UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA,

Los Angeles
Without Community, Without Self:
Gilles Deleuze's American Problem
in the Films of Ford and Sternberg and the Fiction of Melville
A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the
requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy
in Film and Television
by
Jason Mark Skonieczny
2012
UMI Number: 3532413
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ii
Dedicated to the victims of the auto-da-fe
iii
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements ix
Vita xi
Abstract xiii
1 Introduction
1.0 Ori2inalitv and Universality: Deleuze's American Problem 1
Deleuze and the cliches of the American Cinema -Seismic lines of flight in Foucault and
Melville -Originals -Individuation is above membership in a species -Originals,
Benjamin's Aura, Personality, and Deleuze's cliches -Ranciere's Classical and Modern
vs. Deleuze's Classical and Modern -Towards politics as a new universality
1.1. Flux. Philosophy. Cinema: Deleuze in Contrast with Other Film 15
Time as Flux, the Heraclitean paradox, and Difference in itself -Bergson's telephonic
exchange -Both Speech-Events and Film-Events must intervene in the flow of time in
order to be effective -Deleuze against structuralist semiotics -Deleuze against
"indexicality" -What is a film author?: Not a Manifestation of a Worldview
1.2 Ford: Atmosphere over History 30
Synopsis of Part 2
1.3 Sternberg: Philosophy Against Personality 35
Synopsis of Part 3
1.4 Melville: Aleatory Originality 40
Synopsis of Part 4
2 Unanimous Depth: John Ford
2.0 Unanimity and the Ahistorical in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962).. .47
"What Counts for Ford?": Unanimous community, not factual history -Unanimity in
Liberty Valance -Tracing Deleuze's Idea of Ford's "Encompasser" to the Logic of Sense
-Tracing Ford's encompassing atmosphere to Nietzche's Use and Disadvantages of
History -Stoddard as the Rebel Above a Depth -Comparison of Ford's use of depth to
Fuquet's Melun Dyptich -Legend-as-Cinematic-Mastery against Legend-as-Fact
2.1 A Sublime Architecture of Attractions in Staeecoach (1939) 71
Comparison of Ford's use of depth with the abstraction within "Train Arriving at La
Ciotat" (1895) -From Eisensteinian attractions to the abstraction of spatial distortion -
Ringo and Dallas as rebels above a depth -The architecture of Ford's strategy for
unanimity -the other "variable ornaments" of Stagecoach - the unrecognized link
between Miinsterberg and Eisenstein through the violence of Kant's sublime -Ford's
dangerous paradox and the Other "Expressionist" Ford
iv
2.2 The Horizon of Civil Religion in Fort Apache (1946) 96
Horizons and the infinite depth of the sky -Col. Thursday's recessed but variable
positioning -Contrast of this study to the Cahiers du Cinema treatment of Ford's Young
Mr. Lincoln (1939) -Mobility in the Positioning of York and Cochise, and in Lincoln -
The opposition between garden and desert or between Rousseau and Hobbes is uneasy at
best -Rousseau's General Will -Plato's city as one body -The civil religion as
periodically reestablished unanimity -Ford's paradox as the dangerous solution to
Rousseau's problem of the form that a civil religion should take-The classical irony of
Ford's dangerous paradox
2.3 Equity. Pitv. Nostalgia: MvDarline Clementine (1946) and
Ford's Other Women 119
Wyatt Earp's law as Agambenien state of exception -Resentment of the civic order is
clearly not the aim of Ford's strategy -The transfer of atmosphere from Doc to Wyatt via
Clementine -Henry Fonda's Wyatt Earp in contrast to Henry Fonda's Lincoln -Ford's
exercise in equity in contrast to Aristotelian equity -Pity and the maternal from Kristeva
and Zizek -Some of Ford's other women: 4 Sons (1928), Pilgrimage (1933), 7 Women
(1966), The World Moves On (1934), The Searchers (1957) -The audience can say "we"
only on the basis of a pitiable object that is isolated and willingly claiming need,
insufficiency, or dependency as his/her central identifying characteristic -The social
utility of pity in Rousseau -Derrida's parallel between Rousseau's and Nietzsche's ideas
of femininity -Derrida's critique of representation in contrast to Deleuze's encompasser
-The nostalgic dissimulations of Ford's civil religious rituals
3 Spectacular Stoic: Josef Von Sternberg
3.0 From the Encompasser to the Self 156
Deleuze's portrait of the Stoics from the Twentieth Series of Logic of Sense in contrast to
his idea of representation as encompassing from the Third Series of Logic of Sense - The
parallel difference in the internal target of Sternberg's Stoic exercises of the self and the
external target of Ford's encompasser/strategy for unanimity
3.1 The Close-Up and True Choice in Shanehai Express (1932) 159
Seneca's call for a means of bringing the self to a state of tranquil neutrality -
Sternberg's "spiritual hygiene" and Shanghai Lily's praying hands -Deleuze's idea of
the close-up as appropriated from Balazs -Sternberg's idea of the close-up -Epictetus:
Affection qua things that are in our own power -Shanghai Lily's praemeditatio malorum
-Did Deleuze recognize Sternberg's Stoicism?
3.2 Refraction of Bodies and Immanent Spiritual Light: Shanehai Express and
Morocco (1930) 180
Sternberg's goals in obstructing the actor -Deleuze's treatment of Sternberg and direct
address from the lectures that preceded Cinema 1 - Deleuze's study of Sternberg was not
v
comprehensive because it focused too much on close-ups -Sternberg's reservation of
moments of direct address for moments of Stoic true choice -Doc's Spiritual Conversion
-The Chain of sacrifices in Morocco - The effective parallel between Sternberg's
positioning of bodies and Deleuze's final discussion of Sternberg's light in Cinema 1 -
Sternberg's sacrificial love triangles in contrast to the love triangle in Ford's Liberty
Valance
3.3 Distinguishing the Self from the Crowd in Morocco
and Blonde Venus (1932) 200
Sternberg against the dominant regime of the self in Hollywood -Amy Jolly's tuxedo as
an assault on the crowd -The Dressing Room: Sternberg, Sex, and the Crowd -Helen's
choice to take Johnny was not the true choice -Sternberg's and Eisenstein's principles of
"motor reproduction" against sympathetic character or plot logic -Cicero's Stoically
natural affection as beyond the crowd's judgments of "wifely duty"
3.4 Sternberg's Critiques of the Crowd: From Scarlet Empress (1935) to
Anatahan (1952) 222
Sternberg's crowd scenes as the opposite pole to his close-ups and moments of "true
choice" -Deleuze's emphasis of the moment of encrustation of Catherine the Great in
contrast to Mary Ann Doane's and Robin Wood's -Bellour's isolation of the other meta-
cinematic aspects of Scarlet Empress - Glamour: "Visual stimulant achieved by
flummery" -Fan discourse surrounding Dietrich -Freud's Group Psychology in
Sternberg, Bellour, and Hansen: the problem of identification with the crowd -But,
Sternberg still posits a unique self as an alternative to membership in the crowd -The
conclusion of Anatahan'' s use of direct address -Sternberg's relapse into an ideal of
human community: the failure of Sternberg's Stoicism to specify a means of oikeiosis
4 The Originality of Herman Melville
4.0 The American Problem Reformulated: Oikeiosis without Nostalgia 268
Melville was ahead of Ford and Sternberg because his works convey that an oikeiosis
without nostalgia requires turning against the human community
4.1 Bartleby. the Stoic 272
Stoicism and Emersonian transcendentalism are parodied in the character of Bartleby -
Bartleby's curious effects upon the attorney-narrator -The simultaneous failure of
Bartleby's Stoicism and of the attorney's charity due to the intervention of the judgments
of others -Deleuze against Leo Marx's reading of Bartleby, the Scrivener - Sternberg's
transformation from Bartleby-esque Stoic to attorney-esque humanist -Bartleby as the
"New Christ?" -The attorney's refusal to reevaluate his own way of life
4.2 The Acinematic Billy Budd 289
Melville's "savage" critique of "civilized barbarities" against Ford's interest in
"traditional peoples" -Billy's beauty is the more absolute for not being seen -
vi
Admiration of strength admixed with pity: an acinematic paradox of the sublimely
beautiful -The modern irony of Billy Budd against the classical irony of Ford
4.3 The Classical American Cinema's Two Ahab Problem 300
Like Ahab's mission against the white whale, Sternberg's and Ford's games of anti-
idolatry became mere attempts to reinstate a model -Ahab-Sternberg-Ford's struggle
against the white whale/wall of the cave/cinema/Leviathan -D.H. Lawrence on race in
Moby-Dick as compared with whiteness in the American cinema -Sternberg's Stoicism
as the monomania of Ahab -The crew of Ahab's ship, the Pequod, as a Fordian-
Rousseauist general will
4.4 Pierre's Crack-Up and the Aleatory Point 313
Pierre's passage into the disasters of spectacular virtue -Pierre's failure to find an
oikeiosis without nostalgia -Deleuze's unusual interpretation of Isabel as heroine -
Positing a double aspect to Pierre's trajectory like that Deleuze and Guattari posited for
Ahab -Pierre and Ahab's inability to "swerve" -Pierre trapped within the image of
revolutionary sovereignty as in Velasquez's Las Meninas in Foucault's reading -For
Deleuze, Stoicism was interesting for its inadvertent approach to chance opportunities
and Machiavellian-Lucretian fortune: Divination grounds ethics upon the aleatory point -
Can this aleatory grand health be scaled up to the political level?
4.5 QUITE AN ORIGINAL Cynic Game of Truth: How Melville's The Confidence-
Man (1857) Duped Deleuze 337
Explanation of the basic structure of the received reading of The Confidence-Man -
Deleuze's misuse of the narrator's digressions of chapters 14, 33, and 44 -The
Cosmopolitan is specifically not the original titular Confidence-Man -The refrain-clue,
"QUITE AN ORIGINAL"-Henri Thomas' French mistranslation of "QUITE AN
ORIGINAL" -American Melville scholarship on this "Original" problem -A new take
on the confrontation between Cynic misanthrope and cosmopolitan philanthropist in
Chapter 24-Montaigne and Diogenes the Cynic -Foucault's readings of Diogenes the
Cynic and Cynic techniques of disgracing an aggressor -Melville's defacement of the
currency of the novel -Melville, Nietzsche, and the Cynic Jesus Thesis -Speculations on
Melville's New Testament and Deleuze's "belief in this world"
4.6 The Logic of Originality: Melville's (Neo-)Liberal Helping 391
4.6.1 First Series of Diogenes, Alexander, and the Bees 391
4.6.2 Second Series of the Media Theory in The Confidence-Man 397
4.6.3 Third Series of Neo-Liberalism and Truth-Telling 401
4.6.4 Fourth Series of the Wall of Loose Stones 410
4.6.5 Fifth Series of the Great Cock and the Fiddler 416
4.6.6 Sixth Series of Education, Human Capital, and Originality 420
4.6.7 Seventh Series of Originality and Minority 425
4.6.8 Eighth Series of Children and the Cynic Kingdom 429
vii
4.6.9 Ninth Series of the Two Father-Narrators 431
4.6.10 Tenth Series of Marketing and Education in the Societies
of Control 435
4.6.11 Eleventh Series of the Dark Truth of Melville's Shakespeare 438
4.6.12 Twelfth Series of Marxism and Timonism 442
4.6.13 Thirteenth Series of Flattery qua Marketing 444
4.6.14 Fourteenth Series of Transparency and Surveillance 450
4.6.15 Fifteenth Series of Jefferson, Madison, and Hawthorne 455
4.6.16 Sixteenth Series of Little Diogenes and the Humanities 457
Works Cited 465
viii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Janet Bergstrom showed me how impossibly difficult it is to really become a writer.
Teshome Gabriel's teaching encouraged me to follow my ambitions without constraint.
Steve Mamber showed me the almost inexhaustible level of detail at which one can work
in reading a film. Eleanor Kaufman taught me that, for better and for worse, the truth of
praise is folly. Kirstie McClure showed me how much there was to be gained by tracing
the cracks in those intellectual ice flows that lead outside of disciplinary constraints.
Tamsin Lorraine taught me that ideas need to have a reality. Patty White taught me to
follow my feelings about a film in order to study it. Kathleen Ennis had hinted that it was
all as absurd as it all was beginning to seem. Peter Schmidt cautioned me to attend to the
risk of missing all. Philip Weinstein provided further demonstrations the caution of a
gentleman. Donna Jo Napoli taught me to pay attention to the irreducible value that the
ideas of youth would possess in and of themselves if only they were invited to be spoken.
Philip Wagner suggested indispensible structural and conceptual revisions for the
presentation of my reading of The Confidence-Man and Daniel Steinhardt provided
essential last minute research aid. Tim Holland had confidence but, more importantly,
good cheer. Andy Woods, Mary Samuelson, Savitiri Young, Jason Gendler, Alex Kupfer,
and others at The Crank helped me get the context on American cinema that I need to
write this book. Jonathan Knapp was a crucial commentator and fellow philosopher.
Susan Skonieczny showed me the values of reading, patience, and acceptance.
Kenneth Skonieczny showed me how far an autodidact can go. Ana De Santiago A yon
ix
taught me that in order to truly confront the problem of a vulgar elite I would have to take
as much pleasure in thinking about my readers as I did in thinking about the authors
about whom I was writing. Lakshmi Indrasimhan made me listen to lectures. From very
earliest Tiffiniy Cheng, Jonathan Knapp, Tim Albro, Kenneth St. Onge, John Weeks,
Naomi Fox, Will Schachterle, Jake Berendes, Ben Werthheimer, Holmes Wilson, Nick
Reville, and, then later, Christine Smallwood, Damon McMahon, His-Chang Lin, and
Ethel Seno, and Sabrina Soyer were indispensable interlocutors in my attempts at
philosophical and aesthetic inquiry. Tyler Hoyt, Jessica Schaffer, and Rebecca Bannor-
Addae provided spatial support and friendship. Lars Jan repeatedly confirmed my interest
in screens and mysteries of all kinds, and also my faith in comedy during the middle
days. Andrea Bergen confirmed my intuitions about comedy in the strange later days.
Alex Robinson, Sam Moyer, and Andrea Martinez made me think about the fun of real
spaces.
x
VITA
June 24,1980 Born Worcester, Massachusetts
2002 BA, Linguistics Min. Film and Media
Studies
Swarthmore College
Swarthmore, Pennsylvania
2003 Educational Assistant
Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
2006 MA Film and Television
University of California
Los Angeles, California
2008-9 Visiting Scholar through Charles Boyer
Fellowship
University of Paris IV
Paris, France
PUBLICATIONS AND PRESENTATIONS
Skonieczny, Jason (March, 2010). The Vertical Dimension of Carl Dreyer's Silent Films.
Paper presented at a meeting of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. Los Angeles,
California.
(October, 2008). Towards a jouissance of Decroissance. Paper presented
at a meeting of Film and History: Film and Science. Chicago, Illinois.
(August, 2008). A Rhizomatic Interrogation of Some Basic Political
Assumptions of "Sustainability." Paper presented at the First International Conference of
Deleuze Studies. Cardiff, Wales.
(November, 2007). Three Ecologies in the Early American and Soviet
Avant-Gardes. Paper presented at Nature Matters: Materiality in Cultural Studies of the
Environment. Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
xi
(Summer 2007). "Los Angeles Documents the Virtual: Xan Cassavetes
and Thom Andersen Between Docutainment and Machinima" Postscript
(March, 2007). American Lyrical Abstraction: Sternberg in Light of
Deleuze. Paper presented at a meeting of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.
Chicago, Illinois.
(May, 2006). Reality TV as Auto-da-fe. Paper presented at the
Interational Congress of Medieval Studies. Kalamazoo, Michigan.
Spring, 2005). "Virtuality and Control in Steven Spielberg's Minority Report"
Mediascape Spring 2005 (http://www.tft.ucla.edu/mediascape)
(April, 2005). Spielberg's Sci-Fi, Foucault's Modernity, Deleuze's
Images: Minority Report. Paper Presented at the Ninth Annual UCR Humanities
Graduate Conference. Riverside, California.
(February, 2005). Technology and the Non-European: Youssef Chahine
and Post-National Ecolog(onom)y. Home: A UCI Visual Studies Conference. Irvine,
California.
(February, 2005). The Significance of Los Angeles's Z Channel Amidst
Media Consolidation. Federation Symposium on Rhetoric. Commerce, Texas.
xii
ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION
Without Community, Without Self:
Gilles Deleuze's American Problem
in the Films of Ford and Sternberg and the Fiction of Melville
by
Jason Mark Skonieczny
Doctor of Philosophy in Film and Television
University of California, Los Angeles, 2012
Professor Janet Bergstrom, Chair
Why is it that, for Gilles Deleuze, the nineteenth century fiction of Herman
Melville was more modern than the classical American Cinema? John Ford and Josef
Von Sternberg are the richest examples of the classical American cinema treated by
Deleuze's Cinema 1. In a number of Ford's mature films, one can detail a richly
calculated strategy linking law and cinematic depth designed to coerce the viewer's sense
of their membership in a national audience community, an experience like Rousseau
detailed as a civil religion. Whereas, in Sternberg, one finds carefully modulated
presentations of bodily freedom and constraint that exercise the viewer in what it means
to maintain a classically Stoic sense of selfdetached from the sentimental demands of a
community that were so crucial to Ford.
xiii
Yet, in Melville's Bartleby, the Scrivener, one finds a portrayal of the disastrous
consequences of this Stoic self. Bartleby, the self that is cut off from all desire is
Sternberg's Stoic ideal, left unable to desire, misunderstood by society. Likewise,
Melville's Billy Budd deflates the very element of law and rebellious vigilantism that
motivated Ford's strategy for coercing community sentiment. These two Ahab-esque
master directors of the classical American cinema proposed higher truths of community
and self in an effort to conquer cinema's chaotic crowd. In detailing the failure of the
wild quests of Ahab from Moby Dick and the protagonist of Pierre, or, the Ambiguities,
Melville demonstrated the consequences of the failure to persist in remaining open to flux
and change. In The Confidence-Man, Melville detailed the very manipulative process of
substituting fictional ideals of human community and self for the more difficult truth of
flux through a philosophical game that has never been understood by critics, including
Deleuze, in terms of its link to radical Cynicism. This highly misunderstood line that
constitutes my Deleuzean Melville's vision of modernitydemonstrated through
Melville's short storiesreverses the goal of a humanities education. Rather than
teaching the true meaning of community and self to youth, humanities educators should
be using filmic and literary texts to facilitate youth's ability to make interventions in the
workings of the larger network of enterprises that constitute the modern world. The very
process of education dreamed of by Melville in his discussion of "young writers" from
"Hawthorne and His Mosses," is one that must involve and integrate the original and
disruptive perspectives of youth as a form of capital with irreducible value for social
innovation and evolution.
xiv
1.0 Originality and Universality: Deleuze's American Problem
"Boy!" said my uncle at last, lifting his head.
I looked at him earnestly, and was gladdened to see that the terrible
blight of his face had almost departed.
"Boy, there's not much left in an old world for an old man to
invent."
I said nothing.
"Boy, take my advice, and never try to invent anything but
happiness."
Herman Melville "The Happy Failure" 1856 (94)
America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am
afraid it is not going to be a success.
Sigmund Freud in a letter to Hans Sachs 1908 (Clark 278)
Darwin quotes
From Shelley, that forever floats
Over all desert places known,
Mysterious doubtan awful one.
He quotes it, adopts it. Is it true?
Let instinct vouch; let poetry
Science and instinct here agree,
For truth requires strong retinue.
Herman Melville Clarel "Of Deserts" 1875 (168: 2.11)
There is an American problem in the late work of Gilles Deleuze. It can be clearly
stated: Herman Melville's nineteenth century fiction is more modern than the classical
American cinema of the early to mid-twentieth century. Why?
This problem can be broken down into a series of questions that will define the
progress of this study but that are nonetheless not easily compartmentalized. How is it
indicated in Deleuze's writings that Melville's fiction is more modern than the Classical
American Cinema? What kind of meaning would such a paradoxical aesthetic calculation
have for Deleuze? As it becomes clearer what it would mean that Melville was more
modern than the classical American cinema, the question emerges, what does it mean for
1
us if it is true? One cannot help skipping back and forth across these basic issues in
pursuit of a clearer picture of Deleuze's American problem as a whole. But, this study
will flow from the "how," through mechanical and conceptual clarifications and
corrections towards the question of the "wherefore," or what it means for us, the point at
which the purpose of this study's philosophical and aesthetic performance takes on its
effective shape.
After using Deleuze's work as a philosophical guide to demonstrate the ultimate
inadequacy of the ideals of community and self as they are deployed quite formidably in
the films of John Ford and Josef Von Sternberg, the key exemplars of the classical
American cinema in Deleuze's Cinema books I find in Herman Melville, the meaning of
an ethics and a politics that does without community and without self.
Deleuze's American problem starts to become evident in looking at what he
writes about the classical American cinema. In Cinema 1: The Movement-Image from
1983, one finds descriptions of American cinema as "a lot of ambiguity and hypocrisy"
(147). Further on, American cinema is "cliches, nothing else" (208). Deleuze cites the
bleak social critique of the "English Romanticism" of Blake and Coleridge in order to
describe what appears "in the world and in consciousness" of American Cinema as "a
whole organization of misery" (209).' The question appears:
How can one not believe in a powerful concerted organization, a great and
powerful plot, which has found the way to make cliches circulate, from
1
Italics in original.
2
outside to inside, from inside to outside? ... It is the crisis of both the
action-image and the American Dream (209-10).
Such a dire picture could not be further from much of what Deleuze wrote about
Herman Melville. In fact, from Melville to D.H. Lawrence to Henry Miller, the
exemplars that Deleuze chooses for his discussions of American literature are the objects
of some of his most radical praise. Deleuze wrote in 1977 that Melville's fiction
contained unparalleled demonstrations of the fact that "to leave, to escape, to trace a line
is the highest aim of literature." Further on, Deleuze admits that French authors "do not
understand this very well" (.Dialogues 37).
Melville's lines appear again when in a memorial for Deleuze's close friend,
Michel Foucault, Deleuze placed Melville and Foucault together and alone together in a
category of "great thinkers," who
are somewhat seismic; they do not evolve but proceed by means of crisis,
in fits and starts. Thinking in terms of moving lines was the process put
forward by Herman Melville, and this involved fishing lines and lines of
descent which could be dangerous, even fatal ("What is a Dispositif?"
159).
This lecture took place some years after Deleuze's 1985 book, Foucault. There, Deleuze
had already claimed that Foucault was "a great audiovisual thinker," who was "uniquely
akin to contemporary film" (Foucault 65). That is, Foucault was akin to the filmic regime
that would oppose the classical American cinema's regime of cliches. The outlines of an
American problem that is tucked within the folds of Deleuze's late work begins to come
3
full circle via Melville's closeness to Foucault. Foucault's and Melville's lines join
together against the classical American cinema as the force of a higher and more radical
modernity which this study will ultimately need to describe.
