It sounded something like ‘mass-klo’ or ‘matisklo.’ ” Heeding the child's voiced demand for a presence in the world, Levi grants that presence, allowing “Hurbinek, who fought like a man, to the last breath, to gain entry into the world of men from which a bestial power had excluded him.” Specifically, by repeating Hurbinek's word, he lends Hurbinek's existence a duration. His account of the micro event of Hurbinek's utterance renders Hurbinek as a historical subject, playing a political role. Levi's brief discursive gesture constitutes a powerful political pedagogy about the force of a few words. Marking the event of Hurbinek's life and death, he provides an exemplary instance of the ethics and politics of the event. As he sums up his contribution to Hurbinek's presence, Levi writes: “Nothing remains of him: he bears witness through these words of mine.”8
The third commentary on the event of National Socialism I want to reference is by another Holocaust survivor, the Nobel prizewinning author, Imre Kertész (who survived his survival). In response to an interviewer's question about how the Holocaust has been treated as historical memory in the East and the West, Kertész provides a way to conceive such events: “The Holocaust is an absolute turning point in Europe's history, an event in the light of which will be seen everything that happened before and will happen after.”9 Slavoj Žižek gives us a perspective on the theoretical implications of the way Kertész renders that event: “An event is…the effect that seems to exceed its causes…a change in the way reality appears to us…[perhaps] a shattering transformation of reality itself?”10
My investigations of politics and time in this book are focused initially on another reality-shattering event, the dropping of an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, in part because my inspiration for this study is owed to an invitation to contribute to a monograph issue of the journal Thesis Eleven, devoted to the seventieth anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Having been recently attuned to a grammar-temporality rendering of that atrocity by Rosalyn Deutsche's excellent book Hiroshima after Iraq, I responded to the invitation with an essay entitled “Hiroshima Temporalities” (the prototype for chapter 2, which preserves that title).11 My opening chapter prepares the way for my analysis of the Hiroshima event in two ways. First and foremost, I respond to the issue of “events” by reviewing and applying the critical philosophical perspectives that shape my analyses and, second, I do a reading of Chris Marker's (semi)-documentary Level Five which treats the Battle for Okinawa as an event that helped legitimate the US decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
My analyses throughout the chapters presume that events involve what Claude Romano refers to as “the temporalization of time,”12 where to refer to temporality rather than mere time registers time as lived experience for particular historically situated subjects. Péter Forgács's documentary work, in which he recovered decades of Hungarian private life by collecting home movies and adding documentary footage (primarily from newsreels to mark the periods in which the home movies are made), is an instance of treating time as lived experience. His approach “marginalizes official history…[in order to have] us understand that time does not unfold through a collective narrative.”13 In effect, Forgács's documentaries substitute the micropolitical aspects of events − the way they bear on lived experience for a variety of individual subjects − for the official national narratives that constitute collective histories.
Heeding Forgács's approach to historical time as a multiplicity of micro events of lived experience, I focus my Hiroshima investigation on a contrast between the United States' official version of the bombing and the experiences of the Japanese target/victims, articulated in a variety of genres and testimonies. I follow that chapter with more temporality-relevant chapters, each of which builds on the problematic that frames what precedes it. Thus because my Hiroshima chapter concludes with a reading of Silva Kolbowski's video After Hiroshima Mon Amour, which substitutes a black woman for the French actress Emanuel Riva, thereby reflecting on the ethnic color-coding of events, it is appropriate to follow the Hiroshima chapter with “Hurricane Katrina's Bio-Temporalities” (chapter 3) in which I emphasize the way the hurricane and the policy responses disproportionately victimized black bodies (the African-American population of New Orleans). To treat the inattention to the disproportionate suffering of those bodies, the chapter focuses on Spike Lee's documentary When the Levies Broke and David Simon's fictionalized version of Katrina's aftermath in his television series Treme, both of which inter-articulate the history of the African-American soundscape with the historical trajectory of Katrina's aftermath.