Melville is clearly aligned with the modern cinema in Cinema 2. Deleuze
describes Melville's The Confidence-Man (1857) and Nietzsche's Thus Spake
Zarathustra (1883/1891) as "in literature and philosophy, the two greatest texts to have
developed ... chains of forgers ... confronting 'truthful men' who are no less false than
they are" (134). Melville is aligned with this modernity of a "powers of the false" of
unending forgery exemplified, among other films, by Orson Welles's final film, F for
Fake (1974).
Defining Deleuze's American problem ultimately will become a problem of
showing just how close what Deleuze called Melville's treatment of forgery in The
Confidence-Man was to Foucault and modern cinema. But, it will not be an easy task to
reconcile Deleuze's glorification of the "powers of the false" that he sees in Nietzsche,
Welles, and Melville with Foucault's late turnin the last lectures before Foucault's
death in 1984towards studies of parrhesia or truth-telling in antiquity. It is difficult to
be certain whether it is truth-telling or the powers of the false that motivate Deleuze's late
studies of American cinema and literature.
The most important text for describing Deleuze's American problem is his final
and most thorough text on Melville, his postface to the 1989 Garnier-Flammarion edition
of Barlteby, the Scrivener (1853), republished as the essay "Bartleby, or the Formula" in
Essays Critical and Clinical. In this essay, it is immediately apparent that Deleuze is not
4
celebrating forgery in Melville in the same way that he had in Cinema 2. When Deleuze
asks, "What is the greatest problem haunting Melville's oeuvre?" the problem revolves
around what Melville's narrator in The Confidence-Man has to say about "original
characters":
The original, says Melville, is not subject to the influence of his milieu; on
the contrary, he throws a livid white light on his surroundings. ...
Mediocre novels have never been able to create the slightest original
character. But how could even the greatest novel create more than one at a
time? ("Bartleby" 84)
Melville's originalslike the reclusive scrivener, Bartleby, like Ahab of Moby-
Dick (1851), like Billy Budd and Claggart from Melville's posthumously published Billy
Budd, Sailor (1891/1926)all clash with what Deleuze calls their "human milieu."
2
They are "not subject to the influence" of the norms of the human beings who surround
them. The main problem raised by Melville's treatment of these originals is not only to
create more than one in a single novel. Deleuze emphasizes that the problem truly lies,
11
in reconciling the original with secondary humanity, the inhuman with the human" (84).
Deleuze is not necessarily saying that these characters are themselves inhuman.
2
It is worth mentioning Brian Massumi's note on the definition of the untranslated milieu
in his preface to his translation of A Thousand Plateaus.
In French, milieu means "surroundings," "medium" (as in chemistry), and
"middle." In the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, "milieu" should be
read as a technical term combining all three meanings (17).
I think "environment" would be a good translation for milieu. The specifically "human
milieu," one could possibly translate as "human social and cultural environment."
5
Melville's original characters are evidence that calls into question a great many classic
forgeries of what the human or of what human beings are supposed to be.
This study will progress, therefore, by working through the concept of human
community that operates as a core value in the films of John Ford and that of the human
self that is similarly indispensable to the films of Josef Von Sternberg. In contrast to the
concepts developed by a close study of Sternberg's and Ford's work, looking at
Melville's use of fiction will throw into question the definition of humanity, or of any
human community, as a collection of individual selves rather than a complex and chaotic
process.
Deleuze described a similar conflict between individual uniqueness and
membership in a species of organisms in his 1968 Difference and Repetition. He
addresses the common "tendency to believe that individuation is a continuation of the
determination of the species" {Difference and Repetition 247). However, Deleuze insists
that, to the contrary, "any confusion between the two processes, any reduction of
individuation to a limit or complication of differenciation" and therefore any reduction of
an individual to just one instance of a species, "compromises the whole of the philosophy
of difference" (247). In fact, "It is the individual which is above the species, and precedes
the species in principle" (250). My discussion of Ford will address the way that Ford's
illusion of human community has its origins in the kind of reduction of individuals to
species in Jean-Jacques Rousseau but also in St. Paul and Plato.
Yet, even if these passages from Difference and Repetition suggest that the
individual is above the species, the individual is still hardly a self-evident unity. The
6
individual is only the effect of recombinations of "pre-individual singularities" (249) and
"individuating factors" (254). This circulation of "singularities" and "factors" that
produce individuals would have to refer to genetics and all of the events of individual
experience. Hence, events that occur within and amongst individuals are
individuating and individual differences which ceaselessly interpenetrate
one another throughout the fields of individuation. Individuality is not a
characteristic of the Self but, on the contrary, forms and sustains the
system of the dissolved Self (254).
So my study of Sternberg will require undoing the kind of undissolved self that operates
as Sternberg's cinematic interpretation of Stoic philosophy.
One can define Deleuze's interest in Melville in terms of Melville's refusal of
both species community as well as of a unified self as political or ethical goals for
philosophy and aesthetics. Through the experience of originality that Melville's novels
offer to the reader, the reader is exposed to a formula [formule] or what Deleuze
describes as a kind of medical procedure. Melville's novels are calculated to impact their
reader in a way that should change the reader's attitude towards the humanity of his or
her own milieu. The results of the procedure, the impact of the original, should be a new
appreciation for the relation between the human and the inhuman. Melville's literary
medicine invites the reader to consider the potential for ethics, politics, and aesthetics that
do without a humanistic species community and without any concept of a self that has not
been dissolved.
7
Cinema certainly bears upon the fate of Deleuze's and Melville's aesthetics of
originality. Deleuze and Melville's hopes for originality actually converge with Walter
Benjamin's idea of the problematic status of the original in modern mass culture.
Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" from 1936 made
a key distinction between cinema and photography from the media used in earlier
traditions of art. In premodern traditions of art, "the presence of the original is the
prerequisite to the concept of authenticity" (733). It is the opposite with what Benjamin
hopes for the new modern arts:
First, process reproduction is more independent of the original than
manual reproduction. ... Secondly, technical reproduction can put the
copy of the original into situations which would be out of reach for the
original itself. Above all, it allows the original to meet the beholder
halfway (733).
Modern technologies of cinema, photography, and all manner of media had by the early
twentieth century induced a fading of the "aura" that surrounded original works of art in
previous eras with cult value. For Benjamin, this was the condition for a new
revolutionary art estranged from the elitist cult of traditional art. Such an estrangement
would enable previously excluded classes of individuals to enter not only into the art
world but into the world of all of the arts involved in the means of the production of
goods more generally.
Nevertheless, Benjamin noted that there were barriers within these new
technological industries that undermined the revolutionary possibilities entailed by the
8
fading of the aura surrounding the original that constitutes the cult value of art. Most
notably in cinema,
the film responds to the shriveling of the aura with an artificial build-up of
the "personality" outside the studio. The cult of the movie star, fostered by
the money of the film industry, preserves not the unique aura of the person
but the "spell of the personality," the phony spell of a commodity.... It is
inherent in the technique of film as well as that of sports that everybody
who witnesses its accomplishments is somewhat of an expert (742).
The problem of "personality" in Benjamin's essay threatens to negate the revolutionary
potential of technological reproductions breakdown of the cult through the personality's
false pretensions to originality. The apparently unique aura of the personality is
distinguished from everybody else in a way that preserves cult value and sets up barriers
to the further fading of the aura.
Benjamin's problem traces an intersecting line with the issue of originality in
Deleuze's Melville. How could the artist reconcile originality with the rest of humanity,
orin Benjamin's termshow could art meet the beholder halfway in a system designed
to affirm the separation of those individuals who are artificially built up so as to appear as
unique from rest of the crowd?
This is the American problem as it is confronted by John Ford and Josef Von
Sternberg in the cinema. Their work within the classical American cinema intervenes into
the saturation of the American cinema by cliches as described by Deleuze and with
Benjamin's artificial build-up of personality outside the studio. Ford and Sternberg
9
attempted to intervene in a system based on the false originality of personality in order to
propose higher values and higher truths of human community and human self. They
challenged the system of personality that dominated the commercial cinema screen.
However, Ford's and Sternberg's approaches to the American problem had already been
evaluated and rejected in the procedures of Melville's novels.
In that sense, after describing Ford's cinema of community and Sternberg's
cinema of the self, we can speak about Melville's novels as a film and media theory
avant la lettre. Melville's fiction addressed key philosophical problems for modernity in
a more advanced way than these two classical filmmakers. As Melville's Ahab in Moby
Dick was nevertheless pulled into the vortex with the white whale, tied forever to the
malice of the "white wall" (Deleuze and Guattari A Thousand Plateaus 168) that he
sought to destroy, Ford and Sternberg failed to escape the force of the film industry's
system of cliches. It is in this sense that their battles remain exemplary of what Deleuze
termed the "classical," while Melville was clearly on the cutting edge of what Deleuze in
1969 referred to the "critical modernity" opposed to Platonism and much of the history of
Christian thought (Logic of Sense 265).
3
3
The introduction to Joe McElhaney's The Death of Classical Cinema, especially pp. 7-
13, presents the stakes of the term "classical" in Deleuze in juxtaposition to those of the
The Classical American Cinema. The difference between Bordwell, Thompson, and
Staiger's definitions and Deleuze's is that Deleuze is not concerned with the presence or
absence of a group style, but rather with a constellation of forms that appear uniquely in
different authors. Further, the modern's rupture with the classical is the emergence of
novel forms in the cinema, but it is preconditioned by literature and philosophy. Other
arts addressed the shift from the classical to the modern before cinema did. Deleuze
writes in the introduction to Cinema 1 that the difference between the movement-image
and the time-image recapitulates the differences he saw between Greek philosophy and
10
This American problem presents an opportunity to do something that is
philosophically and pedagogically instructive: to put the modern chronologically before
the classical. Undoing the apparent self-evidence of chronological time by reordering
events on new conceptual lines puts ideas into motion. Putting newly created relations
amongst events in the history of cinema, literature, and philosophy ahead of presupposed
considerations of temporal succession was an effect dear to Deleuze's heart. It should
give one pause to ask what concepts could distinguish the modern from the classical apart
from periodization.
For Jacques Ranciere, the exemplary films of Hitchcock and the predominance of
narrative coding define his reading of Deleuze's ideas of classical and modern, or what
Deleuze repackaged in his reading of the cinema as the "movement-image" and the
"time-image," respectively. Hence, in Ranciere's interpretation of Deleuze, the modern
or the "time-image"is differentiated from the classical "movement-image" by its anti-
representational aspects. According to Ranciere,
what distinguishes the latter [modernity] from the classical, representative
regime is a different conception of art, a different idea of how to think
about art. The representative regime understands artistic activity on the
model of an active form that imposes itself upon inert matter and subjects
it to its representational end. The aesthetic regime of art rejects the idea of
form willfully imposing itself on matter and instead identifies the power of
the work with the identity of contraries: the identity of active and passive,
modern philosophy initiated by Kant. Deleuze saw the shift in cinema as pre-formed, but
that does not invalidate its presence in directors across the history of cinema.
11
of thought and non-thought, of intentional and unintentional ("From One
Image" 117).
Ranciere's opposition between a representational and a realist regime is deceptively close
to the opposition that D.N. Rodowick detailed between classical narrative and political
modernism when he characterized debates in film theory of the 1970s.
4
To reduce
Deleuze's critique of the classical and modern strictly to the presence or absence of a
narrative structure threatens to underrate the importance of the problems of the politics
and ethics addressed by the classical cinema. Furthermore, there is a risk of equating
Deleuze with the filmmakers of "political modernism" for whom anti-representation
became a political program.
5
This is the value of taking a clearer look at the classical cinema in light of
Deleuze. It is important to be clear about what value specific classical filmmakers had for
Deleuze. This helps to put Deleuze's film theory in the context of the rest of his work.
But it is clear from the outset that if Sternberg's and Ford's classicism consists in their
membership in a "representative regime," this should be said only with some
qualifications about Deleuze's critique of representation.
Deleuze's aesthetics is anti-representational. But, a representative/non-
representative distinction based on a narrative/non-narrative distinction is not sufficient
4
Rodowick's The Crisis of Political Modernism historicizes the interconnections of a
number of these theories and programs and their impact on the academic study of film in
the Anglo-American world.
5
This tendency to associate the classical with representational cinema or narrative is
evident at times in Rodowick's explication of Deleuze's cinematic framework in
Rodowick's distinction between the time-image and movement-image (Time Machine
53).
12
for distinguishing the artists of the classical and the modern. Years before, in The Logic
of Sense, Deleuze voiced quite clearly that even when representation appears as the mere
communication of ideas or information there is always some kind of activity happening
that is more than mere representation. That is to say, a speech-event must achieve effects
that are more than merely preserving some represented information. Language, as well as
cinema, classical or modern must intervene in the flux of time in order to be effective.
Most of this introduction will be occupied with clarifying the applicability of Deleuze's
critique of representation in Logic of Sense to cinema aesthetics.
Ultimately, the difference between classical and modern does relyas Ranciere
points outon their different arrangement of active and passive elements.
6
But, this
distinction gains definition only by introducing questions that appear especially
poignantly in Deleuze's discussions of Melville's politics of literature from Deleuze's
postface to Bartleby. What Ranciere writes elsewhere about Deleuze's reading of
Melville's literature is equally true of Deleuze's poetics of cinema: "To understand the
seeming contradictions of Deleuzian poetics, one must reestablish the order of mediations
that gives literature its political function" ("Deleuze, Bartleby" 157).
For Ranciere, the "order of mediations" between politics and aesthetics that is set
into motion by Melville's treatment of originality conducts us to a politics where "it is
not the human individual who is the atom of equality" ("Deleuze, Bartleby" 157).
6
Another danger that Ranciere flirts with in the "identity of active and passive" is to
identify Deleuze with Bazinian realism. For some of Bazin's work it was the passivity of
the cinematic medium that allowed it to capture reality without human intervention. But,
Bazin's theory of realism shifts across his work. On this point, see my chapter on
"Pierre's 'Crack-Up' and the Aleatory Point" below.
13
Moreover however, the political milieu within which this mysteriously de-atomized
ethics finds itself is also outside or without any human community. In Deleuze's essay on
"Bartleby," the "order of mediations" of Deleuzian political aesthetics gets as close to
humanism as it can without getting caught up in that line.
Nowhere does Deleuze describe the revolutionary ideal of literature and art in a
way closer to a democratic manifesto than when he points out the ultimate problem of
Melville's theory of the novel as the reconciliation of original characters and "secondary
humanity." It is up to the novelist to reunite originality with "patchwork humanity" into
a society of brothers as a new universality. In the society of brothers,
alliance replaces filiation and the blood pact replaces consanguinity... in
order to above all constitute a universe, a society of brothers, a federation
of people and goods, a community of anarchist individuals ("Bartleby" 84-
5).
But, in deriving this theory of democratic fraternity Deleuze relies on The Confidence-
Man, a novel that he earlier described as western literature's greatest treatment of
forgery. Deleuze's choice of this novel of Melville's as a pivotal source in his theory of
democratic fraternity utterly undermines any false ideals of humanism while gesturing
towards "the wonder of a nonhuman life to be created" (A Thousand Plateaus 191) that
he had worked on in his books with Felix Guattari.
Making originality a priority in this universe of people and goods is the kind of
political mediation that Francis Cusset recognized as the inaugural problem of
14
Anglophone studies of Deleuze. Ian Buchanan's 1997 valorization of Deleuze's politics
is rephrased by Cusset in a way that merits quoting here. Only Deleuze's philosophy
will facilitate the reconciliation of the ethic of singularities proper to
minorities and the concrete universalism required for grounding a general
politics: only Deleuze, according to Buchanan, provides a way of
particularizing the universal without objectivizing dominated subjects
(358).
7
Such a "general politics" acquires a ground only in Deleuze's anti-representational
aesthetics. However, it is necessary to further clarify just what is so originalso to
speakabout Deleuze's anti-representational aesthetics.
1.2 Flux. Philosophy. Cinema: Deleuze in Contrast with Other Film Theories
That philosophy not only can, but must have a limited, poor, schematic
doctrinal framework was asserted by the Cynics for a number of reasons
which affect the very conception they had of the philosophical life and of
the relationship between philosophical teaching and philosophical life. In
fact, for the Cynics, the function of philosophical teaching was not
essentially to pass on knowledge but, especially and before all else, to give
both an intellectual and moral training to the individuals one formed.
Michel Foucault (The Courage of Truth 204)
The idea of time as flux is fundamental to Deleuze's anti-representational model
of cinema. Deleuze is not at all original in treating this idea of flux. It was treated in
different ways by the physics of Epicureanism and Stoicism, referred to by Deleuze as
"the two great ancient systems" (.Logic of Sense 183). But, it is Deleuze's unrelenting
commitment to harnessing this idea and deploying it to all kinds of modern problems that
gives his work its continuing importance.
7
Translation mine
15
Deleuze's philosophy and his aesthetics approach a world of impulses, or atoms,
in constant motion and interplay as theorized in ancient Epicurean physics. The
unceasing movement of these atoms constitutes a flow or flux where change is the only
constant. Hence, as described by the Heraclitean paradox, one can never step in the same
river twice. The river that I cross again is not the same river, nor am I the same I.
Consciousness and its objects differ not only from one another in this unceasing
flux of matter in time, but they differ inevitably from themselves. This key paradox
weaves itself throughout Deleuze's assessment of western philosophical tradition in
Difference and Repetition. True difference is not the difference of any one thing from
anything else. Instead, true difference emerges from the movements by which any one
thing differs from itself in the flux of time. Deleuze's Difference and Repetition dubs
this idea drawn from the ancient awareness of the flux of matter as a new kind of
difference: "difference in itself."
Cinema 1 builds up a typology of cinematic art from this idea of consciousness as
a flow of matter and impulses as it was explained by Henri Bergson in Matter and
D
Memory. Anything that one might call representation is itself material and is always a
8
Bergson had a close connection with the Epicurean theory of atoms taken from
Heraclitus because he wrote his doctoral dissertation on the late Epicurean Lucretius. But,
Bergson describes the unstopping flow of consciousness in the nervous system in a
recognizably modern way,
In our opinion, then, the brain is no more than a kind of central telephonic
exchange: its office is to allow communication, or to delay it. It adds
nothing to what it receives; but, as all the organs of perception send it to
their ultimate prolongations, and as all the motor mechanisms of the spinal
cord and of the medulla oblongata have in it their accredited
representatives, it really constitutes a centre, where the peripheral
excitation gets into relation with this or that motor mechanism, chosen and
16
force of change and an intervention in flux. Rather than storing representations in a static
container, this consciousness embodied in the brain merely conducts a further interacting
flux of these impulses.
Consciousness is, after all, only a selective flow of matter. The apparent
representation of reality in information, language, or memory never preserves anything
because representation never bears an idea unchanged from one location to another. The
appearance of representation only masks a more primal and unceasing relay of forces and
impulses. Language, cinema images, and all sensory input contribute impulses to the
living circuits of the brain. In consciousness, this flow of matter is selected, prioritized,
and formed through habit into patterned cyclical interchange and interaction with the
world. Like a telephonic exchange, consciousness is just a routing point made up of
complex living circuits in which impulses of perception never stop their chaotic
movement.
This flux undergirds Deleuze's critique of representation in language as well as in
the cinema. Early on in the twists and turns of Deleuze's Logic of Sense, there is the third
"series" out of the thirty-four short series/chapters entitled "On the Proposition," and here
Deleuze acknowledges that "many authors agree in recognizing three distinct relations
within the proposition" (12). Thus, he frames his skepticism about such theories.
no longer prescribed. On the other hand, as a great multitude of motor
tracks can open simultaneously in this substance to one and the same
excitation from the periphery, this disturbance may subdivide to any
extent, and consequently dissipate itself in innumerable motor reactions
which are merely nascent (19-20).
Part of the way Deleuze traces the transition from the classical to the modern is that in the
modern this "center" of the telephonic exchange can no longer be located -human
consciousness becomes wandering and dislocated.
17
These three ordinary conceptions of the way a linguistic proposition is thought of
as a representation are first, signifying a logic or grammar, second, denoting an object or
a state of affairs, and third manifesting an opinion of the speaker.
9
Deleuze ultimately
rejects the idea that any one of these alone can account for the work that a linguistic
proposition does.
These three seemingly autonomous functions of representation rely on the
irreducible "sense" of the proposition because the sense of a proposition is the event by
which the linguistic act intervenes into the flux of matter in the world. There is no
representation without an accompanying act. Yet Deleuze's reasoning aims at something
other than what J.L. Austin described in his "speech-act theory." In formulating the idea
of sense, Deleuze did not reference Austin but he did explicitly distinguish his speech-
events from Emile Benveniste's idea of the enonce. The intricacy of Deleuze's critique of
representation emerges from an awareness that anything that we understand as
representation is, in fact, an event that intervenes into a world that is not static but that is
itself already changing in the flux of time.
9
1 will procede through 1) signification, 2) denotation 3) and then manifestation. Deleuze
treated these three in a different order when he introduced them.
The first is called 'denotation' or indication.... A second relation of the
proposition is often called 'manifestation.' It concerns the relation of the
proposition to the person who speaks and expresses himself.... We ought
to reserve the term 'signification' for a third dimension of the proposition.
Here it is a question of the relation of the word to universal or general
concepts.
Sense is the term that Deleuze proposes for the events carried out by a linguistic
proposition that must be accounted for outside of any one of these representational
aspects (Logic of Sense 12-22).
18
The critique of signification, denotation, and manifestation that Deleuze unfolded
in Logic of Sense is also useful for understanding his study of the cinema. Deleuze's
cinema aesthetics can be accounted for with a similar triple critique to what is found in
Deleuze's critique of the proposition. First of all, cinematic representation cannot be
reduced to signification any more than a linguistic proposition can. In this, Deleuze
stands in clear contrast to Saussurian-linguistic and Lacanian-psychoanalytic film theory
of the 1970s, best exemplified by Christian Metz and Jean-Louis Baudry. Deleuze does
attempt to explicitly correct Metz's notion of cinematic language at the beginning of
Cinema 2. The way he addresses attempts to apply linguistics to film resonates with the
way that he questioned the limits of the effectiveness of linguistics to apply even to
language in Logic of Sense.
Even with its verbal elements, this [cinema] is neither a language system
nor a language. It is a plastic mass, an a-signifying and a-syntaxic
material, a material not formed linguistically even though it is not
amorphous and is formed semiotically, aesthetically, and pragmatically
(29).
This discourse makes clear that cinema is not a "language system," or that, in the terms of
Logic of Sense, cinema cannot be accounted for only as a system of signification.
Yet, Deleuze worked just as hard if not harder to prevent the idea of a speech-act
from being reduced to signification in Logic of Sense. The "Twenty-Seventh Series on
Orality" and the "Thirty-Second Series on the Different Kinds of Series" deliver a much
more developed critique of the materiality of language than what is expressed in this brief
19
passage on the plastic mass of the cinema. Likewise, in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze
and Guattari describe the idea of speech as a pragmatic system of order-words that they
then oppose to signification as described by Noam Chomsky's idea of universal
10
grammar.