The Katrina chapter ends with a treatment of what I call the “racial sublime,” noting that of late the US media are finally acknowledging that (as I put it with the help of Michael Eric Dyson) “it has becomes evident in a way not previously appreciated by white America, ‘the lived experience of race feels like terror for black folk.’ ”14 Having appreciated and utilized the concept of the sublime to treat the broader implications of the Katrina event, I enlisted the concept of the sublime to shape parts of chapters 4 and 5, which focus among other things on the sweatshop and weapons sublimes respectively. More generally, the conceptual issues I have needed to think through (rehearsed in the various chapters) are the relationships between temporality and grammar, the fluid boundaries of events, the relationships between official modes of problematization that emerge as “history” versus the lived temporalities of diverse human assemblages; the media and artistic genres within which critical thinking about temporality can be articulated (featured in chapters 1−3); the contentions between the rhythms imposed on bodies by coercive forces (which produce morbidity and hasten death), and the artistic practices that evince the counter-rhythms through which those coercive forces are confronted and resisted (the focus of chapter 4); and the contention between the biographic scripts lent to persons by official agencies (for example, the CIA's bio-anthropologies that select those who are targeted for state murder) and counter-biographies summoned in fictional and documentary texts which challenged the official, assassination-justifying biographies (the focus of chapter 5).
In this brief preface, I want to provide an elaboration of only the first issue, the grammar−temporality relationship, because it shapes not only how I conceive the objects of my investigation but also the grammatical rhythms of my text as I seek to make my analyses “worthy of the event[s]” (to enlist a Deleuzian phrase). My attention to grammar was developed in a prior investigation concerned with the temporality of citizenship.15 There, I was especially alerted to the grammar−temporality relationship by Thomas Pynchon's fictional construction of a group discussing a world-shaking, comprehension-challenging (i.e., sublime) event, the decision by the head English astronomer (in 1752) to remove eleven days from the English calendar so that English time could become compatible with other global times (instituted in 1582 by a calendar reform commission under Pope Gregory XIII). As a conversation among patrons in an English pub articulates reactions to the event, one speaker, wondering about “the kind of people who could accept such a change with equanimity,” remarks that the astronomer would have to hire:
A people who lived in a different relation to Time – one that did not, like our own, hold at its heart the terror of Time's passage, far more preferably Indifference to it…The verbs of their language no more possessing tenses, than their Nouns Case-Ending, for these People remains as disengaged from Subject, object possession, or indeed anything which among Englishmen require a Preposition.16
To pick up on the insight provided by Pynchon's character, I want to note that the verb tense that plays a central role in my analyses is the future anterior, the will-have-been, because much of my focus is on the way past events reemerge not only in the present but also enduringly into contingent futures. Specifically, for example, I speculate about how such events as the bombing of Hiroshima and Hurricane Katrina will-have-been after succeeding events give them new political relevance.
The analytics and ethos of my investigation are well captured in a remark by Foucault in his Introduction to the English translation of Georges Canguilhem's The Normal and the Pathological: “Error is not eliminated by the muffled force of truth which gradually emerges from the shadow but by a new way of ‘speaking true.’ ”17 My adaptation of that commitment allocates the “way of speaking true” especially to critically oriented documentary films, whose insights I draw on in each chapter. They are critical in the sense that (to use Deleuze's terms) they are “false narrations,” rather than simple chronologies. As a result, they are involved in “shattering systems of judgment”18 by providing “counter-histories.”19 The documentaries upon which I focus provide challenges in the form of counter-narratives and counter-visions to what Foucault famously calls the “truth weapons” of governments which try to quarantine events within official interpretations, sedimented within (among other places) national museums and archives.
Notes
1
C. Wright Mills, “Review of Franz Neumann's
Behemoth:
The Structure and Function of National Socialism 1933−1944
,”
Partisan Review
. Online at:
http://www.wbenjamin.org/Behemoth.html
.
2
The quotation is from Paul Patton, “The World Seen from Within: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Events,”
Theory & Event
1(1) (1997). Online at:
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/summary/v001/1.1patton.html
.
3
For more specification of the perspective, see Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari,
What is Philosophy?
, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
4
Michel Foucault,
The Archaeology of Knowledge
, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 120.
5
Michel Foucault,
Manet and the Object of Painting
, trans. M. Barr (London: Tate, 2009), 32.
6
Ibid., 16.
7
Primo Levi,
The Reawakening
, trans. Stuart Woolf (New York: Collier, 1987), 11.
8
Ibid. Unbeknownst to Levi (who was not privy to Czech culture), Hurbinek is likely based on the character “Hurvinek,” a popular figure from the Czech puppet theater. The child's sounds that Levi reports are likely based on Czech as well (e.g.,
maso
is the Czech word for meat and
maslo
is the word for butter). I owe those insights to Professor Petr Kouba of the Philosophy and Religious Studies Institute of Charles University in Prague.
9
Imre Kertész,
The Holocaust as Culture
, trans. Thomas Cooper (Chicago: Seagull Books, 2011), 43.
10
Slavoj Žižek,
Event: A Philosophical Journey through a Concept
(Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2014), ebook, loc. 114.
11
See Rosalyn Deutsche,
Hiroshima after Iraq: Three Studies in Art and War
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).
12
See Claude Romano,
Event and Time
, trans. Stephen E. Lewis (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), xi.
13
The quotation is from Kaja Silverman, “Waiting, Hoping, among the Ruins of All the Best,” in Bill Nichols and Michael Renov (eds),
Cinema's Alchemist: The Films of Péter Forgács
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), ebook, loc. 1416.
14
Michael Eric Dyson, “Racial Terror, Fast and Slow,”
The New York Times
. Online at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/17/opinion/racial-terror-fast-and-slow.html?_r=0
.
15
See Michael J. Shapiro, “National Times and Other Times: Re-Thinking Citizenship,”
Cultural Studies
14(1) (January) (2000), 79−98.
16
Thomas Pynchon,
Mason & Dixon
(New York: Henry Holt, 1997), 195.
17
Michel Foucault, “Introduction” to Georges Canguilhem,
The Normal and the Pathological
, trans. Carolyn R. Fawcett (New York: Zone Books, 1989), 15.
18
Gilles Deleuze,
Cinema 2
, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 133.
19
For an analysis of the relationship between cinema genres and counter-history, see Marcia Landy,
Cinema & Counter-History
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015).
Acknowledgments
While many colleagues, students, and friends have contributed to my thinking – with reactions, insights, and suggested references − I want to single out Sam Opondo who read most of the chapters with amazing discernment and made many helpful suggestions. I also want to acknowledge those who invited me to lecture and/or contribute essays that turned out to be prototypes (or sections) of my chapters: Rune Saugmann Andersen, Garnet Kindervater, Luis Lobo-Guerrero, Mustapha Pasha, Keith Tester, and Juha Vuori.
Almost everything in this book was delivered in lectures and discussions in my courses at the University of Hawaii and at PUC-Rio (the Pontifical Catholic University in Rio de Janeiro). I am grateful to all my students (too numerous to mention) in both places for contributing to the stimulating conversations that affected much of the writing. I want to acknowledge one student in particular, Isabela Carpena, who sat in on one of my courses at PUC-Rio in the summer of 2014 and turned me into a cinematic character. She made a (professionally edited) “Shapiro” biopic in which the rhythms of the montage (mostly film clips and musical interludes interspersed with my commentary) introduce me to a subject/scholar I only vaguely knew. I want also to express my gratitude to my PUC-Rio colleagues for the repeated invitations and support of my teaching of the materials in this book to an attentive and challenging student constituency: Paulo Esteves, Marta Fernandez, Monica Hertz, Joao Nogueira, and Roberto Yamato.
Finally, I want to acknowledge the outstanding support of my acquisition and managing editors, Louise Knight and Nekane Tanaka Galdos, who, along with two anonymous readers, provided valuable insights that found their way into the final draft. A shorter version of chapter 2, “Hiroshima Temporalities,” was published in the journal Thesis Eleven. I am grateful for their permission to reproduce that material here. And an earlier version of chapter 3, “Hurricane Katrina's Bio-Temporalities” is published in Anna M. Agathangelou and Kyle D. Killian (eds), Time, Temporality and Violence in International Relations (Routledge, 2016).
1Critical Temporalities: Thinking the Event
Introduction: The Battle of Okinawa
“The Battle of Okinawa” is an event that receives relatively little coverage in contemporary reviews of the history of violence, even though its duration and civilian casualty rate looms large in the historical archive of atrocity. It's “old news,” and, as Milan Kundera has noted (through one of his fictional characters contemplating the events of brutality that he'd seen covered in recent television news broadcasts), news becomes old very quickly:
No event remains news over its whole duration, merely for a quite brief span of time, at the very beginning. The dying children of Somalia whom millions of spectators used to watch avidly, aren't they dying anymore? What has become of them? Have they grown fatter or thinner? Does Somalia still exist? And in fact did it ever exist? Could it be only the name of a mirage?1
However, as I have suggested elsewhere, “while the momentarily timely images carried by news media may be ephemeral, the genre of the exhibition, which yields an accompanying and enduring catalogue/text, is one in which what becomes effaced as a news event is restored, reflected on, and made publicly available for extended ethical and political negotiation.”2 For example, there is an installation by Alfredo Jaar that references the 1994 massacres in Rwanda. Rather than showing gruesome images of mutilated bodies, Jaar “conceals…photographs of the Rwandan massacre in boxes [see Figure 1.1], after first leading visitors along corridors placing them before a huge screen of light, empty of any image.”3
Figure 1.1
The eyes of Gutete Emerita
Jacques Rancière captures the effect of Jaar's aesthetic strategy: “It is the construction of a sensory arrangement that restores the powers of attention itself.”4 Certainly, diverse media − official government releases, journal, newspaper, television and internet publications, and what is treated by a variety of artistic genres − create the conditions of possibility for what people know about atrocities, starvation, and other forms of adversity all over the planet, and each media genre has a different way of evoking or dulling “powers of attention.”