In the case of both cinema and language, Deleuze attempted to break the work
performed by speech or by cinematic art away from what he defined as structuralism in
1972. A few years after the 1969 Logic of Sense, Deleuze appropriated terms particular to
the work of Jacques Lacan to describe structuralism in general as an approach where,
as a general rule, the real, the imaginary and their relations are always
engendered secondarily by the functioning of the structure, which starts
with having its primary effects in itself ("How Do We Recognize
Structuralism?" 191).
10
In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari formulate this same insight that there is
no structure apart from speech-events through a critique of modern Chomskyan universal
grammar. The appearance of rules and norms has less to do with an innate structure in the
mind of a speaker and more to do with a perpetual relay of commands. To describe this
relay of commands they introduce their idea of the order-word.
We call order-words [mots d'ordre or slogans], not a particular category
of explicit statements, but the relation of every word or every statement to
implicit presuppositions.... Order-words do not concern commands only,
but every act that is linked to statements by a 'social obligation.'
...Language is neither informational nor communicational. It is not the
communication of information but something quite different: the
transmission of order-words, either from one statement to another or
within each statement, in so far as each statement accomplishes an act and
the act is accomplished in the statement (79).
In the example of the "order-word," the issuance of a command may or may not be
understood, or remembered. It depends upon a variety of pragmatic considerations. A
speech-event, and no less a cinematic event, must make something happen, and intervene
in the continuing flux of matter.
20
Deleuze's aesthetics breaks away from this aspect of structuralism because he reverses
the priority of the study of structure over the activity of art.
For Deleuze, the functioning of structure, or of signification, does not have its
primary effects in itself There is no structure to speak of outside of the events carried out
in works of art or linguistic propositions. The structures of art, literature, and theory all
interact through the primary effects of events. Through speech-events, through film-
events, and equally through events proper to other arts, structures are picked up and made
to circulate secondarily, such that structures do not have primary effects in themselves.
The same holds for the asignifying plastic mass of cinema.
Second in the ordinary types of representation that Deleuze critiques in Logic of
Sense is the idea that a proposition represents or denotes an exterior object. The same
break is evident in Deleuze's critique of representation in the cinema. The value of the
work of art is something entirely other than its truthfulness or its referential felicity to an
object. The evaluation of film as an aesthetic object is not a matter of judging its reality
content. Instead, the aesthetic evaluation goes on in terms of the extremely various ethical
and political consequences of events that are specific to different films and filmmakers.
This marks a significant contrast with contemporary theories that hinge on
explaining cinema's agonized claim to preserve the past "indexically." Work by Mary
Anne Doane and Philip Rosen, for instance, draws on Andre Bazin's ideas that are
expressed in "The Myth of Total Cinema" and "The Ontology of the Photographic
Image." In these works by Bazin, the preservation of reality motivated many of the
developments of cinematic technology. The moving image is considered as a referential
21
imprint or locus of truth, a datum or registration of the truth of an event. For Bazin, this
goal of the preservation of reality was then pursued and further perfected throughout the
history of cinematic art. This indexical-epistemological desire serves as the ground of
Doane's and Rosen's histories of cinema technology and art.
But, Deleuze's Cinema books treat cinematic art as a creative selection from the
unceasing flow of matter in time rather than the possibility of a trace suddenly frozen,
withdrawn, and protected from reality.
11
Consider the parallel in the critique of the
linguistic proposition from Logic of Sense. Deleuze admits that it is not incorrect to
attribute to a linguistic proposition the capacity to mark space "indexically" in the same
way that a gesturing finger points to an object. This is clearly evidenced in such
"indexical" words as "this, that, it, here, there, yesterday, now, etc." But, according to
Deleuze, there is no indexicality without some form of the third ordinary idea of
representation: manifestation. There is no indexicality without some kind of idea of an
i t f
all [indexicals] are related to [the idea of an "I"] as well. Indication, or
denotation, subsumes the individual states of affairs, the particular images
and the singular designators; but manifesters, beginning with the "I,"
constitute the domain of the personal, which functions as the principle of
all possible denotation (13).
11
The idea of the indexical sign introduced by semiotician and philosopher C.S. Peirce
has a meaning for Deleuze's cinema semiotics that is something other than the film's
denotation or reference to the object photographed.
22
A proposition never takes up a relationship to an object or a state of affairs without a
speaker manifesting an assertion about a state of affairs as being true or false.
A proponent of cinematic indexicality would likely argue that this is the
difference between cinema and language. Cinema can referentially denote an object
without manifesting a viewpoint or opinion whereas language cannot.
12
One sees this as
early as Bazin's idea of cinematic realism as it is expressed in "The Ontology of the
Photographic Image." The cinema can denote truthfully because it is independent of the
intervention of the artist's hand and thereby independent of the manifestation of an "I":
Only the impassive lens, stripping its object of all those ways of seeing it,
those piled up preconceptions, that spiritual dust and grime with which my
eyes have covered it, is able to present it in all its virginal purity to my
attention and consequently to my love (15).
But, consider Bazin's claims alongside Benjamin's idea of the fading of the aura.
According to Benjamin, the process of photographic reproduction generates copies that
are not more faithful, or guaranteed to point to an original object, but that are freed to
enact events in a way that is independent from the constraints upon movement proper to
the original object, itself.
To pry an object from its shell, to destroy its aura, is the mark of a
perception whose "sense of the universal equality of things" has increased
1 2 * ,
In this, Doane and Rosen focus on Peirce's idea of an index exemplified by a pawprint
or a knock on the door, rather than the linguistic indicatives or deictics that Deleuze
draws from Emile Benveniste.
23
to such a degree that it extracts it even from a unique object by means of
reproduction (735).
What happens to Bazin's truthful denotation when the world of copies usurps the
place of the original, extracting and emptying the power of the original object rather than
preserving its virginal purity? A film theory of Herman Melvilleby way of Deleuze
will ultimately be helpful in solving this paradox, but part of Deleuze's answer to such a
puzzle is already found in the way that he begins by linking denotation to manifestation,
linking indexicality to an "I" who speaks in Logic of Sense.
The inevitable link between a denotation and a manifestation is, in fact, more than
the necessity of some kind of an "I." This is clarified by the note on the list of indexicals,
"this, that, it, here, there, yesterday, now, etc." where Deleuze writes, "We separate
'tomorrow' from yesterday or today, since 'tomorrow' is first of all an expression of
belief and has only a secondary [indexical] value" (336/il).
Future-oriented indexicals do not have reference in and of themselves. They are
statements of belief. But, in a world in constant flux where there is no representation
without a speech-act, propositions that have pretensions to truly denote only an object of
a "today" or "yesterday" are still alloyed with a little bit of this future-oriented
manifestation.
Even statements about what was or what is still intervene in the flow of time that
is always already being undergone by speaker and listener. Even assertions about the past
and present have prospective effects upon what will be because they are manifested and
interpreted from viewpoints that speculate upon the future. Even a cinematic image that
24
pretends to preserve the past or present makes implications to the one who views it about
what will be.
Neither a linguistic proposition nor a cinematic image can be completely
estranged from the event that it constitutes in the unceasing flow of time. All propositions
are to some small extent future-oriented in that they take effect upon a future. Hence,
Deleuze proposed the idea of the "sense" of a linguistic proposition as
the fourth dimension of the proposition. ...sense, the expressed of the
proposition, is an incorporeal, complex, and irreducible entity, at the
surface of things, a pure event which inheres or subsists in the proposition
{Logic of Sense 19).
Likewise, filmic images are not just registrations of events of today or yesterday;
they are themselves events. Cinema and photography's plasticity does not preserve any
object because every object is in flux and an object truly preserved is still an object from
a world that no longer exists. This inevitable admixture of future-oriented activity alloyed
to any pretension of indexicality is a property of every cinematic image as much as every
speech-act. The force of the image may flow out of the past in the present through which
it is spoken but it flows towards a future that it alters.
Deleuze's study of cinema therefore treats films as the creative work of an author,
rather than as an index of a denoted object. Yet, Deleuze specifically avoids reducing the
films to the third type of ordinary representation. A work of film art is more than a
manifestation of the world-view of the filmmaker. The Cinema books specifically avoid
25
an interpretation of a coded message or worldview communicated by the films he
discusses.
Rodowick phrases the problem of Deleuzian semiotics provocatively in Gilles
Deleuze's Time Machine when he writes, "A film semiotic requires a pragmatic approach
where the logic of signs is deduced from images as they appear in and for themselves"
(41). However, such a pragmatics of images must certainly take careas Deleuze
cautioned of structuralismto resist allowing filmic pragmatics to fall back on an
approach that considers structure as having its primary effects in itself.
Deleuze's Cinema books, at one point, even seem to caution the reader from
focusing too much on judging the structures of typology in themselves from the works of
the authors who discovered them.'
3
Deleuze does refer cinematic art works to a
typological structure, but it is still the singularity of the film-eventsthe discoveries
made by certain directors in creating their works that are given precedence.
Furthermore, what distinguishes the classical from the modern is not the presence
or absence of any one of the three ordinary conceptions of representation. Classical and
Modern both entail something like cinematic "sense" or pragmatic "film-events" specific
13
Deleuze is in the process of describing the structure of the "crystal-image" in Alain
Resnais, Orson Welles and others when he comments that
the formation of the crystal, the force of time and the power of the false
[all characteristics of certain strains of the time-image] are strictly
complementary, and constantly imply each other as the new coordinates of
the image. There is no value-judgment here, because this new regimeno
less than the old onethrows up its ready-made formulas, its set
procedures, its labored and empty applications, its failures, its
conventional and 'second-hand' examples offered to us as masterpieces.
What is interesting is the new status of the image, this new type of
narration-description in so far as it initially inspires very different great
authors (Cinema 2 132).
26
to different films and filmmakers. If the classical cinema is a representative regime, it is
still a cinema of events. But, we have to ask what kind of different events are enacted in
different films.
The author plays a role in Deleuze's typology of cinematic images that is parallel
to the author-function described by Michel Foucault. The author is a key "discursive
property" in Deleuze's "typology of discourse." Michel Foucault describes this in "What
is an Author?"
It seems to me, at least, that [a typology of discourse] cannot be
constructed solely from the grammatical features, formal structures, and
objects of discourse: more likely there exist properties or relationships
peculiar to discourse (not reducible to the rules of grammar and logic), and
one must use these to distinguish the major categories of discourse. The
relationship (or non-relationship) with an author, and the different forms
this relationship takes, constitutein a quite visible mannerone of these
discursive properties (117).
The author is a discursive property however much he is not the source himself of the
discourse, but a conductor reconfiguring forces, a cinematic telephone operator rewiring
connections within the viewer and amongst members of the film audience.
The idea of the author is a discursive property that aids in understanding the flow
of matter through the consciousness of the reader/viewer. As Foucault says further on, the
author is not the indefinite source of significations that fill a work" (118). Instead, the
idea of the author plays a limiting function with respect to fictions and interpretations of
27
fictions that without reference to an author might just proliferate infinitely.
14
Likewise,
the author remains central to Deleuze's studies of the cinema, but it is the coherence of
the active system of events in the author's work that counts, not an interior state of the
author that is manifested in the film.
Melville expressed the sentiment of wanting to do without the author in his essay
on Nathaniel Hawthorne. In 1852, he wrote, "Would that all excellent books were
foundlings, without father or mother, that so it might be, we could glorify them, without
including their ostensible authors" ("Hawthorne and His Mosses" 517). But, then he
nevertheless goes on to make general statements about the mysterious events of
Hawthorne's books to demonstrate his vision for a new American literature in terms of
Hawthorne's example. The idea of the author limits interpretive possibilities and makes
them manageable and pedagogically useful.
Rodowick writes in his "Elegy for Theory" that denunciations of "grand theory"
are emblematic of shifts in film studies towards historical/empirical evidence outside of
textual analysis. This shift was doubled by a shift to claims about the development of the
medium's mode of narration that were more objectively voiced and less politically
determined. Rodowick proposes Deleuze an example of the continued relevance of
theory.
14
"The author does not precede the works; he is a certain functional principle by which in
our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses; in short, by which one impedes the free
circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition, and
recomposition of fiction. In fact, we are accustomed to presenting the author as a genius,
as a perpetual surging of invention, it is because, in reality, we make him function in
exactly the opposite fashion" (118-9).
28
However, it is largely the author-specificity of Deleuze's insights in the Cinema
books that constitute Deleuze's defense against the accusations of grand theory that have
deposed many a film theory. As Deleuze approaches film authors, he isolates the system
of active events that are specific to the organization of the author's films.
Rodowick insists in his "Elegy" that theory consists in connecting cinematic art
with life and ethics and that Deleuze is a central example of this ethical potential for
theory, cinema, and life. But, by their basis in specific works, the Cinema books offer
more of an ethics of authorship than an ethics of reception. They present an aesthetics of
cinema, a comparative theory of multiple techniques of constructing a work of film art.
If the Cinema books appear as a kind of phenomenology, it is because the
technique of film-making must take the viewer's response to film phenomena into
account. If they are an ethics of viewership, it is in terms of the ethics advocated by the
films and the film techniques invented for the purpose of advocating these ethics. If they
are a history, it is because film technique stumbled onto different problems, goals, and
possibilities throughout the twentieth century. If the Cinema books offer a model of
spectatorship, then it is through the specific attention that the books give to different
filmmakers.
Deleuze's defense against overgeneralizations that draw aesthetic theory towards
becoming "grand theory" emerges from an approach towards the cinema that is not
structuralist/narrativist, nor realist, nor even auteurist. Even though Deleuze uses auteurs
as a central discursive property, his film theory is activist. We must look for film-events
29
in order to restore the order of political and ethical mediations that supply the consistency
proper to Deleuze's cinema aesthetics.
1.2 Ford: Atmosphere Over History
Let the homeland, therefore, show itself to be the common mother of all
citizens. Let the advantages they enjoy in their homeland endear it to
them.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau ("Discourse on Political Economy" 123)
In Cinema 1, Deleuze isolates Ford's most important kind of film-event when he
identifies "what counts for Ford." A sentiment of unanimous community is enacted by
what Deleuze calls the "encompasser" of Ford's film style. Such language of
"encompassing" is found in discussions of representation in Logic of Sense. There, the
extent to which a linguistic proposition achieves sense outside of the three ordinary ideas
of representation "comes from the manner in which it encompasses, or envelops an
expression" (145). Likewise, in Ford's strongest film-events, the sentiment of community
belonging is the core force that Ford's films encompass and enact even when the films do
not represent such a community onscreen.
In Cinema 1, Deleuze refers Ford's work to Nietzsche's The Use and
Disadvantages of History for Life. According to this early work of Nietzsche, modern
society was weakening due to too much factual historyand too much artificiality. New
encompassing mythologies of nationhood were necessary to reawaken authentic human
vitality.
In the French edition of the Use and Disadvantages, the ideas of unite (527), and
an atmosphere protectrice, or a nuee envelopante (504-5) appear in a way that
provocatively parallels Deleuze's choice of such terms to describe representation in Logic
30
of Sense. In short, Deleuze's choice of an encompassing healthy illusion to describe Ford
seems an acknowledgement that some of language's and cinema's most powerful effects
are connected with community-making in ways that are often surreptitious and enveloped
by illusion.
15
Deleuze's discussion of Ford in these terms is powerful and if not "correct in
every detail" certainly correct in spirit. As with Sternberg and with Melville's The
Confidence-Man, further detail is required to explain what Deleuze meant and what
insights motivated what he wrote on these authors. Ford's "encompasser" works through
a strategy of abstraction that centers on the management of screen depth from shot to
shot. This strategic distribution of depth cues is largely responsible for the feeling of
unanimity, the impact encompassed by Ford's films.
Tom Conley has considered the notion of strategy as a component of Deleuze's
modern cinema, a feature of the structures of the modern cinema of the "time-image."
However, strategy is a tool for understanding the specificity of different filmmakers in
terms of the link between film form and its effects that can be applied just as well to the
classical cinema of Deleuze's "movement-image." My choice of the idea of strategy
corresponds to what is discussed by Pierre Bourdieu as a key concept in his mode of
studying kinship.
The notion of strategy is the instrument I use to break away from the
objectivist point of view and from the action without an agent that
15
In my chapter "Equity, Pity, and Nostalgia: My Darling Clementine and Ford's Other
Women" I will have to address how close this brings Deleuze's critique of representation
to Jacques Derrida's association of language with an inextricable "primitive function" in
Of Grammatology.
31
structuralism presupposes (by relying, for example, on the notion of the
unconscious). But one can refuse to see in strategy the product of an
unconscious program without making it the product of a conscious,
rational calculation. It is the product of the practical sense as the feel for
the game, for a particular, historically determined game .... One's feel for
the game is not infallible; it is shared out unequally between players, in a
society as in a team.... Nothing is simultaneously freer and more
constrained than the action of the good player (62-3).
Bourdieu writes that the strategic feel for the game is unequally distributed amongst
players. Likewise, it is not surprising that the feel for the game should be illustrated
differently and unequally from the films of one director to another. Yet, describing the
work of these good directorslike describing the strategic "action of the good player"
requires reference to a complex of philosophers even to define the goals of the strategy.
As Foucault wrote, the author is not the indefinite source of the signification of his work.
Ford borrows and channels philosophical events into the cinema to enact them upon the
viewer.
Deleuze draws his account of the ahistorical force of Ford's films from a reading
of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty
Valance reflects upon the very stylistic specifics of Ford's cinematic strategy. It is in this
sense that the film is a meta-Ford more than it is a meta-western or a reevaluation of
representations of histories of the American west in general. The film seems to be unique
in Ford's work because installed within the fiction is a kind of visual demonstration of
32
the kind of stage direction required to create the visual force of what Deleuze calls an
encompasser. Tom Doniphon (John Wayne) is the director, and Ransome Stoddard
(Jimmy Stewart) is the actor in Ford's strategy of placing a "rebel above a depth" that
couples exceptional screen depth with judgments of the good against the law.
The films of Ford's mature and late career exhibit this strategy at a high degree of
functional consistency.
16
It is precisely executed in Ford's classics Stagecoach (1939),
Fort Apache (1948), and My Darling Clementine (1946). This distribution of depth
intensifies audience response to fictional action for the sake of the good but opposed to
the law.
The pleasures and political utility of the feeling of unanimous approval generated
by Ford's strategy can best be described in terms of idea of the general will that Rousseau
introduced in On the Social Contract. Society's sense of its own general will, the sense
that there are common goals for all citizens, may falter when the law fails to achieve the
good. But, this general will must be preserved. As Patrick Riley has pointed out, the
essential value placed by Rousseau on a community's sense of itself as one single body
can be traced to St. Paul and Plato's Republic. In Rousseau's Social Contract, the strange
16
Tag Gallagher describes the appearance in Ford's work of some of the features
discussed here.
Yet suddenly in 1927 he began to make pictures on an altogether more
ambitious level of artistry, the true characteristics of his mature work
began to emerge, and, with smashing commercial successes, his position
at Fox became preeminent. In brief, Ford's artistic leap resulted from
marriage of his vignette style with Murnau's atmosphere-enriching
expressionism. This marriage of "turn" with composition greatly
intensified rapport between character and milieu, and soon blossomed into
a theme that dominates Ford's work: milieu, through tradition, duty and
ritual, determines individual character (Gallagher, 63).
33
idea of a civil religion is added to serve the end of persuading individuals to feel such a
sentiment of commonality. Ford's strategy for unanimity gives ritual form to what
Rousseau only obscurely gestured towards as a civil religion.
Ford spoke of his films as exercises in equity, but this strategy for unanimity
relies as much if not more on pity, particularly pity towards women. The idea of the good
that is threatened by legal forces is best expressed as a duty to pity a mother. One can
look to Rousseau's considerations of gender and pity from Emile for a precedent to the
way that many of Ford's films rely on pity for women to define the good that opposes the
law. Ford's strategy for unanimity functions on a basic sentimental level because of the
presence of a pitiable objectusually femalewho sacrifices her own will in order to
display her need for a general will to be imposed upon her. Hence, Ford's strategy for
generating a sense of a general will relies on the presence within the fiction of the film of
a character that cannot herself will and in place of whom the audience generally wills.
Ford's strategy for unanimity addresses Deleuze's American problem by reducing
social conflictsthe originality of individuals and the singularities of minoritiesinto a
nostalgic sense of familiarity and illusory community-belonging. Robin Wood saw the
sense of "nostalgia" as a defining feature of at least Ford's mature work. But, the
nostalgia of Ford's strategy has nothing to do with a longing for the historical past. Ford's
nostalgia is a longing for a sense of familiaritythat the film's visual rhetoric
demandseven in a society defined by conflict rather than unity, a nostalgia that is
oriented towards other individuals in the present rather than towards a represented
historical material. Ford's solution to the American problem may temporarily cover over
34
the background of a social order that is in reality the product of conflict rather consensus.
But, that order is rapidly aging.
1.3 Sternberg: Philosophy Against Personality
It is to these illusions that every person on the earth throws their money
day in and day out as if to avoid being abandoned in the desert. Those in
earlier times did the same with statues of gods and saints. This is a sad
way of taking all that might rescue the heart and investing it in a glistening
mirage.
George Bataille ("Lieu de Pelerinage Hollywood" 198)
X1
Ford and Sternberg occupy different places in Deleuze's typology from Cinema 1.
Ford is discussed in descriptions of the "action-image." Formally, Deleuze's idea of the
action-image is centered upon the full shot, and is exemplified by "the duel." Sternberg,
to the contrary, is discussed as a representative of what Deleuze calls the "affection-
image"formally associated with the close-up. But, what was at stake for Deleuze was
something far beyond formal description of the films.
In Logic of Sense, there is an even clearer juxtaposition that cuts into the
philosophical principles that motivate Ford's and Sternberg's film-events. By the
"Twentieth Series On the Moral Problem in Stoic Philosophy," Deleuze had already
worked up his idea of the sense of representation as an activity, where any linguistic
proposition does not signify, denote, or manifest an interior state but where instead a
linguistic proposition must encompass an expression. A complex of forces and events
must achieve the effects of the linguistic proposition in order for it to make sense. The
same principle upon which Deleuze rejected the reduction of the proposition to any of the
three ordinary types of representation in the Third Series appears again here in the
1 7
Translation mine.
35
Twentieth Series, A linguistic proposition has to do somethingit has to actand so
does a film.
In the Twentieth Series Deleuze introduces a contrast between the effects of a
speech-event and another use of representation. On the one hand, a speech-event may
encompass an expressionlikewise in Ford's film-events. On the other hand, in a
manner exemplified by Stoic philosophy, representations may be used internally so as to
manage events internal to a philosopher, himself.
For Deleuze's Stoic sage, representations are useful, above all else, in order to
reconcile oneself to all that comes to pass. Marcus Aurelius and Epictetusto whom
Deleuze refers in his discussion of Stoicism from Logic of Sensewere cited by
Sternberg as some of his most important influences in his book, Fun in a Chinese
Laundry (1965). In the terms of Michel Foucault's late lectures on Stoicism or in Pierre
Hadot's studies, Sternberg's films are exercises of the self. They constitute a cinematic
training in the Stoic use of representations for internal effects.
The difference between Ford's action-image and Sternberg's affection-image, was
already laid out in Logic of Sense. The sentiment that is the target of Ford's strategy for
unanimity has an object that is external to the viewer: the audience transformed into a
unanimous community. On the other hand, the effects and target of Sternberg's films
generate a sense of strictly internal concern: a new sense of self. Sternberg's cinematic
advocacy for Stoicism must therefore include a detachment from the emotions of
onscreen character, from the personality of the star, and from the rest of the audience.
They exercise the work on internal affection in and for oneself. The difference between
36
the external object of sentiment generated by Ford's strategy and Sternberg's attempts to
exercise the viewer's sense of self are a means of conceiving of the different political and
ethical stakes of the formal distance between their films.
The intensive compression of the close-ups in Sternberg's filmswhat Deleuze
refers to as Sternberg's "Lyrical Abstraction"is exemplified in the prayer scene of
Sternberg's Shanghai Express (1932). Style functions in Sternberg like the Stoic mantras
of Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius. Sternberg's spiritual exercises are calculated to take
their effect on the viewer's control of emotion. The goal is the one set out as the primary
principle of Epictetus's handbook as a detachment from all concerns that "are not in our
power" (Seddon 31).
Deleuze restricted his discussion of Sternberg to "affection-images" in the
interests of advancing the typology of Cinema 1 and therefore, in terms of formal
analysis, he looks no further than close-ups. But, in comparing his lectures on cinema to
the published Cinema books, Deleuze seems to have omitted from the published studies
an unfinished discussion of the orientation of faces in relation to the camera in
Sternberg's films. However much Deleuze made the Cinema books an attempt to work
with structure as something secondary to filmic events that should have their primary
effects in themselves, it seems that the typological structure of the booksin the case of
Sternbergnevertheless obscured the potential for further refinements in understanding
Sternberg's way of working.
The pattern of direction of Sternberg's faces that Deleuze began describing in the
lectures is really only borne out when one observes how the pattern extends beyond
37
close-ups to medium and long shots. Deleuze's primary insights into Sternberg's work
remain valid, but a closer reading shows how key philosophical values pointed out by
Deleuze were in fact incarnated by slightly different mechanisms. In Shanghai Express
and Blonde Venus (1932), body postures and relative positioning of figures work to
instruct the viewer by varying the display of freedom or obstruction of actors' bodies in a
manner that is orchestrated according to the spiritual freedom of the character from
moment to moment.
The oppositional status of Sternberg's Stoic philosophy in relation to the artificial
build-up of personality outside the studio is evident in the exercises of Shanghai Express,
Blonde Venus, or Morocco (1930), but there is a direct critique of the crowd in the The
Scarlet Empress (1934). Robin Wood long ago recognized the allegorical gesture of The
Scarlet Empress as one where Catherine's (Marene Dietrich) royalty was equated to star
status (1976). But, in The Scarlet Empress, Sternberg's interconnected motifs of veils,
statues, and paintings in the Russian royal palace of Catherine the Great interact in a way
that reflects upon the cinematic viewing situation. This critique draws on many of the
terms from Freud's Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego.
The idea of "identification" directly attacked by Sternberg's Scarlet Empress
seems drawn from the problem of identification that is central to Freud's Group
Psychology. This is not, however, the problem of identification with a character in the
fiction. Rather, the identification critiqued by Sternberg and Freud is a viewer's
identification with other members of the audience and the formation of a false sense of
group-belonging.
38
This differentiates the target of Sternberg's oppositional position from the
antagonism towards film's illusion conceived of in terms of Freud's idea of the dream or
of the Oedipal scenario. Freud's idea of the dream was often appropriated for critiques of
identification in much of 1970s film theory according to the metaphor of film-as-dream
most conspicuously by Baudry, Metz, and Mulvey. But, Sternberg's critique of the crowd
is closer to revisions of Freud's relation to the cinema by Bergstrom, Hansen, and
Bellour.
Sternberg's Stoic vision of individual autonomy, the self freed from all
disturbances caused by unchecked passionate attachments to external objects, must of
course be freed from any attachments to the crowd or to the image. True self-sufficiency
is detached from the hoi poloi. Hence, this sense of self exercised by Sternberg's films is
clearly quite opposite to the sentiment of universal community encompassed and enacted
by Ford's strategy.
However, in his final film Anatahan (1953) and in the descriptions of unmade
films that Sternberg claims to have planned after his most famous work with Marlene
Dietrich in Hollywood, Sternberg attempted to bridge the gap between ideals of the self
and the need for a community. Anything like community only ever appeared derided as
conformity or the crowd in Sternberg's earlier films. In this way, Sternberg's philosophy
and aesthetics demonstrate the problematic status in Stoic philosophy of what was called
oikeiosis: if the self is an end in itself then how does one ethically relate to a community,
to other human beings, to the world, other than through detachment?
39
As in Ford, Sternberg's treatment of female characters is an index to the faltering
of the higher truths upon which his exercises depend. There seemed immense
possibilities for the ethics of the self boldly defined for the heroines of the earlier work.
In so far as Anatahan represents a further elaboration of Sternberg's cinematic Stoicism,
these possibilities become only more obscure in Anatahan's revised Stoic answer to the
challenges presented by the self s need for a milieu, for some kind of a political or ethical
context.
Sternberg's solution to the American problem is to posit the self as the potential
source of all originality. Any individuals could be original if only they could detach
themselves from the group and establish themselves within their own citadel of
authenticity. However, when the problem of the group reemerges in his later film work
and writing, Sternberg's approach to this problem of oikeiosis falls back on the same
political coordinates that organize Ford's work: a human universality that will always
bind the individual to "the influence of his milieu" (Deleuze "Bartleby" 83) rather than to
originality.
1.4 Melville: Aleatory Originality
Culture, however, is an involuntary adventure, the movement of learning
which links a sensibility, a memory, and then a thought, with all the
cruelties and violence necessary, as Nietzsche said, precisely in order to
"train a 'nation of thinkers'" or to "provide a training for the mind."
Gilles Deleuze (Difference and Repetition 165-6)
In one of the bizarre twists and turns of his Logic of Sense, Deleuze moves from
the idea of Stoicism to the idea from F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Crack-up of the felure or
"the Crack." Fitzgerald's story is basically a description of an alcoholic's experience of
40
hitting rock bottom. Encountering this "crack" may make people "wake up as if from a
battle which has been too much for them, their bodies broken, their muscles strained,
their souls dead" (154). Yet accidents and mistakes provide an enhanced perspective on
health, a reevaluation of what health means, the possibility for discerning new
connections that would be missed by apparent certainty in a unified community or a
philosophically guaranteed self.
18
Such cracks, accidents, and aleatory events that undo
the assurances of one's own health and sanity are, for Deleuze, more effective in
producing a greater idea of health than an ethics that works through absolute fixation
upon defined goals and ideals that remain unquestioned.
In the affinity between Stoicism and the accident of the crack-up, Deleuze saw
something that Sternberg's Stoicism seems to have missed. Or, perhaps Deleuze's
interpretation of Stoicism introduces into Stoicism that Sternberg's more orthodox
Stoicism could not see. In any case, Deleuze's Stoicism was certainly the product of the
introduction into Stoicism of what he identified in Diogenes Laertius's descriptions of
Cynicism: "a curious system of provocations ... animated with paradox and philosophical
values and [meanings] which are new" (Logic of Sense 130).
Reinvestigating the failures of the classical should appear, then, as a work of
finding cracks in political or ethical programs that masquerade as perfect truth in order to
gain a new perspective on modern philosophical health. Only by investigating the
18
"Nietzsche exhorts us to live health and sickness in such a manner that health be a
living perspective on sickness and sickness a living perspective on health .... The
procedure which makes of health an evaluation of sickness and sickness an evaluation of
healthis this not the Great health (or the Gay Science)? Is it not this which permits
Nietzsche to experience a superior health at the very moment that he is sick?" {Logic of
Sense 173).
41
pathologies of a too-restrictive definition of philosophical health and thereby
surmounting the illusions of the classical, can the philosophical-cinematic-literary
apprentice discover a modernism without guarantees. Refraining the divide between the
modern and the classical in cinema and literature in terms of the American problem
brings into further relief the unbridled approach to flux engendered by Deleuze's
philosophy and aesthetics. One's approach to flux must be renewed in each and every
moment of life. In Melville's literature, the ethical affirmation of life in its continued
indeterminacy and flux stumbles upon what may yet appear as the true meaning of the
American dream: "the wonder of a non-human life to be created" (A Thousand Plateaus
191).
Melville's film theory avant la lettre provides a ground for critiquing the work
performed by Sternberg's and Ford's films. Ford's and Sternberg's challenges to the false
originality of personality in the cinema appear as attempts to play Ahab with the white
whale of the cinema. A fixed idea of true authenticity was supposed to serve as a ground
for their solution to the inauthentic vacillations of a mass culture transfixed by the aura of
personality. However, Sternberg's and Ford's issues with the audience parallel the
relationship of Ahab to his crew as he brandishes his harpoon in the face of Starbuck's
dissent to the Captian's mission (383:119). The moment is described well by Clare L.
Spark,
Ahab is playing resolute Head to the crew's frightened Heart. There is a
constant tension in the text between Ishmael's joking explorations of the
whale's anatomy and Ahab's assertive thrusts through walls that would
42
block his vision. The harpoon may be seen as a phallic gaze, residing in
the "conspicuous crotch" (166).
As in the destructive fixation of Ahab's mission or as in Pierre's moral enthusiasm in
Melville's Pierre or, the Ambiguities (1852), Ford's and Sternberg's work manifests the
failure of an ethics that becomes too fixed by a Head that is invulnerable to shifts that
would take an ethics of the Heart beyond the limits of a human self or community.
Sternberg's Stoicism was already undone in Bartleby, the Scrivener. Bartleby is a
hyperbolically perfect Stoic, and therefore he very likely has an extremely tranquil self
but has no oikeisosis. He "prefers not to" do anything in the office or anywhere else.
Bartleby's passive resistance against preferences for anything outside of his own control
is finally misinterpreted by the narrator-lawyer as a testament to the common suffering of
humanity. The attorney reinterprets Bartleby's pure Stoicism as a simplified affirmation
of the human milieu confirmed by the limits of what humanity and charity achieve for its
pitiful dead letters like Bartleby. This is the same shift that is shown in Sternberg's
recontextualization of his earlier Stoicism in his later work that can be interpreted as his
own late arrival at an appreciation for the value of humanity.
Melville's Billy Budd undoes the configuration of law and pity upon which Ford's
strategy for unanimity depended. Melville makes pity something other than the sense of
sympathy for infirmity that it is in Rousseau and Ford. Instead, pity for the stuttering of
Billy Budd is an admiration of strength within infirmity. What is more, the pitiable object
cannot, as in Ford's instrumental use of women, have our general will imposed upon
her/him. This pitiable objectBilly himselfis sacrificed. This disillusionment
43
accentuates the ironic estrangement of the good from the law that Ford's unanimity
covered over with an illusion of unanimous community.
Putting together the pieces of the puzzle installed within Melville's The
Confidence-Man in light of Melville's short stories leads to a crucial point of intersection
with Foucault's explorations of the classical world in his final lectures of 1984: the games
of truth of Diogenes the Cynic. Referring to Foucault and to Melville provides a good
deal of refinement to what Deleuze often referred to as the central importance of art's
resistance to "the society of control"an adaptation of what Foucault defined as the
biopolitics of neo-liberalism in his 1978-1979 lectures. In short, Melville's film theory
avant la lettre is highly Foucaultian. Like what Melville had suggested in his 1851 essay
"Hawthorne and His Mosses," as an education in artistic resistance, an ethics or politics
that does without community and without self is nothing more and nothing less than a
process of maximizing originality.
The procedures of Melville's literature, according to Deleuze, undermine the
reader's sense of "particularities that pit man against man and nourish an irremediable
mistrust." However, the novels fight equally "against the Universal or Whole, the fusion
of souls in the name of great love." At least, they refuse any fusion that is not adequate to
what remains of souls once they are no longer attached to particularities,
what keeps them from melting into a whole ... precisely their
"originality," that is, a sound that each one produces, like a ritornello at
the limit of language ... when it leads its life without seeking salvation,
44
when it embarks upon its incarnate voyage, without a particular aim.
("Bartleby" 87)
In short, the reality of flux requires an ethics "without a particular aim" and therefore
defies the imposition of individuals or communities as ethical or political coordinates.
The "democratic contribution of [the] American literature" ("Bartleby" 87) of Herman
Melville is his fiction's clear demonstration that an authentic oikeisosis must be directed,
more than anything else, against unquestioned ideals of what it means to belong to an
ethical human community or to be an ethical self.
The aesthetic programs that I will go on to reconstruct for Ford, for Sternberg, and
then for Melville may seem to refer to abstractions rather than individuals. I confess that
this accords with the now cliched claims of Baudrillard's postmodernism where
abstractions have already overwhelmed the desert of the real. But, not to despair, the
abstraction may in fact be more available, livelier, and truer: less human. For the classical
cinema and for Melville, I will be generating abstractions through procedures of my own
that I hope might attain to what Deleuze claimed to have sought in the process of working
on an author. In a note from the Dialogues with Claire Parnet, Deleuze instructed,
Think of the author you are writing about. Think of him so hard that he
can no longer be an object, and equally so that you cannot identify with
him. Avoid the double shame of the scholar and the familiar. Give back to
an author a little of the joy, the energy, the life of love and politics that he
knew how to give and invent. So many dead writers must have wept over
what has been written about them. I hope that Kafka was pleased with the
45
book that we did on him, and it is for that reason that the book pleased
nobody (119).
46
2 Unanimous Depth: John Ford
2.0 Unanimity and the Ahistorical in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
What made his pictures great? Some say the message. Others say the
quality of the picture apart from any message. I would answer the question
in a different way. All of John Ford's pictures had a message. But unlike
many current pictures which emphasize a message, the message in his
pictures never overwhelmed the movie.
Richard M. Nixon in a letter to Joseph McBride 1988 (712)
"Do you see the systematic destruction of the Red Indian as
something inevitable or as a blot on American history?"
"That's a political question," Ford responded. "I don't think it has
anything to do with pictures."
Interview with the BBC 1968
Gilles Deleuze took Ford's estrangement of cinema from politics seriously. If we
do not let the message overwhelm the movie, then the strategy for unanimity present in
many of Ford's pictures can help to describe Ford's films as political events, but only in a
carefully-circumscribed sense. The events of Ford's films are something more than a
manifestation of Ford's political or historical opinion. They are attempts to create the
illusion of belonging to a community undivided by political questions.
According to Deleuze, "unanimity" is "what counts for Ford." It is the audience's
sense of its milieu as a connected group that really counts. This unanimity distinguishes a
healthy community from a pathogenic milieu in the Fordian philosophy that Deleuze
describes,
What counts for Ford is that the community can develop certain illusions
about itself. This would be the great difference between a healthy and a
pathogenic milieu.... a community is healthy in so far as a kind of
unanimity reigns, a unanimity which allows it to develop illusions about
47
itself, about its motives, about its desires and its cupidity, about its values
and its ideals: "vital" illusions, realist illusions which are more true than
pure truth (147-8).
According to Deleuze, Ford's films demand surrender to a sense of community that is
only achieved by any film as a resolution that is "external to the film, but internal to the
cinema" (153). What I want to show here is that Ford's sentimental transubstantiation of
the audience into a community is only garnered by a careful distribution of cinematic
depth that intensifies moments of opposition to the law.
Sylvie Pierre recognized in writing about hypocrisy in Ford's films that "the worst
horrors committed in Ford are the refusals of equity committed by the law" (23). The
converse is just as important to Ford's strategy for unanimity. The most important
moments of approval of character action position the viewer to judge equitable actions
taken against or in spite of the law.
The moral hierarchy that valorizes such moments of good action against the law is
reinforced through the distribution of characters in screen depth. This is a technique of
visual persuasion, or even coercion, to make a judgment that such an action against the
law is equitable. The sense of belonging to an audience forced to certain judgments of
equity amounts to coercion to dispense with political questions in order to share in an
equitable unanimity that reigns, if only momentarily and only through illusions.
Describing this dramatization of depth and law will take this discussion of Ford's
films beyond the affinity set out by Deleuze in Cinema 1 between Ford's films and
Nietzsche's Use and Disadvantages of History for Life. The comparison to Nietzsche is
48
correct in so far as Ford's strategy deploys apparently historical material with a force that
places politico-historical objectivity largely to one side for the sake of generating a lively
sense of community. However, since the law is a central component in the force of Ford's
vital illusions, the effect of this coupling of thematic and visual structure is best explained
as a ritual in a civil religion, designed to persuade the viewer to feel community
sentiment in a form like that which Rousseau described as the general will. In Rousseau's
On the Social Contract, civil religion was necessary to persuade citizens of their duty
even when a direct link between the legal actions of the state and the general will was not
intelligible by all.
19
Ford's films construct filmic scenarios that enforce just such a
sentimental duty.
Deleuze's suggestion that the resolution to the duel of Ford's films is "internal to
the cinema" emerges from his reading of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1963).
Even in the Western, which presents the duel in its purest state, it is
difficult to mark out its boundaries in the final instance. Is the duel that of
the cowboy with the bandit or the Indian? Or with the woman, with the
boyfriend, with the new man who will supersede him (as in Liberty
Valance)! In M, is the real duel between M and the police or society, or
rather between M and the underworld which does not want him? Does not
19
Deleuze cites Jack London's memoir on alcoholism, John Barleycorn, as an example
of another American who wrote in favor of "healthy illusions." The idea of London's,
that an alcoholic is a person who has lost his illusions and that "the alcoholic community
has no illusions about itself. Far from producing dreams, alcohol refuses to let the
dreamer dream," (Cinema 1 148) I think, may be referred back to Rousseau's idea of the
general will and civil religion.
49
the real duel remain elsewhere? Finally, it might be external to the film,
although internal to the cinema (153).
The duel "external to the film, but internal to the cinema" is a stylistic battle for
the hearts and minds of the audience.
20
In addition to the converging duels between
woman, boyfriend, new man, and the bandit/mercenary, it is a fight for the hearts and
minds of a community that is at stake in Liberty Valance. The people need a hero, and the
"new man," Ransome Stoddard, ends up taking the job.
The town of Shinbone and then the entire territory will join together around
Ransome Stoddard as the delegate who brings the territory to statehood. Their approval
will be based on the reputation that he, a lawyer recently arrived from the East,
miraculously killed the hardened mercenary, Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin). The film's
depiction of the unbridled cruelty of Valance aids in establishing the good of Stoddard's
actions in challenging Valance to a duel.
All of this is related through Stoddard's flashback. At the very beginning of the
film, an aged Stoddard, now a famous senator, arrives in modern Shinbone with his wife,
Hallie (Vera Miles), whom he met upon arriving in Shinbone years before. Having
returned to the town for the first time in years, reporters from the local newspaper, The
Shinbone Star, demand news. They demand to know why Mr. and Mrs. Stoddard are
back in town. When they are told that the reason is a funeral for a man named Tom
In this passage, Deleuze goes on to talk about transformations within Fritz Lang's style
from expressionism to realism. However, the juxtaposition of Ford and Lang is
interesting because Ford's films optimistically lead the viewer to conceive of a
community that exists,, whereas Lang's films, especially his American films, often rely
on a cynical picture of society that must be one inspiration for Deleuze's characterization
of the American cinema as a conspiracy of cliches.
50
Doniphon, the editor of the newspaper demands to know, "Who is Tom Doniphon?"
Stoddard begins by describing how Valance attacked and robbed him as he was on his
way into town on the Overland Stage.
21
The flashback goes on to describe the events that
led to the new reputation that Stoddard earned with the revenge killing of Valance.
It is clear that Stoddard's new reputation alters the public's perception of him
from that of merely a learned man of the law that would have been politically fatal to that
of a civilized man turned killer, a man who took the law into his own hands. It appears
that Stoddard beat Valance at his own game, by turning to what Valance claims to be
teaching Stoddard with the raw violence of the initial beating: "western law."
Stoddard's reputation finally carries through the push to agree upon the agenda of
statehood with an ease that his semi-learned calls for law and order would not alone have
achieved. The advancement of plans for statehood coupled with the advancement of
Stoddard to political celebrity form a long-term solution for avoiding conflicts with thugs
like Valance, who had been paid by the "big ranchers" to keep the small farmers in line.
But, the great political victory that begins Stoddard's careerat the end of the
flashbackis preceded by a confession. In a flashback within a flashback, we are shown
another version of the shootout with Valance. Before Stoddard gives his final speech,
Doniphon tells Stoddard that Stoddard did not shoot Liberty Valance. Thus, when the
film returns to the frame narrative with a dissolve, the men of modern Shinbone have to
contend with Stoddard's confession that it was not him, but Doniphon, the man who once
claimed Hallie for his girl, who killed Valance. Stoddard has brought his wife back to
21
Perhaps a sly reference to Overland Drive in Los Angeles, the route that before Ford
advanced to director linked the studios in Hollywood with those in Culver City.
51
Shinbone to be among only four mourners at the funeral of the man who truly achieved
the healthy illusion that was essential to Stoddard's career-making victory. This victory,
moreover, allowed Stoddard to whisk Doniphon's girl away from Shinbone as his wife.
The film's community persuaded into unanimity by the trickery of a spectacular
central figurethat mirrors Ford's work on the audiencefinds parallels in Young Mr.
j j
Lincoln (1939) and in Ford's films with Will Rogers. However, Liberty Valance is also
different from these earlier films. Hereunlike the figure of Lincoln in Young Mr.
Lincoln or Will Rogers in Judge Priest (1934)Stoddard is created by another hero
within the fiction. Doniphon is the real-concealed good-outlaw trickster. Allegorically, it
is Doniphon who supplies Stoddard with his necessary atmosphere, just as it was Ford
who staged and composed images of heroes by enveloping them within an atmosphere of
strategic abstraction.
Deleuze's account of Ford's healthy illusions explains that the movement of
Ford's films takes place in an "encompasser" (Cinema 1 146). This language can be
traced to Logic of Sense, where representation's effectiveness is based on the way "it
encompasses, or envelops an expression, much as it may not be able to represent it"
22
This theme is particularly strong in Judge Priest (1934)and Steamboat Round the Bend
(1935), as well as the remake of Judge Priest, The Sun Shines Bright (1953).
23
Jim Kitses recognizes the theatrical aspect of Doniphon's surreptitious shooting of
Valance, but does not expand on it to the level of a reflection on Ford's own cinematic
style. Kitses writes,
Enter Tom, a brutish lost soul, like Doc Holliday on a bad day, visibly out
of place. The inspired use of his recall (Ford flashing back within the
overall flashback) lifts the curtain on Tom's brilliant piece of theater. The
duel between Ranse and Liberty is re-enacted within a lethal triangular
mise-en-scene directed by Tom... Tom's memory corrects the play for
Stoddard.... The image is preferred to the real (125).