Here, I want to point to another genre, the documentary film, which like the exhibition offers an opportunity for “slow looking” and extended reflection, and, to note one in particular, Chris Marker's “semi-documentary”5Level Five (1996), which brings back the Battle of Okinawa. Combining archival footage with a fictional scenario, the film is narrated by the actress Catherine Belkhodja, who as the character Laura (drawn from Otto Preminger's 1994 eponymous film) sits at a computer console building an interactive video game begun by her deceased lover. The game is aimed at altering the battle. Combining ethnographic and aesthetic subjects − footage of Okinawan informants and victims as the former and “Laura” as the latter (who is continually on-screen, talking to her absent lover) − Marker, a “futuristic ethnologist”6 as well as a filmmaker/essayist, reframes the way the event will-have-been. Because his way of recreating the past's present and future inspires much of my inquiry throughout this investigation (as well as providing a threshold for chapter 2), I do an extended analysis of the film's complex temporalities at the end of this chapter. However, before turning back to the film, I want to rehearse the conceptualizations through which events can be thought by drawing from both critical philosophical perspectives on temporality and from artistic and cultural texts that implement those perspectives.
Events
To begin illustrating the conceptual interventions I deem necessary for a critical politics of temporality, I return to a subject of an earlier inquiry, a 1996 sports report on a Sunday Giants−Lions NFL game by Mike Freeman in the New York Times. Extending the action on the field into a media future, Freeman wrote: “This is an image that might endure in the minds of the Lions for months to come: Giants defensive lineman Ray Agnew, after picking off a pass, rumbling 34 yards for a touchdown, his 285-pound body running so slowly it seemed the feat couldn't be captured on an hour-long highlight show.” In my original analysis of the report, I contrasted the value of the touchdown in the game (six points) with that of its potential as a ratings-enhancing “highlight” on a television sportscast.7 Here, I am revisiting the episode to enhance the “legibility” for what was then the other aspect of my focus, the conceptualization of the layers of temporality needed to capture the episode as a critical political event.8 Because in my first analysis, I gave inadequate attention to the concept of the event, I turn to that issue first: What is an event?
It should be evident that the constitution of the Ray Agnew event is inseparable from Mike Freeman's dramatic narrative. Rejecting approaches to events that separate them from narratives (as if the “real” of events has a stand-alone facticity that precedes accounts of them) J.-F. Lyotard, using the historian as subject/narrator, writes,
We habitually pose the following sequence: there is the fact, then the account of the witness, that is to say a narrative activity transforming the fact into a narrative [an intellectual habit that]…poses a theatrical model: outside is the fact, eternal to the theatrical space, on stage the dramatic narrative unfolds; hidden in the wings is the director, the narrator with all [her]/his machinery…The historian is supposed to undo all the machinery and machination to restore the excluded, having beaten down the walls of the theater. But it is obvious that the historian is [herself]/himself only another director, [her]/his narrative another product, [her]/his work another narration.9
If we assume, as Lyotard's remarks suggest, that there are no “events” outside of the narratives with which we construct and elaborate them (turning a stream of activity into an event requires interpretive practices that partition continuous time with a lived narrativized temporality), we are able to offer a critical analysis of the way Freeman narrates Ray Agnew's run. What is required in this case is an articulation of philosophical, media technology, and sports histories. Freeman was not a “transparent eyeball,”10 perceiving a moving body as a pure image, unaffected by where/when he was situated. He occupied a contemporary locus of enunciation, writing as a participant in a modernity that had been shaped by the impact of media technologies on contemporary sports. And we who would make critical sense of the narrative/event are situated in a history of ideas, a critical philosophical trajectory that begins with Immanuel Kant's location of time within subjectivity, runs through Edmund Husserl's concept of time consciousness, proceeds to Martin Heidegger's ontological location of the subject in time, and moves to versions of critically oriented philosophies of history and subjectivity by contemporary post-Kantians − for example those of Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Paul Ricoeur, who displace pure consciousness with reactivated possibilities, discursive practices, counter-actualizations, and narratives respectively.