52
(145). A linguistic proposition is only effective in so far as it can "encompass" a speech-
event, achieve something, and thereby intervene in the flow of matter in time. This
language of a protective envelope also appears in Nietzsche's early critique of modern
culture that Deleuze uses to generalize the American cinema of Griffith, Vidor, DeMille,
and Ford. (Cinema 1 149)
24
The thrust of Nietzsche's argument that cultural vitality must avoid being stifled
by scientific rationality appears with the most force in Deleuze's discussion of Ford.
Nietzsche describes the illusions necessary for cultural vitality this way:
All living things require an atmosphere around them, a mysterious misty
vapor; if they are deprived of this envelope, if a religion, an art, a genius is
condemned to revolve as a star without atmosphere, we should no longer
be surprised if they quickly wither and grow hard and unfruitful. It is the
same with all great things, 'which never succeed without some illusion'...
But every nation, too, indeed every human being that wants to become
mature requires a similar enveloping illusion, a similar protective and
veiling cloud; nowadays, however, maturity as such is hated because
history is held in greater honor than life (97).
In Nietzsche's vision of the healthy society, culture must deliver individuals to
visions about their milieu that are fanciful and "ahistorical." The distance between
24
There are 3 useful types of history in Nietzsche's account: "monumental,"
"antiquarian," and "critical." The types take history as example, as artifact , or as bad
example, respectively. They are all examples of how a society might come to know itself.
In Nietzsche's essay, these categories occupy only the second chapter of a nine-chapter
essaythe theme of fiction in the healthy community runs through the essay's entirety.
53
knowledge and life that has been engendered by historical education, according to
Nietzsche, weakens society. The ordinary individual subjected to the complexities of
history is likely to become overly internalized, and even morbid. If an individual is
locked by education into a realm of fixed knowledge about things that have gone before,
he will be unable to act according to a spirit of cultural belonging in the present.
25
The Use and Disadvantages of History hinges on the insight that an individual
cannot actively reimagine and reinvent him or herself, much less reinvent society, by
recourse only to objective scientific reflection on what is already exactly known to exist.
One needs to make claims for previously unknown aspects of reality in order to produce a
"conception of culture as a new and improved physis, without inner and outer, without
dissimulation and convention, culture as a unanimity of life, thought, appearance, and
will" (123). Because of rational modernity's lack of a community in which the individual
can feel a part there comes a need for vital illusions.
In Deleuze's idea of Ford's work that is best exemplified in Liberty Valance,
these illusions have a value for life that makes them "more true than pure truth" (Cinema
1 148). Likewise, Nietzsche would later pare down the principle he was working on in his
Use and Disadvantages. "In the end, it comes down to the purpose the lie is supposed to
serve" {The Anti-Christ 56: 56).
25
The above passage continues,
There is, indeed, rejoicing that now 'science is beginning to dominate
life': that condition may, possibly, be attained; but life thus dominated is
not of much value because it is far less living and guarantees far less life
for the future than did a former life dominated not by knowledge but by
instinct and powerful illusions (97).
54
In Liberty Valance, the purpose has clearly been lost from the victory of the
flashback to the Stoddard of the frame narrative. Stoddard no longer has this atmosphere
that is more true than pure truth and he is no longer the bearer of "what counts" for the
thriving health of any community. The feeling of unanimity that carried the town of
Shinbone and the entire territory into a political fight for statehood to protect the people
was a temporary victory. But, Stoddard remained in the public spotlight long after his
greatest achievement.
The philosophy of Deleuze's Ford is one where vital illusions encompass or
envelop the lively individual personality of the hero, as well as the people of a healthy
nation. However, consider Deleuze's treatment of this text of Nietzsche's in Deleuze's
Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962)the book that made Deleuze's career. There, Deleuze
twice assesses as "insufficient" the critique of modern knowledge as it appears when
Nietzsche was only beginning to develop it in Use and Disadvantages when he put
forward the program that society needs healthy illusions.
26
The fact that Deleuze grounds
his assessment of "what counts" for Ford in Nietzche's early diatribe against modernity is
not terribly flattering to Ford.
26
See Chapter 4 (139-40) of Nietzsche and Philosophy. Nietzsche's proposition that
fictionalizing history is an antidote to the malaise of a culture of inauthentic dissimulation
is not given a complete resolution in The Use and Disadvantages of History, according to
Deleuze. Chapter 3 of Nietzsche and Philosophy explains that The Use and
Disadvantages of History expresses ideas that would be fully developed into the later
idea of the positive value of forgetting in Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals (Books II 1,
and Book I 10). The earlier text is Nietzsche's attempt to point out the reactive forces at
work in education that suppress rather than unleash active forces. The opposition between
culture and history is something he will later overcome by turning to genealogy or a
theory of culture as something that is in fact natural and evolving, a formal knowledge
that reaches beyond the bounds of humanity towards a knowledge that is both more
universal and more useful than human history.
55
But, neither is it flattering to say that there is "a lot of hypocrisy" (Cinema 1 147)
in American cinema and particularly in Ford's use of the ahistorical as it is represented in
Liberty Valance. Deleuze idiosyncratically refers to these quasi-Nietzschean illusions as
the American dream. "One cannot, therefore, criticize the American dream for being only
a dream: this is what it wants to be, drawing all its power from the fact that it is a dream"
(148).
What Deleuze does not explain is how this "American Dream" is produced by the
stylistic mechanics of Ford's creation of an encompassing atmosphere for his heroes. The
encompassing atmosphere that surrounds Stoddard surely does not consist in the
confused history lesson that he delivers to his class in Shinbone. What makes Stoddard's
mission movie-worthy is the way that Doniphon, the ostensible director of the grand
victory, envelops the event in an atmosphere that Stoddard's personality does not in itself
possess.
The power of spectacular illusion exhibited in Doniphon's trick shooting of
Liberty Valance is the force that cinema was capable of producing in the hands of a
master visual strategist like Ford. Ford's strategic use of depth that renders heroes into
their atmosphere is reflected in the film of Liberty Valance itself. Depth is central to the
staging by which Doniphon produces the illusion of Stoddard as the man who shot
Liberty Valance.
56
Doniphon first "directs" Stoddard after he has gotten the idea from Hallie that
Stoddard is learning how to shoot in order to face up to Liberty Valance.
27
He brings
Stoddard out to his ranch. Stoddard embarrasses himself as he fails in four shots to hit a
can of paint thrown in the dirt, demonstrating that he is inept with a gun. In the lesson
that follows, Stoddard thinks he is going to learn more about shooting, but Doniphon is
playing a little trick on him. Doniphon's staging of this trick produces behavior in Ranse
that recapitulates Ford's techniques in staging in that it raises the rebel hero from the
depths of the screen.
Doniphon tells Ranse to set up three paint cans at intervals on three fence posts.
The tops of these posts extend at a diagonal into the depth of the frame. Ford consistently
exploits this kind of architectural diagonal in his films. Diagonals to the picture plane
function as intensifiers of depth. They intensify the positioning of a foreground figure at
the wider, more forward extreme of the lines. In Ford, any diagonal can function as a
"line of flight" extending back towards a "point of flight."
28
The "face," or the
27
This important interaction between Hallie and Doniphon is not shown. Doniphon tells
Stoddard that it is because of his conversation with Hallie that he pursues Stoddard and
brings him to the ranch.
28
Lines of flight is an English rendering of lignes de fuit, the French term for lines of
linear perspective that foreshorten towards the vanishing point, point de fuit. There is no
good English term for these parallel lines that appear in plastic space as diagonals. To
further complicate matters but also to make things more interesting, Deleuze and
Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus puns on the term lines of flight to associate flight with
the possibility of literally fleeing a repressive social order. In Ford, however, these lines
of flight are always subordinated to the face, the French term for the foremost vertical
line from which the lignes de fuit extend towards the point de fuit. Just as Deleuze and
Guattari propose that fragmentary representations of of facial expressions might function
autonomously from the organic unity of the face, they propose lines of flight,
autonomous abstraction that might function autonomously fromor even be turned
57
foreground figure, oriented as above a depth is placed at the wider front/high/raised end
of these lines of flight. Inversely, a figure can be placed at the narrow or far/low/recessed
end closer to the point of flight.
Setting the cans on the posts, Ranse moves across the composition's intensified
depth as he responds to Tom's direction. First, Ranse goes deeper into space, moving to
the post at the far/low end and then back to the middle post. With the marks set,
Doniphon pulls his joke on Stoddard, shooting all three of the cans and soaking Ranse
with paint. Ranse leans back to the far/low post before he charges up to a position where
his head is at the near/raised post. Then he passes out of frame. This forward movement
is repeated from another angle before he punches Doniphon, knocking him to the ground
and further back/down out of frame.
Doniphon is thereby recessed by his positioning below the tilted camera of the
next framing. Doniphon moves in the opposite direction from Ranse's forward motion.
The director/Doniphon has challenged the actor/Stoddard by infringing on Stoddard's
sense of the good and our own. Doniphon's authority is temporarily torn down in
accordance with our sentiments. Ranse, on the other hand, is raised in screen space and
becomes the rebel above a depth.
As a comparison, the effects of positioning a foreground figure at the wide end of
diagonals that imply linear perspective appear clearly in the left section of Jean Fouquet's
Gothic masterpiece, The Melun Dyptich The function of linear perspective lines in the
architecture behind the figures in "Etienne Chevalier presented by Saint Etienne"
againstthe idea of organic unity of a landscape or social unity. It is quite the opposite in
Ford's compositional strategy.
58
accentuates the men's forwardness. Lines of flight raise them from the depths of the
painting.
In Ford, depth constitutes the Nietzschean "atmosphere" that makes great things
possible. However, film can do more to convey depth than painting because it has more
depth cues at its disposal than painting does. In a film, a human figure can also move in
depth as Stoddard does here. Furthermore, background cues can shift through editing.
Tag Gallagher recognizes the importance of depth in Ford by pointing to some of the
most striking compositional moments in many of his films.
29
More can be said, however,
about Ford's use of depth cues in composition. The variation of depth from shot to shot
and the distribution of characters within this depth have a precise function that is present
in Doniphon's little demonstration in Liberty Valance.
The stage directions that Doniphon gave Stoddard with his little trick at the ranch
are apparently well learned by Stoddard because the same arrangement is repeated with
some formal modifications in the central duel with Valance. Depth in the streets of
Shinbone intensifies the great showdown. We do not find out until later that everything
has transpired the way that Doniphon staged it.
29
Depth is analogous to the idea of shadow that is so important to Deleuze's idea of
expressionism. Deleuze at least includes Ford's The Informer as an expressionist film. In
Cinema 2, Deleuze distinguishes this expressionist use of depth from how depth in
Welles's films, made with deep focus where "the volume of each body overflows any
given plane, plunging into or emerging from shadow and expressing the relationship of
this body with the others located in front or behind: an art of masses" (107). In Ford, the
lines of flight are generally subordinated to a character that serves as their face. In Ford,
the human form limits the pure of play of masses that, according to Deleuze, constitutes
Welles's modernist use of depth.
59
Prior to the duel, Valance announces that his planned murder of Stoddard will be
seen by the law as a "clear-cut case of self-defense." As he tries to claim a legal right to
authorize his own murderous intent, he faces off with Marshall Appleyard and is placed
at the low end of the curving diagonals in the contours of the mirror. Valance's conduct is
heinous but he claims that the duel is legal.
Valance takes his place at the low end of things in that the narrowing diagonal of
the mirror functions as a submerged depth cue as a part of composition in two-
dimensional screen space. Even though it is not a product of actual depth on the set such
lines of flight that are virtual rather than real have a relation to the foreground figures
comparable to the use of recessed text and drop shadow text. Raised or recessed text can
raise or recess a letter with ostensible autonomy from the abstract space of the rest of the
page. Likewise, these diagonals abstracted from the space of the set can recess as well as
raise a character for dramatic effect in a fashion. Such effects work in isolation from the
rest of the frame or the construction of the actual space of the set while nonetheless
positioning characters in relation to each other.
Out in the street, Valance is further recessed at the back end of the deepest space
of the entire film. Stoddard is out front. However, in the composition of the shots of the
two men we see most of the duel from behind Stoddard's back. Stoddard's activity is
somewhat muted. This is fitting in so far as Stoddard is not the agent of the atmosphere.
Rendered visually passive, Stoddard is pushed out from the screen with his back towards
us.
60
Furthermore, no single diagonal matches up precisely with his form in the shot
that he shares with Valance. It seems as ifwere Stoddard not crouching slightlyhe
would in fact meet the diagonals of the top of buildings to his left. This, again, is fitting:
he has been positioned by another force within an atmosphere for which he is in fact
inadequate.
Stoddard's soaking in the earlier trick at Doniphon's ranch is literally repeated as
Valance shoots the hanging bucket next to Stoddard. Stoddard does not move in depth in
this moment as he did in reaction to Doniphon's trick, but in the shots with Valance he is
still lifted forward from the diagonals of the static depth, as in Fouquet's painting of St.
Steven. The diagonals of the entire town widen towards him and narrow towards Valance
in the deepest space of any set of the film.
When see the duel the second time, however, such spatial relationships have
changed. In the flashback within the flashback when the story of the duel is related by
Doniphon, the scene is recomposed. The depth relation between Stoddard and Valance
from the earlier scene is conspicuously absent. Stoddard and Valance are leveled into the
recessed space of the street. Only Doniphon and Pompey (Woody Strode) are in front of
the depth in which Stoddard and Valance are submerged.
30
From Doniphon's perspective, there is no good herethat is, the only good is
that which Doniphon himself produces. The success of healthy illusions looks different
when it set in motion from this different angle. Doniphon is the one who gives Stoddard
30
Steve Mamber has demonstrated the spatial and temporal incongruities between the
two renderings of this event. This discrepancy is essential to accentuating the different
abstract qualities and effects in these two representations.
61
the protective atmosphere of illusion, that of a successful vigilante. Without Doniphon's
help, Stoddard would have been a mere martyr like Mr. Peabody (Edmund O'Brien), the

newspaperman beaten bloody by Valance just prior to the duel. The health of the
community is bolstered only by the healthy illusion and a mysterious atmosphere that
Doniphon supplies.
Stoddard truly does overstep the law and order for which he has argued so
fiercely. To remedy this flaw in Stoddard's conscience that is incapable of tolerating
ambiguity, Doniphon makes sure that the truth he expresses gives Stoddard his own
illusion that relieves him of his guilt. Before Stoddard makes his speech for the
delegation, Doniphon tells him, "You didn't kill Liberty Valance." This gives Stoddard
the strength to go on, having been riddled with guilt since the murder.
Stoddard needs the idea that he is not himself a murderereven though he
certainly attempted to kill Valance and even though he certainly aided Doniphon in
killing Valance. He provided the distraction that made Tom's act possible. But,
everyone's protection from the big ranchers is secured through the group's confidence in
Stoddard and through Stoddard's self-confidence. Fictional foundations make the lively
progress of Shinbone's unanimity possible.
The broader allegorical temptation is to see The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
as a manifestation of Ford's opinion about the necessity of state secrets, about western
legend's discrepancy from the facts, or about society's denial of the law's intimacy with
62
primitive violence.
31
The film is a lush trying ground for theories of law, politics, and
history.
The tendency was apparent from Peter Wollen's formulation of an auteur theory
in Signs and Meanings in the Cinema. Even though the film author was described as a
"performer" rather than the "composer" of films, Ford's films were nonetheless
generalized by Wollen on the basis of their representation of a master standpoint on
American history, one taken from the script of Liberty Valance: the antinomy between
y-y
the garden and the desert. While Wollen's study proposed a model that was supposed to
be more structural than thematic, Ford was nonetheless categorized as an interpreter of
history. Wollen's study remains a touchstone in spite of other attempts to go beyond it.
33
31
v
Slavoj Zizek glossed such an explanation of Liberty Valance in a brief anecdote in
January 2011 in "Good Manners in the Age of Wikileaks." He described that the recent
Batman: The Dark Night follows in the same tradition of Liberty Valance and Fort
Apache, by affirming the necessity of state secrets and collaboration of the law with
illegal violence in order to protect the people who should not or cannot know who is
protecting them.
2
The idea is taken from Hallie's challenge at the end of the film to Ranse, "Look Ranse,
it used to be a wilderness and now it's a garden. Aren't you proud?" Wollen replaces
wilderness with desert in order to align the antinomy with Henry Nash Smith's account of
the evolution of western mythology. According Nash Smith, throughout the 18
th
century,
mythology of the contemporary was always one step behind the historical actuality of
imperialist exploitation of resources in the westernmost territories. Wollen explains,
As Henry Nash Smith has demonstrated in his magisterial book Virigin
Land, the contrast between the image of America as a desert and as a
garden is one which has dominated American thought and literature,
recurring in countless novels, tracts, political speeches and magazine
stories. In Ford's films it is crystallized in a number of striking images.
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, for instance, contains the image of
the cactus rose, which encapsulates the antinomy between desert and
garden which pervades the whole film (Wollen 96).
33
Some time ago in 1978, Peter Lehman noted the formal shortcomings of Wollen's
analysis,
63
In an interview with Ford, Peter Bogdanovich inquired about parallels from the
ending of this film to the ending of Fort Apache. There Captain York (John Wayne)
refuses to expose the glorified martyrdom of his former commander Owen Thursday
(Henry Fonda) as the product of suicidal misconduct. York thereby facilitates the
propagation of the legend of honorable death in the painting "Thursday's Charge." The
newspaperman (Carleton Young) in Liberty Valance likewise refuses to print Stoddard's
confession, claiming, "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." Bogdanovich
claims the reverse philosophy for Ford. Liberty Valance, Fort Apache and other of Ford's
films expose this printing of the legend as a falsehood, thereby printing the facts of
America's history of legend-making.
34
Wollen's own auteur analysis discusses entire directors' oeuvres
without ever dealing with individual shots in a given film and their
relationships to other shots in that film. Sam Rhodie pointed out years
ago that this gave us little more than a sense of the director as a
cracker-barrel philosopher. Little has changed since then (1).
Will Wright's synopsis of master antinomies attributed to the Western of course gives
similar outlines to the Western's representation of history that are tempting to apply to
Ford. Ford's reputation remains that of the American cinema's interpreter of philosophies
of history. Yet, what Vivian Sobchack said in 1982 about Ford's Grapes of Wrath,
remains true of his entire oeuvre:
The film enjoys a wealth of considerationas an adaptation of a work of
fiction, as a cultural artifact which illuminates various aspects of popular
American ideology and myth, and as part of the oeuvre of a major film
auteur. Paradoxically, however this widely considered film has suffered
from visual neglect. Examined from several critical perspectives, The
Grapes of Wrath has been more frequently looked into than looked at. Its
visual surfaces have been hardly explored and mapped, its texture and tone
have been rarely considered as functions of its imagery, and its dominant
thematic emphasis has been only minimally related to its visual style
(5%).
34
McBride and Wilmington expand on Bogdanovich's claim.
Ford is not suggesting that the lie has become truthafter all, as Peter
Bogdanovich notes, 'Ford prints the fact'but instead that the lie was part
64
But, looking for answers to political questions that according to Ford have
"nothing to do with the pictures" risks allowing the message to overwhelm the movie.
The film is an allegory but it also appeals for a kind of expiation for the illusions it
allegorizes. The film is a washing of hands for Ford's own legend-making. This allegory
is not a message but the attempt to create a certain kind of film-event.
The film-event enacted by Ford's demonstration of this victory of an illusion in
Liberty Valance does not clearly move towards disenchantment with a philosophy of
healthy illusions or an admission of guilt or hypocrisy. The film is better described an
allegorical washing of hands. Like Stoddard, the heroes whom Ford created could not be
expected to last beyond the moment when they were, as Ford said of legends, "good for
the country" (Bogdanovich 86). The film does not lament the falsehood behind legends.
Instead, it acknowledges the fleeting nature of the kind of power that the master director
lends to the image of a personality in creating filmic atmosphere. Liberty Valance stakes
out the claim that Ford's kind of masterful mythmaking served as a part of the
community-making that could have pulled America through great challenges like the
depression and World War II. However, the continued build-up of the personalities that
of history and the symbol of Stoddard the hero has become a fact. Law
triumphed over anarchy; the wilderness did become a garden. To expose
the symbol as a lie would be to deny the meaning of history. And the
public, as the ending of Fort Apache makes abundantly clear, would not
believe it anyway. Once the historical process has been given a catalyst, it
can't be stopped: that is the tragedy. The reason Ford 'prints the fact' is to
ask the public, "Are you proud?" (189).
65
might have taken place outside of his own work can only be counted as an ancillary loss
that does not undermine the constitutive success of Ford's mythmaking.
35
To say that Ford's strategy takes up Nietzsche's warning that all great things
never succeed without illusion and that all "stars" need an "atmosphere" is not the same
as the newspaperman lazy shrug that he recited as a kind of sanctimonious dictum. The
Nietzsche of the "Use and Disadvantages of History," and almost certainly Ford, would
say the opposite while maintaining the autonomy of mythmaking from "political
questions." When the legend becomes mere fact, it has become stale, the youth has left it,
and the personality formed through that legend has lost its vital value.
35
Such a position, however, assumes that it was human community that pulled the United
States through this period of great adversity. Mark Reisner suggests that it was in fact the
further exploitation of the American West's rivers to produce aluminum for war planes
and ships that led to the U.S. victory in World War II and that, in turn, pulled American
industry out of the depression.
No one knows exactly how many planes and ships were manufactured
with Bonneville and Grand Coulee electricity, but it is safe to say that the
war would have been seriously prolonged at the least without the dams.
By 1942, ... we possessed something no other country did: a huge surplus
of hydroelectric power.... The Nazis had neither the raw materials nor the
electricity to produce what they needed fast enough. In late 1940, when
Grand Coulee Dam was being completed, people had been saying that its
power would go begging until the twenty-first century. Twenty-two
months later, all of its available power was being used and the defense
industries were screaming for more (162).
So Liberty Valance is not a "meta-western" that self-consciously explains Henry Nash
Smith's argument that myth often disagrees with its contemporary facts in history.
Reisner's history suggests that very idea of the "greatest generation" is just the twentieth
century version of myth being out of touch with the very immediate facts of human
interaction with the environment that motivates human development. That is, in fact, the
results of World War II were the product of the globalized drive to mobilize to
exhaustion all resources available to avaricious human systems from which the United
Statestemporarilyemerged on top. The idea that the healthy illusion of an American
spirit was behind American victory would then be, itself, an illusion.
66
The complex lament in Liberty Valance does not fall on the lost wilderness nor on
a truth obscured by legend. It concerns the weakness of personality without atmosphere.
More to the point, the film laments the discrepancy between, on the one hand, the star
produced by Doniphon out of the mere material furnished by Stoddard, and on the other
hand, the confused remnants of this atmosphere in the later Stoddard.
For Ford as for the young Nietzsche, the discrepancy of fictionalized personality
with the scientific treatment of humanity by history is not the problem. The problem is
the discrepancy between the effective youthful personality made mysterious by
atmosphere and the weakened reified personality whose career may go on once that
atmosphere has evaporated. Hence, Stoddard crawls back to the facts because he can no
longer support the legend, weakly leaking the confession about the event that made his
earlier "rants"like his nickname, "Ranse"into material for the viable political career
of Senator Stoddard.
The difference in value between the triumph of the illusion of Stoddard and the
real Stoddard is just as dramatic as the difference in value between, on the one hand, the
vigilante Stoddard that is produced by the atmosphere of Doniphon's shooting, and on the
other hand, the hokum and hullaballoo surrounding Stoddard's opponent, Buck
Langhorne, at the Capitol City convention. Langhorne uses a trick rider and the
overblown circuitous oratory of Cassius Starbuckle (John Carradine) to bolster his
campaign against the Shinbone delegation and still fails to triumph over the
understatedand borrowedgrace of the illusive vigilante, Stoddard.
67
The force of the atmosphere and illusion that Doniphon grants to Stoddard is of a
different order than the cult of personality satirically distilled in Langhorne. However, the
worn out political personality of the Stoddard of the flashback has less stature than
Starbuckle and the Langhorne Caricature. The way that Stoddard's winning performance
against Langhorne in Capital City is cleverly elided by the return to the frame narrative
preserves the mystery of the speech. Stoddard's historical reality of Stoddard's
speech/rant is not allowed to undermine his victory for us because it is not shown. This
clever use of elision thereby renders absolute the difference between the effective
illusions of the past and the faded illusions of the present day Stoddard.
So it is this discrepancy between youthful illusions and faded facts that creates
moral repercussions for the later Shinbone community and for Hallie and Ranse. As the
flashback opens, Stoddard misquotes the socialist Horace Greeley, "Go west young man
and seek fame and fortune." The original quote concerns something like the Young
Nietzsche's vision of maturity that Stoddard never himself attained, "Go west young
man, and grow up with the country." Sylvie Pierre is correct to write that
one can count on the sensibility of James Stewart himself, authorized by
Ford's own printing of a legend, to refigure hypocrisy into a banal
minister of the American democratic religion, prone to sanctimonious
glorification he who does not take himself for a saint, and has not been
made happy by all of it either. He is a purely melancholic figure that
Stewart expresses marvelously, as he already did in The Two Rode
Together, the same type of tortured combination between cynically taking
68
advantage of social opportunity and the generous righteousness of
American patriotic sentiment (13).
36
Ford's use of the frame narrative Stoddard's sanctimony, then, is an assault on a
type of personality phenomenon much like that to be found in the cult of personality
surrounding John Wayne's career outside Ford's work. One can imagine a character
played by Wayne calling for law and order as Stoddard doesif in a more manly-
seeming voice than Stoddard's. Wayne reflected on his own character in a way that paints
him as a sanctimonious Stoddard. McBride relates the story that
Wayne's longtime assistant, Mary St. John, tried to tell [Wayne] that
Doniphon had an intriguing ambiguity, Wayne replied, "Screw
ambiguity. Perversion and corruption masquerade as ambiguity. I don't
like ambiguity. I don't trust ambiguity" (630).
The studio-marketed personality is merely a weakened illusion left to politic on its
own, left only with the phony spell proper to a commodified star individual artificially
built up outside the studio. Rather than the discrepancy between the legend of the Old
West and its factual history, at issue is the discrepancy between personality imbued with
value by the master direction of Ford and that weakened personality-as-fact.
In Ford's Socratic apology about Hollywood legend-making, this pursuit of truth
corresponds neatly to the deprecated status of "legend as fact" as a leftover or by-product
because what is most unfit to print isas in Stoddard's confessionthat the star himself
was not in control of his own image. In a more limited allegorical demonstration of
36
Translation mine.
69
Liberty Valance, the work of the master film technician, hidden, misunderstood, and
largely forgotten creates the distinction of Ford's national personalities as they are raised
from Hollywood's star personalities. These personalities remain mere legend-as-fact
outside of cinematic art itself. Ford's heroes were more than movie stars only because the
source of their originality was the master director. As Deleuze writes,
Ford's originality lies in the fact that only the encompasser gives measure
to movement, or the organic rhythm. It is thus the melting pot of
minorities that is what brings them together, what reveals their
correspondences even when they appear to be opposed, what already
shows the fusion between them necessary for the birth of a nation (146).
Ford's originality served the purpose of unanimity. But, victories do not last forever.
Perhaps Ford's allegorical washing of hands in Liberty Valance might even be
expanded to say that the great Westerns made by Ford gave force to the national
sentiment later associated with the genre only through his very unique and inimitable
work. After Ford's own work was finished, he could no longer take responsibility for the
manifold "political" incarnations of the western genre that he had pioneered. Such
illegitimate sequels may also have come at the expense of "facts" but the lamentable
thing, for Ford, is that they proliferated without the authentic effect of community-
making that "more true than pure truth" was the unique originality of his cinematic
mastery.
70
2.1 A Sublime Architecture of Attractions in Staeecoach
And may not an illusion creep into the word objectivity even in its highest
interpretation? According to this interpretation, the word means a
condition in the historian which permits him to observe an event in all its
motivations and consequences so purely that it has no effect at all on his
subjectivity.... Is it supposed that at this moment the things as it were
engrave, counterfeit, photograph themselves by their own action on a
purely passive medium?
Friedrich Nietzsche (Use and Disadvantages of History 91)
The sublime is what produces unanimity; thus it is objectivity.
Pseudo-Longinus (Deguy 12)
Having already compared Ford's use of depth to painting and to typography, we
should now compare Ford's use of depth to that of the early Lumiere brothers' film
Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat. The film is saidalmost mythicallyto have sent
audiences screaming from the theater when it was first shown. Tom Gunning complicated
the picture of the early film spectator by discrediting the apocryphal explanation that
people naively thought that the train coming towards them in the image was truly going
to break from the screen and run them over. But, there may yet be something to be
gleaned from this myth for describing Ford's use of depth.
In "An Aesthetics of Astonishment," Gunning made the claim for an
"astonishment" defined as "the pleasurable interplay between belief and doubt" as the
cause for this mythical audience's extreme reaction to Arrival of a Train. This alone will
not help to account for Ford's strategy of placing a rebel above a depth.
Considering the force of these two imagesone from the dawn of cinema, the
other from near the end of Ford's careercompletely apart from their verisimilitude
37
Available on YouTube.
71
would mean looking at the abstract qualities of their composition. The compositional
power of both of these images is based in linear perspective lines at diagonals to the
frame. In both images there is also movement situated along those "lines of flight."
In Arrival of a Train, the presence of intense depth on the cinema screen is
maximized by the oblique positioning of the camera to the forward motion of the train.
The train track and the line of the horizonor equally the top of the frametogether
form lines of flight that lead to the vanishing point from which the train emerges. The
front of the train, like Ransome Stoddard charging at Doniphon, plunges out of the
camera's view through the side of the screen.
Ford deployed cinematic depth in a different way, but in a way that was equally
stunning, in the shot that visually introduces John Wayne as the good outlaw, the Ringo
Kid, in Stagecoach. At the Kid's very introduction, Ford used camera movement to create
the sense of Wayne's character rising from the depth of the screen. The same principles
as in Doniphon's demonstration of stage direction with Ranse are applied. However, in
the introduction of Ringo, the movement of the figure towards the camera is direct rather
than oblique, and there are no perspective lines.
The Ringo Kid becomes the rebel in front of a depth as the camera dollies rapidly
towards him, intensifying our approval of his exceptional status. The reason that the Kid
escaped from prison was to avenge the murders of his brother and father.
38
The
exploitation of screen depth in the visual introduction of Ringo adds atmosphere to his
It has already been hinted in earlier scenes that Ringo is the good guy. The earlier
conversation between Buck (Andy Devine) and Curly (George Bancroft) reveals that the
Kid is an outlaw who has "busted out of jail," but the conversation hints that the Kid is
good because of Divine's reaction to the news, "Good for him."
72
opposition to the law for the sake of the good. One finds the exploitation of cinematic
depth paired with opposition to law in many of Ford's great films. In Stagecoach,
distribution of characters in screen depth links together a moral hierarchy that extends
throughout the film.
The strategic value of such atmospheric depth may be linked to the kind of viewer
reaction hyperbolically incarnated in Arrival of a Train's pseudo-credulous spectators.
Gunning includes this film within his rubric as a "Cinema of Attractions." To describe
the look and appeal of pre-narrative cinema, Gunning uses the term "attraction" taken
from Sergei Eisenstein's "Montage of Attractions" written in 1924.
Looking across Eisenstein's work does provide a clue to the attractions within
Ford's abstraction. In 1924, Eisenstein defined attractions this way:
An attraction is in our understanding any demonstrable fact (an action, an
object, a phenomenon, a conscious combination, and so on) that is known
and proven to exercise a definite effect on the attention and emotions of
the audience.... From this point of view a film cannot be a simple
presentation or demonstration of events: rather it must be a tendentious
selection of, and comparison between, events, free from narrowly plot-
related plans ... [the film must concern itself with] molding the audience
in accordance with its purpose ("Montage of Film Attractions" 35-6).
This idea of attraction is drawn from a carnivalesque deployment of thrills and
excitement that, in cinema, could be incarnated by excessive and violent imagery or
strange and provocative juxtapositions of images. Hence, for Gunning, the train pulling
73
into the station as if it were going to plunge out of the image constituted just such a
willful exposure of the viewers to a mildly traumatic shock for the sake of their own
enjoyment. Within the Lumieres' apparently mildly observational style, there was an
inadvertent cinematic attraction.
Eisenstein writes further that this careful and tendentious ordering of effects ought
to be deployed in an "effective construction ... according to which it is not the facts being
demonstrated that are important but the combinations of the emotional reactions of the
audience" (40-4). It is the director's task, according to Eisenstein, to construct an abstract
ordering for a series of largely disconnected emotional shocks on the viewer that have a
function apart from the verisimilitude of facts being demonstrated.
Later in "The Dramaturgy of Film Form" written in 1929, Eisenstein turned to
some of the abstract qualities that figure into Ford's strategy for xinanimity as well as into
the composition of Arrival of a Train. The variation in direction of onscreen diagonals is
referred to by Eisenstein in his discussion of "graphic conflict" and "spatial distortion"
(99). Though Eisenstein is no longer writing about attractions here, his interest in such
formal features of the image extends his earlier theory to the kind of effects that could be
achieved in the abstract qualities of the image. Eisenstein was still developing a program
for harnessing cinema's essential capability to impact the viewer through photographic
distortions of ordinary perception and defamiliarizations of space.
A single shot like that which constitutes the entirety of Arrival of a Train, would
probably have been of very little interest to Eisenstein. In "Dramaturgy of Film Form,"
what matters is "conflict montage between the shots." Of paramount interest are the shifts
74
in the qualities of the image from shot to shot. Spatial distortion was a tool or an element
for creating a viewer experience through a temporal composition conceived in terms of
visual music, "rhythms," and "visual vibrations" (97). In this theory, montage could use
spatial distortions like a visual-musical note in the creation of a "zigzag of expression"
(98).
Ford's distribution of cinematic depth to position characters in relation to one
another does not appear within Eisenstein's purview in any of these essays. The
interaction of the human form with these abstract qualities of the image is largely omitted
in Eisenstein's discourses on attractions and spatial distortion. Indeed, Eisenstein was
later reproached by Soviet propagandists of "Socialist Realism" for his neglect of the
importance of character. Ford never had this problem. He distributed atmosphere built out
of the attractions of screen depth through a complex architecture that cooperated with our
moral evaluations of characters. In Ford, attractions cooperate with character and
narrative "plot-logic."
Stagecoach offers a magnificent example of how Ford managed this architecture.
In Stagecoach, almost all of the characters are positioned above a depth at one moment or
another in so far as they find themselves opposed to the law. Character positioning
relative to depth cues builds up a visual-architectural support for the moral hierarchy
constituted amongst the actions of the film's characters. The rebel above a depth is Ford's
formula for how visual architecture follows the moral hierarchy
Hence, Ringo and Dallas (Claire Trevor) are, of course, at the top of the
hierarchy. Whereas in other of Ford's films the top of the hierarchy is more mutable, in
75
Stagecoach, Ringo and Dallas never falter. Dallas from the beginning of the film is a
victim of law. She is introduced as the women of the "Law and Order League" of Tonto
run her out of town. She is joined by Doc (Thomas Mitchell), the financially insolvent
drunk with a heart of gold. Tracking shots follow them through the sequence such that
depth trails out behind her with along the line traced by the recessed women of the law.
Later in the coach, Dallas is held closer than any character other than Ringo to the depth
extending out from the windows.
Throughout the journey, we are visually prepared for Ringo's final vigilante
action as he sits low on the floor of the coach and yet is raised towards the viewer by the
depth of the landscape that extends out from the window behind him. Throughout this
journey, he is technically a prisoner of Curly, the Marshall (George Bancroft) who, as the
film begins, chooses to ride shotgun with the stage specifically to look for the Kid, the
good outlaw.
It is during the Apache attack that the Kid shows Curlyand usjust how good
he can be. In the most remarkable stunt of the film, Ringo climbs into the foremost
position on the horses in order to retrieve the reins. When the action of the chase finally
settles with the arrival of the cavalry, the line of horses extends out behind him.
By the end of the film, once the stage has arrived at its destination in Lordsburg,
Ringo has earned his chance to take his exceptional revenge on the Plummers. Like
Liberty Valance before his duel with Stoddard, they allege a legal claim of self defense.
A shot just preceding the duel places the Plummers recessed within the depth below the
76
camera. Then they shoot at a black cat running in front of them and miss "at four feet," as
one exclaims
In contrast to the recessed depths in which the Plummers appear, Ringo emerges
from the shadows. The low angle shot in which Ringo achieves his justified revenge
makes his form rise towards us in screen space as he jumps down to the ground. This
distortive contradiction of abstract space makes the moment all the more powerful. We
are not sure the Kid's miraculous stand-off has succeeded until Luke Plummer walks
back into the saloon so that the camera can pan down to follow him falling down into a
spittoon, dead.
In Ford's films, the spectacle of attractions does not only alternate with
narrativeit is infused within the narrative imagery.
39
According to Gunning and many
others, the early cinema of attractions to which films like Arrival of a Train belonged as
pure attractions was displaced by the kind of narrative pioneered by D.W. Griffith (61),
but Gunning does acknowledge that the stunts and thrills of later cinema may function as
"tamed attractions."
This claim is useful for describing Ford, a director who arrived in the film
industry at the time of the rise of full-length narrative filmmaking. His status as a bridge
between when Hollywood film-making was a wild west and its rise to a modern business
enterprise is, of course, epitomized in the anecdote that while working as a part-time
extra and part-time prop boy, he played one of the Klu Klux Klan riders in the climax of
39
Leah Jacobs and Richard DeCordova used Sternberg's The Scarlet Empress in their
attempt to define classical form as an alternation between informative narrative coding
and immersive spectacle.
77
D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation. But, very unlike Griffith, Ford took up the theme of the
good-bad man and elevated it to a spiritual principle through a rigorous engagement with
filmic composition.
Ford's films make use of tamed depth as the key element in his attractions of
abstraction that cooperate with narrative. In becoming accustomed to cinema, film
audiences of Ford's time had likely become adjusted to cinematic depth in much the same
way that Benjamin claimed that the sensorium of modern humans has been worn down
by "shock." The ubiquitous presence of the dangers of modern technologies like the train
itself had numbed human reactions to experiences that would instinctually have triggered
deep aversions.
40
Likewise, by the time that Ford was directing, viewers were acclimated
to depth and movement in the cinema. But, the appearance of depth cues in cinema
nonetheless became prone to distribution as atmosphere throughout the film after the
taming of the shock of cinematic depth.
In Stagecoach, the shifting positions of the other characters from the journey in
this architecture of attractions establish Ringo as the rebel raised in front of a depth. The
film builds up a moral-visual architecture with Ringo at the apex and with other
characters distributed below.
40
Benjamin draws on Freud's ideas about neurasthenia in the traumatic syndromes in
veterans in order to describe modern street life in his "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire."
Moving through this traffic involves the individual in a series of shocks
and collisions. At dangerous intersections, nervous impulses flow through
him in rapid succession, like the energy from a battery.... Today's
pedestrians are obliged to [cast glances in all directions] in order to keep
abreast of traffic signals. Thus technology has subjected the human
sensorium to a complex kind of training. Then came a day when a new
and urgent need for stimuli was met by the film. In a film, perception in
the form of shocks was established as a formal principle (177).
78
Lucy Mallory (Louise Piatt) is the most dramatically-changeable figure within
this architecture.
41
During the stage's first stop at Dry Fork, Lucy moves with Hatfield
(John Carradine) to the low/recessed end of the table to get away from Dallas because of
Dallas's reputation. Lucy saw how the Law and Order League treated Dallas earlier and
she holds her treatment of Dallas to those standards of social order and propriety.
42
Once she has moved, however, Lucy's own struggles are brought to the fore as
she starts to cry. Though we do not yet know that she is pregnant, we do know she is
alone because her cavalryman husband is out in the field. His obedience to command
keeps him and his troops just out of reach at each stop where the stage expects to find
them. When dialogue and action draw attention to her suffering at the hands of the law, a
dramatic tracking shot presents her with a visual rise in compositional space that is
almost as dramatic as the one for Ringo at his introduction. She is thematically and
visually repositioned as a victim opposed to the law that has taken her husband away
from her.
During all of this, Ringo and Dallas remain high, of course. Sitting at the table,
they are raised by the contours of the ledge and bookshelf behind. Moments before,
Ringo is at the top of raised diagonals in the doorway. Moving out from the doorway, he
stands up for Dallas and claims that he will have his revenge in Lordsburg.
41
Mallory may be a play on the word malleable.
42
For analyses of these moments in terms of point of view, see Dayan, Browne, and
Gallagher's discussion of Brown's argument (189-96). Point of view is not irrelevant
conflicting value systems clearly shape what the viewer is persuaded to decide on as the
good. My Darling Clementine demonstrates even better than Stagecoach how the good in
Ford is often tied up with a pitiable female character; Lucy or Dallas both serve this
function at different moments. However, identification with their point of view is not the
same, and is, in Ford, less important than approval of their struggles.
79
Lucy Mallory again demonstrates the same wide shifts in value relative to the law
and the good when the stage stops at Apache Wells. After Lucy finds out that her
husband is not waiting for her as she had expected, she is placed at the high end of the
door exterior to the inn. As she refuses Dallas's offer for help and properly avoiding
association with a fallen woman, she sinks away from the high point of the door.
In the interior, she enters at the low end of the doorway. But, then as she steps
forward she faints from exhaustion and circumstances that are inducing an emergency
labor. At this moment, the door itself widens up to her shoulder, before she falls to the
ground. As with the low-angle shot where Ringo jumps down towards the camera and
thereby rises towards us, she also falls upwards, or rises towards us as she falls.
One can follow this complex layered structure through many of the strongest
moments of Ford's films. In Stagecoach, the ordering is both precise and pervasive.
Characters are positioned in raised or recessed screen space according to the relations of
their actions to the law and to the good. The positioning of all of these other characters
builds up an architecture of visual strength. Installed within it, encompassed by it, is the
moral hierarchy of the fiction. All of this action builds upwards from the screen as the
film advances toward the moment when Ringo, in utter defiance of law and order, takes
what we feel he is owed but that the law has not suppliedjustified revenge and murder
in the interests of protecting Dallas and himself.
In a sense that parallels the way Nietzsche spoke of atmosphere as a means of
breaking the star of national personality out of interiority, the visual structure of the film
breaks out from the two-dimensional screen. The structuring of cinematic depth in these
80
intensified moments works in a way that is not only tamed, but also more subtle, in order
to accomplish the outward movement that Gunning described in the primitive cinema of
attractions.
Making use of both fictional and non-fictional attractions, [primitive
cinema's] energy moves outward towards an acknowledged spectator
rather than inward towards the character-based situations essential to
classical narrative (59).
The overall outward movement of the filmic architecture is carefully composed through a
flexible movement of characters within Stagecoach's visual framework.
This outward movement functions within a system where, as Eisenstein said,
montage does not place images one after another in succession but one on top of another.
In contrast to Eisenstein's meaning, however, the effect in Ford is not so much a matter
of combined meaning or a representative conjugation of pictograms.
43
It is instead the
43
Eisenstein describes this building up of images one on top of another,
We know that the phenomenon of movement in film resides in the fact
that two motionless images of a moving body, following one another,
blend into an appearance of motion by showing them sequentially at a
required speed.... Let us examine more exactly the course of the
phenomenon we are discussing.... Placed next to each other, two
photographed immobile images result in the appearance of movement. Is
this accurate? ... Mechanically, it is not. For, in fact, each sequential
element is perceived not next to the other, but on top of the other. For the
idea (or sensation) of movement arises from the process of superimposing
on the retained impression of the object's first position, a newly visible
further position of the object. This is, by the way, the reason for the
phenomenon of spatial depth, in the optical superimposition of two planes
in stereoscopy. From the superimposition of two elements of the same
dimension always arises a new, higher dimension.... In another field: a
concrete word (a denotation) set beside a concrete word yields an abstract
concept.... The incongruence in contour of the first picturealready
81
building-up of the kind of spatial distortions that Eisenstein described in "The
Dramaturgy of Film Form." Foreground figures do not merely rise and fall one after
another like the peaks of a sine wave. These distortions are compounded into an
upward/outward movement, one on top of another, depth built upon depth and buttressed
into tiered levels of attraction. Thus, Stagecoach builds images and positions character
actions one on top of another over the course of a film.
The sense of a hierarchy of actions for the good but opposed to the law builds up
along with depth effects in visual memory. Movements in depth accumulate across the
duration of the film into a sublime architecture like the tiers that lead upward along the
exterior space of a gothic cathedral. This filmic architecture builds upwards/outwards
from cinematic depth with Ringo and Dallas as the ultimate spires.
Architecture is the appropriate metaphor for this intensified tiered structure. Art
historian Heinrich Wolfflin wrote in Renaissance and Baroque that Gothic and Baroque
architecture worked according to a compounding or multiplication of architectural
elements combined with the irregular distribution of ornament (52, 58). Such a
description fits Ford quite comfortably. When Wolfflin further differentiates Gothic and
impressed on the mindwith the subsequently perceived second picture
engenders, in conflict, the feeling of motion. Degree of incongruence
determines intensity of impression, and determines that tension which
becomes the real element of authentic rhythm ("A Dialectical Approach to
Film Form" 49-50).
Eisenstein's point was that images one after another do not combine to form meaning like
words in western semi-phonetic script by placing syllables one after another. Instead
cinema images work like pictograms as if the meaning was obtained in the changing
structure of a single combined image imbued with value by a composition of
superimposed and simultaneous smaller images. Sequential images are combined in the
mind as if in simultaneous conflict and interaction with one another like elements within
a single painting.