Instead of rehearsing all of the ideational trajectory involved in philosophies of temporality after Kant,11 I am cutting to what I regard as key revisions of the above-mentioned four thinkers: Benjamin's displacement of a continuum from past to present with episodes of shock, when the past which “carries a temporal index…flashes up at a moment of danger”12; Foucault's displacement of temporality from subjective consciousness to discursive practices (privileging especially genres that challenge institutionalized limits of exiting discourses13) and to a genealogical version of history; Deleuze's concept of the “pure event” and its various actualizations and counter-actualizations; and Ricoeur's location of time within specific narrative formations (and his privileging of fiction over foundational narratives of rationality, an explicit critique of Hegelian universal history).
Summoning Benjamin first, we can observe a view of historical time that presumes eventual moments derived from a politically acute “mindful remembering,” a “seizure in the present of the missed possibilities of happiness in the past.”14 To give that perspective concreteness, we can observe an implementation of Benjamin's view in W. E. B. Du Bois' reflection on the missed possibilities indexed in the post-Civil War reconstruction in the American South. Asking “What is the object of writing the history of the Reconstruction, is it simply to establish the truth, on which Right in the future may be built?”15 Du Bois goes on to reflect on a missed opportunity. What “flashes up” from the past for him, as he views the racial inequalities, practices of coercion, violence, and exclusion constituted by the “color line” (which etches America's most significant failure to achieve a democracy) is the brief moment when a possibility failed to take hold. He points out that when black entrepreneurs returned to the South, at the beginning of the Reconstruction, it was a time in which “the ranks and file of black labor had a notable leadership of intelligence.”16
Observing that many white laborers had begun to appreciate the effects of that leadership and that a combined labor force could “bring workers of all colors into a united opposition to the employer,”17 he saw a possibility of a “democratic development across racial lines,”18 which never came to fruition. The tragic failure of the Reconstruction was for Du Bois the primary way that the past existed in the present of an America whose oppressive racial-spatial order he both analyzed and lamented. In effect, Du Bois' approach to the political economy of a racially fraught America mimics Benjamin's revision of Kant's philosophical temporality. Du Bois exercised a non-linear, redemptive approach to historical cognition that evokes “the event” by privileging missed possibilities rather than a Kantian sensus communis, which is based on a transcendental structure of apprehension. Historical time for Du Bois as for Benjamin is politically attentive. It is not “a linear and homogeneous process whose form remains the same and whose contents, assimilated to persistent forms, are indifferent.”19
Foucault also departs from the Kantian model of historical cognition.20 As I have put it (explicating Foucault's later historical method), “Foucault like Kant rejects the iconic thing in itself, but rather than displacing the privileging of the thing with [a phenomenological model of consciousness] a ‘productive understanding,’ responsible for the shape and temporal extension of phenomena, Foucault substitutes a genealogical practice of historical sensibility.”21 His most explicit approach to the event is articulated in his reflections on Kant's essay on enlightenment (Aufklarung) where he shifts the emphasis from the Kantian enlightenment tradition, which enquires into the legitimacy of modes of knowing, to an emphasis on the “connection between mechanisms of coercion and contents of knowledge,” an examination of what he calls “eventualization.” That expression, which lends a dynamism to the concept of the event, is meant to point to the historically situated “effects of power” generated by the “contents of knowledge.”22 Foucault's approach to the effects of power is in the form of investigations that record the contingencies of power arrangement, making them appear “fragile, temporary [and as mere] events, nothing less than events.”23
As Foucault pursued his diverse historical investigations, it became evident that the events that occupied his analytic attention involved the emergence of (among other things) new subjects, for example “the criminal,” who emerged as a coercion-connected object of knowledge in the middle of the nineteenth century. Whereas prior to that historical moment, “Criminal law knew only two terms, the offense and the penalty,”24 the mid-nineteenth century witnessed a new subject as an object of knowledge, “the criminal,” whose identity began to be interrogated within the disciplinary frames of new knowledge agents, especially psychiatrists, whose knowledge practices were invited into courtroom dramas. As Foucault points out:
Crime became an important issue for psychiatrists because what was involved was less a field of knowledge to be conquered than a modality of power to be secured and justified. If psychiatry became so important in the nineteenth century, it was not simply because it applied a new medical rationality to mental or behavioral disorders, it was because it functioned as a sort of public hygiene.25
As is the case in his other investigations of subject formation, Foucault locates the event of the criminal's emergence as an object of knowledge in a broader field of events, specifically those associated with the historical development of the biopolitics of population, a shift in governmentalities, beginning in the late eighteenth century, from the problem of maintaining the inviolability of the sovereign to that of managing the social order's collective subject, the “population,” which had become “the ultimate end of government, that is the welfare of the population…the increase of its wealth, longevity, health.”26