82
Baroque in terms of their different upward movements, the upward movement of Ford's
use of depth should be categorized as Gothic because "in gothic the vertical movement
stems upward without check and dissolves playfully at the top" (60). The playful
dissolution at the top is the exceptional escape of Ringo and Dallasthe playful spires of
the cathedral.
44
It is the overall build-up and distribution of intensity in this visual
architecture that brings about the ultimate effect.
Doc is another example of a variably-positioned character. It begins when he is
introduced in Tonto as a victim, like Dallas, of the persecutions of the Law and Order
League, walking with her in the tracking shot as depth trails out behind. However, after
he sinks into an alcoholic stupor in the stage and then as we find out his services are
needed in Apache Wells, lines recess towards him.
So again, he shifts as he must sober up to practice medicine illegitimately in order
to deliver Lucy's child during the emergency labor. The rising diagonals of the shelf
behind him meet his form at their apex as Ringo soaks him with cold watera baptism
into a morality based on achieving good even when the ladies of law and order have
branded him a pariah. He wanders out of the makeshift delivery room rising towards the
camera like a true Fordian hero. But, as he immediately resumes drinking, he is recessed
again by the diagonals of the bar. In the gothic architecture strategically executed by
Stagecoach, he is just a piece of "irregular ornament."
44
Marsha Kinder may have been correct in her comparative reading of Young Mr.
Lincoln and Ivan the Terrible (1985). In Ford, there is a difference between two different
postures, standing and sitting, erect and flaccid. But, this up and down/forward and
backward polarity would not then be confined to stage directions alone. The sense of
height and hierarchy comes from the architectural arrangement of depth that builds
upwards and outwards towards the viewer.
83
Even Gatewood (Burton Churchill) gets treatment that varies equitably according
to his actions. He is primarily the hypocritical windbag proponent of law and order, a
banker stealing from his own bank while arguing for laissez-faire. But, when he stands up
to the young cavalry lieutenant for abandoning the coach in order to follow orders, he
gets the raised positioning through the diagonals of the wall behind him just where Buck
stood a moment before protesting against the cavalry's obedience to orders that lead them
to abandon the good of the stagecoach.
This whole ensemble of dynamic characterization through the irregular
ornamentation of staging and composition builds up a visual architecture of value through
which we receive the encompassing sentimental value of the film. But, this architecture is
the product of manifold judgments and on-the-spot decision-making by Ford and those
with whom he worked.
Ford also related his film work closely to architecture. In 1945, Ford candidly
referred to the work of the director as most directly related to the architecture of sets.
McBride describes Elia Kazan's story about Ford's instructions on how to direct a movie,
When Kazan asked Ford how he got his ideas about staging a scene, Ford
grumpily replied, "From the set. Get out on the location early in the
morning before anyone else is there. Walk around and see what you've
got."
"Oh then look at the script and fit the scene into the location?"
asked Kazan.
84
"No," Ford growled, "don't look at the fucking script. That will just
confuse you" (McBride 490).
In 1952, Ford similarly insisted on the photographic value of sets as a concern
above all else, but here admits that the script is not irrelevant. Ford described that,
Mostly, a true director's work is done before the picture's started. You get
all the elements beforehand. You study the sets for photographic value;
you get the best cameraman you can; you get the best location. And I
always work closely with the writer in preparing the screen story
(McBride 522).
Elsewhere, Ford made the case overtly for the director as architect.
People are incorrect to compare a director to an author. If he's a creator,
he's more like an architect. And an architect conceives his plans according
to precise circumstances (Gallagher 546).
Ford's architectural plans seem to conform to a system of Eisensteinian cinematic shocks
and spatial distortions of depth transferred to the screen. But, the idea of depth itself
seemed to be somewhat outside of Eisenstein's formal considerations.
Eisenstein lamented the absence of a scientific study of how cinema acted on
perception.
45
Such a study might have furnished Eisenstein with a further rationale for the
shock of cinematic distortions of depth like that exhibited in the single shot of Arrival of
45
"It seems that there has been absolutely no study or evaluation of the purely-
physiological effect of montage irregularity and rhythm and, if it has been evaluated, this
has been for only its role in narrative illustration" ("The Montage of Film Attractions"
37).
85
a Train or that deployed through the complex Gothic expansion of Ford's compositional
strategy.
Hugo Miinsterberg's early analysis of the aesthetics and psychology of the cinema
can provide such a rationale even though Miinsterberg's study is often considered as a
contemplative version of the filmic apparatus opposed to Eisenstein's violent activist
version. Miinsterberg recognized the importance of the physiognomic fact that in spite of
the absence of binocular depth cues, the cinema can translate some perceptual depth cues
onto the two dimensional screen.
For Miinsterberg, cinema brings the mind to access a higher reality because it
forces the mind to do work beyond what it does in everyday perception. The viewer's
mind has to make up for the fact that cinema presents depth only partially:
We see actual depth in the pictures and yet we are instantly aware that it is
not real depth and that the persons are not really plastic. It is only a
suggestion of depth ... [filmic depth and movement] are created by our
own activity but not actually seen because essential conditions for the true
perception of depth are lacking.... Depth and movement alike come to us
in the moving picture world not as hard facts but as a mixture offact and
symbol. They are present and yet they are not in the things. We invest the
impressions with them (70-1).
46
One knows that onscreen is not real depth because it lacks many of the features of
the experience of real depth. Cinemaat least ordinary cinemais missing binocular
46
Italics in original.
86
depth cues. Even three-dimensional cinema lacks parallax shift in response to shifts in the
viewer's position and to shifts in focus in the viewer's eye that even today attempts at
"virtual reality" have yet to master.
47
Depth in cinema is perceived as present and yet lacking completeness. Cinema
gives the partial feeling that there is something else beyond what our perception of a two-
dimensional screen can give. The mind has to supply that something else. Cinematic
depth thereby brings on an awareness of mental and spiritual faculties that are not
activated by ordinary perception.
The idea is clearly an attempt to adapt cinema's depth and movement to a role in
cinema aesthetics that is parallel to the function of the sublime in Kant's aesthetics.
48
The
sublime, according to paragraphs 23-30 of Kant's Critique of Judgment, is the feeling
caused by the presence of objects of extreme size or complexity. By surpassing
perceptual faculties, such objects force the mind to conceive of an idea of something that
cannot be perceived nor even imagined comprehensively.
The sublime initiates the idea of the infinite, and infinity cannot be given in
experience because perception and imagination are limited to finite objects. Because
perception and imagination fail in this feeling of the sublime, the mind submits to its
47
Since Miinsterberg wrote about cinema's unreal depth, perceptual psychologists such
as James Gibson have enumerated the cues relied upon by our perception of depth.
Indeed, only four out of thirteen of the cues on which perception relies for depth involve
binocularity. However, the absence of the cues available to ordinary depth makes cinema
perceptually unfathomable and quite shocking until viewers can become utterly
accustomed to it, as perhaps we are today.
48
On the link between Mtinsterberg's aesthetics of film and Kant's aesthetics with
Miinsterberg's considered as a contemplative aesthetic, see Dudley Andrews's The Major
Film Theories pp. 20-26.
87
faculty of rational understanding. Only this faculty of understanding can truly supply the
mathematical or logical properties of the infinity that such perceptions merely suggest.
There are some key differences from Kant's original concept in the way that
Miinsterberg quietly appropriates the idea to the cinema. First of all, in Miinsterberg's
account of the cinema, it is because of the partiality of cinematic depth and its lack offull
reality, that cinematic depth extends the mind beyond its activity in everyday experience.
In Kant's sublime, an excess of reality seems to be the problem for perception. It is
excessive size or complexity that requires the understanding to supply the idea of infinity.
However, in either case, it is the inability to fully perceive an object that breaks open or
shocks some otherwise inactive part of the mind into activity.
Furthermore, for Kant, nature was the source of the breaking open of the
understanding that would be proper to what Deleuze calls Kant's "sublime genesis." The
work of man's art had more to do with the production of the beautiful. Architecture was,
however, a central consideration for Edmund Burke, from whom Kant adapted much of
his theory of the sublime.
49
And, neither Kant nor Burke could have anticipated the
49
Burke's discussion of architecture in Section XIII, The effects of SUCCESSION in
visual objects explained" focuses on the effects of repetition in architectural colonnades
in a way that sounds very similar to looking at a filmstrip.
In our present situation it is plain, that the rays from the first round pillar
will cause in the eye a vibration of that species; an image of the pillar
itself. The pillar immediately succeeding increases it; that which follows
renews and enforces the impression; each in its order as it succeeds,
repeats impulse after impulse, and stroke after stroke, until the eye long
exercised in one particular way cannot lose that object immediately; and
being violently roused by this continued agitation, it presents the mind
with a ground or sublime conception" (170).
Although Burke's discussion of the sublime's relation to terror is more involved than
Kant's, Burke's sublime is also more limited than the role Kant's theory gives the
88
challenge that cinematic depth would have posed to everyday perception. Cinema's way
of confounding the distinction between two-dimensional and three-dimensional spaces
goes beyond the painting's capability to render plastic space.
The most important difference between Miinsterberg's characterization of
cinematic depth and Kant's sublime is that Kant was more extreme in describing the
effects of the sublime than was Munsterberg in describing cinema depth. There is nothing
serenely contemplative about Kant's sublime. The immediate effects of the sublime
genesis are described by Kant as pain, fear, even terror, and ultimately respect derived
from the intense sense of a surpassing of limits.
50
As he championed the transformative moral possibilities of the new art of cinema,
Munsterberg was perhaps hesitant to characterize the cinema as an instrument of pain, if
even a pleasurable pain. He was already accommodating Kant's idea within a domain
where Kant did not place it: art rather than nature. However, if the force of Kant's
sublime in relation to imagination and the faculties. Burke did not go on to fill in an
entire linkage between the sublime and a higher moral mission, the interaction with
judgments of beauty, nature, and genius, as Kant did. In so far as Ford may have
theorized something like the sublime, his films seem to utilize something somewhere in-
between the two.
50
Deleuze describes this genesis,
It is only pain that makes pleasure possible here. Kant emphasizes this
point: the imagination undergoes violence.... When the feeling of the
sublime is experienced before the formless or the deformed in Nature
(immensity or power), the imagination can no longer reflect the form of an
object.... So it is that the sublime confronts the imagination with this
maximum, forces it to reach its limit, and come to grips with its
boundaries. The imagination is pushed to the limits of its power.... The
imagination thus discovers the disproportion of reason, and is forced to
admit that its power is nothing compared to a rational idea (62).
The devastating force of the sublime installed within cinema's depth and shadows helps
to define expressionism as well in Cinema 1 (53).
89
sublime is restored to a conception of cinematic depth like Munsterberg's, it seems that
far from being the province of a contemplative detached aesthetics, cinematic depth
should have a much more violent effect on the viewer, something much closer to what
Eisenstein imagined as the shock of attractions.
51
It is really not until Cinema 2 that
Deleuze makes the link between Eisenstein's concept of shock and Kant's sublime (157-
61). German expressionism's chaotic use of depth is linked most directly with Kant's
sublime in Cinema 1 (46-51).
The Kantianism of Ralph Waldo Emerson had as long before as 1836 associated
the sublime with the defamiliarizing effects of mechanical intervention into the
perception of reality,
What new thoughts are suggested by seeing a face of country quite
familiar, in the rapid movement of the railroad car! ... Turn the eyes
upside down, by looking at the landscape through your legs, and how
agreeable is the picture, though you have seen it any time these twenty
years! ... In these cases, by mechanical means, is suggested the difference
between the observer and the spectaclebetween man and nature. Hence
arises a pleasure mixed with awe; I may say, a low degree of the sublime
51
Eisenstein decried the observational and contemplative principles particularly as he
saw them embodied in Vertov's idea of the Kino-Eye:
The Kino-Eye is not just a symbol of vision: it is also a symbol of
contemplation. But we need not contemplation but action. It is not a
'Kino-eye' that we need but a 'Kino-fist'.... Soviet cinema must cut
through to the skull! It is not 'through the combined vision of millions of
eyes that we shall fight the bourgeois world' (Vertov): we'd rapidly give
them a million black eyes.... Make way for the cine-fist (56).
Ransome Stoddard demonstrates Ford's cine-fist in delivering the punch to Tom
Doniphon.
90
is felt, from the fact, probably, that man is hereby apprized that whilst the
world is a spectacle, something in himself is stable (36).
Perhaps Emerson was as inclined as later theorists like Miinsterberg, however, to
minimize the destabilizing elements of technology on the internal psyche that Kant
posited for the sublime.
But, Michel Foucault's comments on cinema in his lecture on "Different Spaces"
actually emphasize cinema's disjunction between two and three dimensions. In this
lecture, he describes that a heterotopia is a boundary space that transcends the distinction
between two ordinarily disjunct spaces. Foucault remarked that such spaces often have a
sacred role in the societies that use them. From the conflict of two-dimensional images
with three-dimensional space, cinema would derive a large part of the sacredness and the
power proper to a heterotopia. Ford's films formally exploit just such heterotopic and
sacred qualities.
Likewise, the violence of the sublime had a wider, almost sacred, purpose in
Kant's philosophy. The terrific feeling of the sublime draws our attention to mental
capacities for truths that cannot be received empirically. The attraction of the cinematic
sublime initiates the genesis of a painful idea of infinity that can be conceived only with
the mathematical faculty of reason. Again, imagination and perception painfully fail since
they are restricted to finite objects.
"The heterotopia has the power of juxtaposing in a single real place different spaces
and locations that are incompatible with each other. Thus on the rectangle of its stage, the
theater alternates as a series of places that are alien to each other; thus the cinema appears
as a very curious rectangular hall, at the back of which a three-dimensional space is
projected onto a two-dimensional screen." (Foucault "Different Spaces" 181)
91
Perhaps, the audience of Arrival of a Train ran out of the theaterat least in
partbecause of the painful infinity that the image's compositional deployment of
abstract depth forced them to conceive. Ford's strategyat its richest in Stagecoach
carefully distributes the subtly pleasurable pain of cinematic depth cues over the course
of a film through, as Eisenstein wrote, "tendentious selection" and "effective
construction" ("Montage of Film Attractions" 35-6)
According to Kant, the sacred function of the painful genesis of ideas of infinity
sparked by sublime experiences was to trigger the conception of a priori moral laws.
53
The sublime's immediate connection to law is described quite directly by Jean-Joseph
Goux. He quotes Kant's Critique of Judgment to answer the question,
Now what is the respect implied by the experience of the sublime,
according to Kant? It is a respect before the law. "The feeling of our
incapacity to attain to an idea, that is a law for us, is RESPECT," he
writes.... Inscribed in this denial is the aesthetic pleasure of the sublime,
the type of pleasure that Kant labels negative because it is composed of a
crushing sense of awe before a superior reality that commands respect
(142-3).
A paradox emerges, then, in revising Miinsterberg's account of the cinema in
terms of the sublime. In Ford's raising of the rebel from a depth, respect for law formally
53
The link from the aesthetics of the sublime link to the aesthetics of the beautiful in a
way that eventually contributes to Kant's idea of the moral function of genius is very
complex but is explained beautifully in Deleuze's "The Idea of Genesis in Kant's
Esthetics," as well as in shorter form in Chapter three of Kant's Critical Philosophy: The
Doctrine of the Faculties.
92
commands respect for an exception to law. This paradox of depth's legitimization of an
exception to the law in Ford's strategy for unanimity is emblematized in Stagecoach by
the character of Curly the sheriff.
Because Curly is the sheriff, we might therefore expect him to be the most
obvious representative of the law. Yet, he has a not-at-all-straightforward relationship to
the law. His positioning in the shot that introduces him to us is accordingly ambiguous.
The tops of the guns may form the most intelligible diagonal in this first framing,
narrowing towards him at the low/recessed end. The other lines of the gun rack also
widen towards Curly, raising him. However, the gun rack is clearly in front of him on the
space of the set. Linear perspective cues are at play in this shot but they are composed to
generate a conflict between different different sets of depth cues.
This visual paradox matches his pivotal position in the paradox of Ford's strategic
use of law. Curly wants to "go after the Kid," and yet we find out later that Curly has
Ringo's interests in mind more than anything else. He was a friend of the Kid's family.
The films works through a kind of sleight of hand that centers on Curly's decision to
suspend his responsibilities to the law. The film moves from an apparent situation, to
action, to a point where we discover we are in a situation that is different from where we
thought we were when we started because of revelations that correct the initial
ambiguities of Curly's intentions. This decision alters the situation in the midst of the
action. Deleuze refers to this as the formula SAS'.
54
54
"The organization of the film, the organic representation, is not a circle, but a spiral
where the situation of arrival differs from the situation of departure: SAS'.... It is true
93
However, composition conducts us through such a shift. The moment when Curly
shows that he is willing to make exceptions to the law regarding Ringo, Curly throws a
gun to the Kid to help as the horse thieves flee from Apache Wells. Curly thereby joins
with the Kid in spite of the Kid's outlaw status. The group, who have now become
collaborators outside of the law, are lifted through a dramatic track-in like that which
marks Ringo's introduction and Lucy's shift from persecutor to victim at the dinner table.
Just prior to the shootout in Lordsburg, we see again how Curly constitutes an
essential support to this architecture of value. The camera looks up to Curly and yet we
see him looking up to the Kid in admiration. These gazes "stem upwards," as in
Wolfflin's definition of the Gothic, in a way that edifies the Kid as the uppermost
element of the architecture.
In the end, Curly also facilitates the Kid's getaway. For those who are interested
in Ford's negotiations between the wilderness and the garden, Stagecoach offers the final
ironic summary by Doc to Curly as the Kid and Dallas ride away. "Well, they're saved
from the blessings of civilization." However, what is important is not that Dallas and
Ringo escape civilization for nature. "What counts" is that they are saved from the
"pathogenic milieu" as Deleuze calls it, the community without unanimity and without
illusions. Also savedfor a momentis the viewer.
The fictional portrayals of law and cinematic depth are tools for Ford in
producing this momentary act of sentimental salvation. Ford's use of cinematic depth
functions pairs the painful disjunction between two-dimensional depth and three-
that between the two, between S and S', there is a lot of ambiguity and hypocrisy"
(Deleuze Cinema 1 147).
94
dimensional depth with the paradoxical disjunction of law in the film with law in the
outside world. This constitutes the real sublime power of Ford's strategy for unanimity. It
demands that we respect ourselves in a way that ordinary life does not allow, by
demanding that we make an exception to the law justified by the plot-logic of the fiction
and a hidden visual architecture.
It serves to mention that The Informer (1935), The Long Voyage Home (1940),
and What Price Glory (1952) are among the best examples of Ford's films where this
rigorous orientation of visual/moral space is largely absent. These chaotic expressionist
experiments by Ford only document what happens when illusions are absent, like what
Deleuze calls in The Informer as "the almost Expressionist degradations of a treacherous
informer in so far as he can no longer have any illusions" (Cinema 1 148). The visual
context is one where the upward motion of gothic sacredness is suppressed in favor of
what Deleuze described as expressionism's "dark, swampy life of things ... a perpetually
broken line" (Cinema 1 50-1). These depictions of bad examples of pathogenic milieu
where both the law and the good fail omit the finally joyful effect conducive to the
unanimity that redeems the sentiment of community in favor of a shame that nonetheless
refers to the glory of the times when vital illusions are present and active.
Ford's strategy for unanimity attempts to resolve fundamental societal conflicts
by working with illusions that provide the object around which unanimity might rally in
order to stave off the threat of a pathogenic milieu. The architecture of attractions of
Stagecoach attempts to save civilization by circumscribing and elevating the image of
opposition to the law. It is a mature masterpiece whose effects work upon the spectator
95
through deceptively innocent means. Likewise, Ford would seem to be the American
pastoral director. Yet, in fact, he managed the capabilities for technological astonishment
that were available to his cinemapainfully limited in relation to the capacity of the
digital effects of today for creating the apparently sublimewith a cunning that still
challenges any present-day filmmaker to orchestrate a film-event that could equal the
rigor of Stagecoach.
2.2 The Horizon of Civil Religion in Fort Apache
To me, religion does not have to do with the mystery of the divine
incarnation. Religion is the mystery of social order.
Napoleon Bonaparte 1802 (Regenbogen 68)
Ford's exteriors stand as a defining feature of his reputation over and above
interiors. His nature photography gets more attention than his treatment of sets and
architecture. But, Ford's nature is not some philosophical concept that serves as one side
of a topological dialectic counterposed to civilization on the other. Ford's photography
was perhaps as concerned with the perception of nature as was Kant's aesthetics.
However, when landscapes appear in Ford's strategy for unanimity, they are organized
within Ford's expert vision of film-as-architecture.
Ford left a clue to what mattered to him in terms of the photographic values of
exteriors. In the 2006 re-release of Peter Bogdanovich's documentary on Ford, Steven
Spielberg relates the story of his meeting with Ford when Spielberg was only a teenager.
In Ford's office,
He had these western paintings. And he said, "Tell me what you see
in that first painting."
96
And I said, "Well, I, well there's an Indian on a horse."
He said, "No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Where's the horizon? Can't
you find the horizon?"
So I pointed to the horizon. [Spielberg points]...
He said, "When you can come to the conclusion that putting the
horizon at the bottom of the frame or the top of the frame is, is a lot better
than putting the horizon right in the middle of the frame, then you make
then you may someday make a good picture maker. Now get out of here."
That is Spielberg's version of the story. But, in looking closely at, for example, the films
of Ford's cavalry trilogy, one does not find that the horizon is more often at the top or
bottom than in the middle of the frame.
This anecdote indicates above all that the placement of the horizon matters. Since
even Ford's exteriors center on human figures, what counts is the relation of foreground
figures to the horizon and to the sky. The placement of the horizon in the frame
constitutes the closing or opening of visual access to the absolute depth of the sky.
No space is deeper than the sky. It is as close as one can get to infinite depth. The
horizon fits very well into Ford's strategy of the distribution of depth in the film in terms
of the placement of foreground figures relative to the horizon and therefore relative to the
opening and closing of the depth of the sky. Deleuze seems to refer to the shifting
position of Ford's horizons when he mentions "the great respirations" of Ford's
encompasser in the landscapes of his films (Cinema 1 151).
97
Clouds also play a role in determining the relation of foreground figures to this
absolute depth of the sky. Equally important are irregularities in the land that constitutes
the horizon, such as the singular rock formations of Monument Valley that are deployed
so formidably in the first film of the cavalry trilogy, Fort Apache. Furthermore, Ford's
paradoxical use of law as a tool within his strategy for unanimity is at its most tenuous
and most bold in this film.
55
In Fort Apache, Colonel Thursday (Henry Fonda) is a cavalry commander and
self-important Yankee who has been dispatched to an apparently unimportant and distant
regiment in Apache territory. But, he remains ripe for gloryin the style of George
Armstrong Custer.
56
Most of the film tracks the difficult period of adjustment through
which Thursday breaks in the troops he finds at the ragged outpost with the help of the
young West Point graduate O'Rourke (John Agar). Thursday finally orders his newly
disciplined troops into a battle against Cochise's rogue Apaches in spite of the concerns
expressed by more-knowledgeable but lower-ranking officers, primarily Captain York
(John Wayne).
Preceding the massacre that results from Thursday's resolve to do battle at any
cost, Captain York is the one officer who insists to Thursday directly that the regiment is
vastly outmatched. This protest follows on York's attitude maintained throughout the
55
In the later films of the Ford-Wayne cavalry trilogyquasi-sequels to Fort Apache
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) and Rio Grande (1950) Ford's strategy appears in a
form that is more pure and paternalistic. Wayne does look extremely handsome with the
moustaches that he wears in these films, however.
56
At least, history typically painted Custer as a glory-mad militarist. Jackson Lears
explains that in fact he was more of a war-profiteer/mercenary who carelessly ventured in
over his head. His wife managed his post-mortem public relations masterfully to portray
his death as a madness for duty.
98
film ranging from insinuation to direct confrontation, that any assault on the Apaches is
far from justified. The Apaches have flown from the intolerable living conditions
imposed on them at the reservation.
Thursday wants a battle, however, and his commands are issued as law in the
military milieu of the film. Refusing to commit any serious effort to the work of
diplomacy, he commands against the good of nearly all the characters we have come to
know. The men of B Troop are sacrificed to the law in the final battle of the filmwith
the exception of the younger O'Rourke (John Agar) and York himself. Thursday sends
the two best soldiers back to stay with the supply train, momentarily breaking out of his
Don Quixote-Custer mindset to order the good young blood saved from the cataclysm
that he is calling down upon the rest of the troop.
This is one exception to Thursday's actions throughout most of the film that mark
him as the proponent of law irrespective of the good. From the film's opening sequence,
the exterior shooting of Fort Apache contributes to the correspondingly recessed visual
positioning of Thursday. The coach bringing him and his daughter, Philadelphia (Shirley
Temple), to Apache country passes under a massive rock formation just as he is
introduced. He is thereby utterly delinked with the depth of the sky.
At the inn at Aschiampa, the film's first interior, also works on Thursday and on
the young O'Rourke in a way that correlates with the different relations that each one has
to the law. After arriving at the inn, Thursday is pushed far into the recesses of the
background by camera movement. The camera pans down, introducing a spittoon into the
lower foreground. The result is that as Thursday cries out for respect for his rank and
99
positioneven to the coach drivers who are barely listeningthe spittoon is more raised
than Thursday.
Thursday is waiting for an official military transport, but because of unreliable
telegraph communication in the remote territory, a transport from Fort Apache arrives
only for the young Lieutenant O'Rourke. O'Rourke is returning home to Fort Apache as
the first graduate in his family from West Point. In O'Rourke and Thursday's first
meeting, the young O'Rourke is caught out of uniform as he salutes shirtless in front of
the doorway that drops out into the depth behind him. The devoted young soldier
uncharacteristically and accidentally becomes a rebel above a depth. This scene at
Aschiampa initiates a key subplot: the romance between Philadelphia Thursday and the
Young O'Rourke. Thursday will later forbid the young O'Rourke from courting his
daughter due to the difference in class between their families.
Thursday is not always held in recessed space no matter how brutal a martinet he
ultimately shows himself to be. Later on, he makes a momentary rise as he displays his
knowledge of military strategy to York, citing a maneuver of Genghis Kahn in order to
justify his command to send troops to investigate an Apache raid on a cavalry outpost.
This is really the one moment when Thursday relies on strong knowledge to enforce and
support his will rather than on the rank accorded to him by chain of command.
Thursday also rises along with the rest of the troop in the dramatic ballroom scene
before he commands the troop to ride out to their final battle. In the ball's ritual dance, all
of the families march around Fort Apache's hall together. Here the active lines of flight
are the widening diagonals of the lanterns above the hall that were not visible in shots
100
framed from this side of the hall earlier in the film in the dance that precedes Thursday's
arrival.
In the later dance scene, the lines of lanterns trace back to George Washington at
the point of flight in the back of the hall, and lead up to the faces of the dancers. Thereby,
each one of the figures appears in front of this intensified depth, one after the other. All
are soon to be victims of Thursday's obsession with following his command to glory.
That includes Thursday himself, who will be his own victim, as he leads the troop into a
massacre.
In Fort Apache's confrontation between the legitimacy of chain of command and
the good, Ford takes up the violence at the heart of Kant's and Burke's sublime that was
suppressed in Munsterberg's contemplative vision of cinematic depth. Here, the
instrumental paradox relating visual violence and law that is core to Ford's strategy for
unanimity is not covered over with any innocent appearance of a cryptic message as in
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, nor is it placed in the shadow of a vigilante return to
innocence as in Stagecoach.
Kant's idea of the sublime was supposed to trigger an innate appreciation for a
priori law, a painful respect for law, one that was inherently dangerous and crushing. The
sublime required a kind of rebirth of rationality within the mind's and the soul's new
constraints of living under the law. Under the weight of the thought of one's own
inadequacy before the infinite, one gains a new respect for inescapable laws that govern
life. The moral value that Kant attributed to the sublime was a respect for law, but Ford
101
includes these sublime features to lift characters engaged in actions that we judge as good
actions taken against the law. Thus, Ford works up his dangerous paradox.
In Fort Apache, composition works especially strongly to lift York and Cochise
(Miguel Inclan). These two do not receive the unflagging consistency of treatment
reserved for Ringo and Dallas of Stagecoach, nevertheless, at moments it is true of York
and Cochise as Burke said of the sublime,
Whilst we contemplate so vast an object, under the arm, as it were, of
almighty power, and invested upon every side with omnipresence, we
shrink into the minuteness of our own nature, and are, in a manner,
annihilated before him (111).
It is tempting to account for this disjunction between the good and the law in Fort Apache
with a claim, like that of the Cahiers du Cinema collective for Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln,
that the film violently asserts the superiority of morality over politics.
57
However, Ford's
composition does not lead us to invest in an ideal moral law over political law.
57
The Cahiers editors write that because political issues involving blacks are almost
entirely omitted from the film and the threatened lynching is a lynching of whites rather
than blacks,
We may be surprised that a film about Lincoln's youth could thus empty
out the truly political dimension from the career of the future President.
This massive omission is too useful to the film's ideological purpose to be
fortuitous. By playing once again on the spectator's knowledge of
Lincoln's political and historical role it is possible to establish the idea that
these were founded on and validated by a Morality superior to all politics
(and could thus be neglected in favor of the Cause) and that Lincoln
always draws his prestige and his strength from an intimate relationship
with Law, from a (natural and/or divine) knowledge of Good and Evil.
Lincoln starts with politics but soon rises to the moral level, divine right,
which for an idealist discourseoriginates and valorizes all politics (505).
102
First of all, what transpires here between York, Cochise, and Thursday would
have us take exception to both the morality and the politics of Thursday's decision and
side both morally and politically with York's responsibly voiced protests. More
importantly, there is no ideal representative of morality or politics in the film. This is true
in both Fort Apache and in Young Mr. Lincoln. The visual configuration of the characters
of Fort Apache is such that moral judgment does not treat either Cochise or York as an
absolute ideal. Likewise, Thursday's treatment as the martinet within a depth is also
irregular and variable. Thursday's character makes slight shifts across the film. Instead of
absolute ideals, there are carefully-orchestrated movements in character positioning that,
as an ensemble, stem upwards in the visual-moral architecture of the film.
In the visual compositions leading up to the climactic battle, geography and
weather work in composition to dramatize the confrontation between Thursday and York,
the good and the law. Thursday eventually chooses the glorification of his own command
over the good of the regiment, ignoring all options for peace. In the negotiation sequence,
Thursday is at his worst. He speaks his orders to Cochise, without any reference to the
good, or to his own power to actually force the Apaches to obey and return to the
Hence, it appears that Lincoln succeeds through, "the operation of the repression of
politics by morality which will continue through the whole film" (508), but note that in
Fort Apache the apparent hero of Custer is being shown in his ambiguity rather than in
terms of a validation secured in advance by historical myth. The same historical
dynamics certainly do not apply. This is certainly not the "self-determination of an
already determined figure" as the editors said of Young Mr. Lincoln. Where the Cahiers
see allusions to Lincoln's "intimate" relations with the law signified by his intimate
relations with the mother, what matters to Ford's strategy for unanimity is pity for the
boys' mother as an effective sentimental structure. The pitiable woman is a tool of
frequently resorted to by Ford for establishing the good.
103
reservation. He is correspondingly held below the horizon by the height of the adjacent
rocks.
Thursday's order to York to remain behind and to take the young O'Rourke with
him salvages some of the good that he is sacrificing to the law. Thursday's face is moved
momentarily into the clear from its previous position blocked from the sky by rock. As
York rides away, however, we see the remaining group of commanding officers crushed
under a huge rock formation.
Thursday still gives the other men a chance to avoid their fate by speaking out and
being branded cowards. "Any other questions?" he asks. Collingwood (George O'Brien)
answers, "No questions, Owen." Thereby Collingwood seals his own fate and surrenders
his life to the law. His body turns into the rock set against the right of the frame and away
from the sky.
Captain York also varies during the battle. When the men first arrive to meet the
Apaches, York's face is clear of obstructions as he speaks up against Thursday's foolish
ideas to deploy the troops against the better-positioned Apaches. Then, as York falls back
in line, silenced in obedience to orders, he is placed back under cloud cover like the rest
of the regiment. In the key moment when York throws down his gauntlet at Thursday's
insistence on marching the troops unprotected into an ambush and at Thursday's
accusation that York's protests have been uttered out of cowardice, York veers off into
clear sky, sarcastically defying: "At your service, sir." After Thursday sends him back to
safety, he will ride off in the direction of clear space to carry out Thursday's exceptional
order to bring young O'Rourke with him to safety.
104
This mobility is evident with Cochise as well. In the high point of his speech
explaining the plight of his people and having spoken his opposition to the law by
decrying the government mistreatment of his Apaches, he is set with his profile against
the clear sky's depth. The very close shot set against the sky marks him as a uniquely-
raised figure in the film. However, after Cochise's troops carry out the massacre of the
cavalry that he ordered, he is treated as harshly as Thursday in composition. After the
battle, Cochise is retracted back into the dust stirred up by his riders. He sinks and fades
away having fulfilled his own command, carrying out a massacre irrespective of the good
of Indian-cavalry relations. In the end, it is only York who rises from the dust.
This gothic irregularity in ornamentation that stems upward through variations in
relation to the law is no less present in Young Mr. Lincoln. There is irregularity in the
young Lincoln's (Henry Fonda) progress. He is not an unwavering ideal figure. Lincoln's
progress begins in the early forest scenes as he naively reads his law book and proclaims,
"That's all there is to it. Wrong and right." Stretching his legs up against the side of a
tree, he is inverted with the diagonals of his legs in the air narrowing down towards him
thinking of the law as a good in itself. The film follows him as he is forced to go beyond
the law and threaten violence to protect the innocent boys from the law of the mob. Then,
Lincoln's antics in the courtroom scenes further place him as an antagonist to the law
rather than its instrument. In the final confrontation with J. Palmer Cass (Ward Bond),
Lincoln moves forward in screen space to apprehend him and physically intimidate him
into confessing and submitting to the reformed authority of the mobconverted by the
force of Lincoln's personality to the side of the good.
105
So it is hard to say that the discourse on law in Fort Apache or the discourse of
law sketched out by this trajectory in Young Mr. Lincoln is idealist. This is a strategy.
What is idealist about this strategy, however, is the sense of community that these films
coerce in the viewer. These exceptions to the law serve the end of a sense of an ideal that
is external to the film, but internal to the cinema.
It may be equally tempting to do, as William Siska did in 1978 or as Hauke
Brunkhorst did as recently as 2005, to transpose these conflicts between law and the good
into the irresolvable conflict between Rousseau's and Hobbes's visions of the state. Such
a conflict parallels that between the garden and the desert constructed by Peter Wollen to
f D
describe Ford's oeuvre.
Steve Neale followed Peter Lehman's doctoral dissertation on Ford in order to
consider the potential applications of the garden/desert type of antinomy directly to Fort
Apache: Colonel Thursday is the representative of the East whereas Captain York and the
other members are the representatives of the natural know-how of the wild west.
However, to avoid allowing "the message to overwhelm the movie," it is necessary to
S8
William C. Siska, in 1978, already generalized Ford's films in much the same way as
Peter Wollen but inserted Hobbes and Rousseau as opposite representatives of desert and
garden,
a running battle between freedom and restraints ... Jefferson and
Hamilton.... The ideological roots of the conflict between freedom and
restraint in the New World are to be found in the Old, in the writings of
Rousseau and Hobbes. Rousseau's Social Contract, a romantic manifesto,
argues the glorious view of man and the beneficence of freedom. In
Leviathan, on the other hand, Hobbes sees man as a slave to instinct who
needs law and order to save him from his own vicious barbarism ...Ford's
films after 1947 show more and more the recognition that the ideal and the
practical can no longer coexist, that individualist virtue has been
swallowed by ascendant Hobbesianism" ("Realism and Romance in the
Films of John Ford").
106
prevent Fort Apache from becoming, as Neale writes, "overdetermined by the film's
system of historical references" (30).
To conceptualize the political event that Fort Apache is patterned to achieve, it is
also necessary to consider that although Rousseau's theory of the social contract is
opposed to Hobbes's totalitarian vision of the state as being naturally and ideally
democratic, the picture is not so simple. The harmony of what Rousseau describes as the
"general will" of a democratic social contract is only uneasily opposed to Hobbes's
seemingly totalitarian vision where sovereign domination is the only effective form of
statecraft. Such an opposition is as uneasy as the opposition between the civilization of
the garden and the anarchic "western law" of the desert.
59
In On the Social Contract, Rousseau postulated the existence of a "general will"
to describe the origin and ground of human government. Like in Hobbes's earlier idea of
a social contract, citizens must sacrifice certain self-interested pursuits in order to gain
the protection of the government. That is, citizens must give up those self-interested
pursuits that trespass too much on the interests of others by acting in accordance with
law. In so doing, they gain the state's protection of all of those interests of theirs that
wouldwithout lawbe in constant danger from the trespasses that would result from
others' unrestrained pursuit of their interests.
59
After all, in Fort Apache it seems that the old west is both the state of perpetual war
(Hobbes) and more democratic (Rousseau) than the rule that Thursday brings, which is
autocratic (Hobbes) while also being the civilized antidote to force (Rousseau). The two
sides of the whole opposition just cannot be maintained in their distinction to one
another.
107
Rousseau borrows from Hobbes's myth of the origin of society. According to
Hobbes, before the existence of government, men are in the condition of a war of all
against all. In this "state of nature," everyone is pursuing his or her own interests
regardless of how that pursuit infringes on the interests of others. Government substitutes
a peaceful condition where men cease to make war on each other and act instead in
obedience to the will of a single sovereign individual by obeying his decrees as law.
In Rousseau's version, however, the citizens as a collectivity are to be sovereign.
At least, the citizens must appear as the sovereign. So, in Rousseau's version,
governments are not formed by citizens giving over their own will to act according to the
sovereign will of a kingas in the alienation deemed necessary by Hobbes. Instead, the
people give over their own wills to the idea of a "general will."
Rousseau explains the apparent benefits of this essential sacrifice to law.
The peculiar fact about this alienation is that, in taking over the goods of
individuals, the community, so far from despoiling them, only assures
them legitimate possession, and changes usurpation into a true right and
enjoyment into proprietorship. Thus the possessors ... have ... acquired,
so to speak, all that they gave up (14: 1.9).
Rousseau makes clear that this general will is not at all the sum of the particular wills of
all of the individuals. The general will is something that transcends those interests and is
quite mysteriously produced by the alienation of all wills to the law.
Certain aspects of Rousseau's "general will" parallel the vision of national
unanimity from Nietzsche's "Use and Disadvantages of History"at least the idea of
108
healthy illusions that Deleuze extracts from Nietzsche in order to describe Ford.
Rousseau's general will is more useful for describing Ford's strategy for unanimity
becauseunlike Nietzsche's cultural theory of healthy illusionsRousseau's general
will is theorized in a precise and direct relation to the law.
In Rousseau's theory of the state, it is only and always the law that carries out the
general will. In theory, the law protects much of each individual's interest. But, in
circumscribing the pursuits of individual interests, the law may not act for the good of
each individual equally. Nevertheless, the law still acts for the general will because it is
according to Rousseauthe society's only outward expression of the general will.
Rousseauunlike Nietzsche's Use and Disadvantagesis not talking about culture here.
That is, until he introduces the idea of the civil religion.
In considering the complicated relationship between law and the general will,
Rousseau takes into account the citizen's conception of the lawor lack of conception of
it. Rousseau considers that not every citizen can understand the law. That may be because
it is imperfect or because the mass of citizens do not have the capabilities of literacy to
read and understand the law. The danger that Rousseau sees here is the development of
political factions.
60
60
Rousseau acknowledges,
It follows from what has gone before that the general will is always right
and tends to the public advantage; but it does not follow that the
deliberations of the people are always equally correct. Our will is always
for our own good, but we do not always see what that is; the people is
never corrupted, but it is often deceived, and on such occasions only does
it seem to will what is bad (17: 2.3).
When the people are deceived or confused, the danger of factions arises:
109
The danger that men may attempt to manipulate or to secretly disobey the law for
their own advantage is, according to Rousseau, the worst evil for a community.
Rousseau's republicanism here seems drawn directly out of Book V of Plato's Republic:
"Can we say that anything would be a greater evil for a city than what
breaks it up and makes it many instead of one? Or any good greater than
what binds it together and makes it one?" -"We cannot." -"And if the
community of pleasure and of pain that binds it togetherwhen so far as
possible all the citizens are pleased and pained alike on the same occasions
of gain and loss?""Quite so.""Whereas it is the privatization (idiosis)
of these feelings that breaks the bondwhen some are intensely pained,
while others are overjoyed at the very same things befalling the polis or its
people?""Yes, indeed" (462a9-c2).
Indeed, men must still be persuaded to feel pleasure and pain as a whole state, to
feel unanimous, and thereby to act according to the law. A force beyond the law is
necessary to convince men to feel pleasure and pain unanimously. To feel unanimous
should stimulate men to defend general interest and not to act in the interests of mere
factions. Even if the laws carried out by the general will are not a permanent expression
When factions arise, and partial associations are formed at the expense of
the great association, the will of each of these associations becomes
general in relation to its members, while it remains particular in relation to
the State.... It is therefore essential, if the general will is to be able to
express itself, that there should be no partial society within the State, and
that each citizen should think only his own thoughts. These precautions
are the only ones that can guarantee that the general will shall be always
enlightened, and that the people shall in no way deceive its self (18).
110
of unanimity, the general will must be based in some form of periodically reestablished
unanimity.
This is the implicit function of civil religion when Rousseau brings up the idea at
the end of The Social Contract. The civil religion serves the purpose of persuading men
to submit to the general will as a duty rather than resorting to the pursuit of exclusively
private interests or factional interests. Rousseau advocates a common civil religion in the
final chapter of On the Social Contract on the following grounds:
Now, it matters very much to the community that each citizen should have
a religion. That will make him love his duty.... There is therefore a purely
civil profession of faith of which the Sovereign should fix the articles, not
exactly as religious dogmas, but as social sentiments without which a man
cannot be a good citizen or a faithful subject (96: 4.8).
Rousseau does gesture at possible doctrines for the civil religion and does discuss
the suitability of different faiths for state religion. However, the exact content of this
religion's doctrine is not the point. Instead, the core requirement of this civil religion is a
universal sentiment about duty. The state requires of civil religion to instill in men a
belief and a sentiment of belonging. There must be a sentiment, "without which a man
cannot be a good citizen or a faithful subject."
61
61
The question of what form of religion might work in Rousseau's civil religion is a
known problem for readers of Rousseau, as it is for interpreters of Machiavelli and
Hobbes.
Those readers of Rousseau who are inclined to interpret The Social
Contract as a determinate and realizable blueprint for an ideal political
community would be well advised to ponder carefully the fact that the
book concludes with the statement of a crucial political problem for which
111
In that sense, civil religion is the defense from divisive individual interests and
from a divisive degeneration into factions. It is the preservation of a minimal sense of
unanimity necessary for continued belief in a general will behind the laws. The job of this
civil religion is only to persuade dutiful obedience to the state that issues the laws.
Consider that in Ford's paradox, there is always care taken such that we do not
resent the law itself. In the ending of Fort Apache, York's character hardly brings us to
resent Thursday's command. Nor is there resentment of military rank or chain of
command in general. It cannot be the aim of Ford's strategy that we, the viewers, should
resent social order. In this, Ford's paradox is a response to the danger of factionalism.
The experience of Ford's films provides an almost ritual form to the civil religion
only gestured to by Rousseau's Social Contract. The religion ought to have no content,
no doctrine, and no ideology. The message cannot overwhelm the movie. What Louis
Althusser wrote of Rousseau's general will is instructive. "The general interest: its
existence has as its sole content the declaration of its existence " (52).
62
It is not civil religion's task to specify or contest the laws: the laws and the
institutions of government do that. Civil religion is merely a profession of civil faith in
Rousseau is unable to propose any solution that he himself regards as
acceptable (Beiner 617).
62
Althusser demonstrates exactingly that the state of law mirrors the state of nature but
only with the presence of law. He writes,
And yet it is this total alienation itself that constitutes the single clause of
the Social Contract: 'the total alienation of each associate, together with
all his rights, to the whole community.' ...Let us stop for a moment at this
paradox. I can say: the total alienation of the Social Contract is the
solution to the problem posed by the state of universal alienation that
defines the state of war, culminating in the crisis resolved by the Social
Contract. Total alienation is the solution to the state of total alienation
(127).
112
the form of a declaration that a general will exists. For this to happen, unanimity must be
outside the law.
The strategy of the rebel above a depth persists even into the juridical acrobatics
at the end of Fort Apache. The value of Thursday's legend has not yet reified into fact,
and York is the legend moreso than an advocate for the printing of legends. He is still the
rebel above a depth.
In refusing to denounce the actions of the agent of law that led to the massacre,
York's media activities after the massacre maintain, rather than reverse, his opposition
with respect to the law. Even if York's statements obscure his opinion about Thursday, he
has not crossed over to the side of law but quite the contrary. Wayne's York is avoiding
disciplinary inquests into the actions of Thursday and the rest of the regiment. He at the
same time avoids disciplinary action for having thrown down his gauntlet with
Thursday.
63
The camera's tracking backwards draws the portrait of Thursday further into the
recesses of screen depth. This movement ceases as York steps into the frame. The linear
perspective implied by the doubling of his form in the painting of Thursday behind him
raises York out of the image of Thursday.
Then York is placed with his face above the clouds, towering higher than
monument valley buttes. He stands above the riders of the regiment superimposed on the
63
York is also sacrificing the potential glory for himself of having resisted the insane
suicide of Thursday's charge, but that would have to be gained through the bureaucratic
legal channels that could very well allow the message to overwhelm the movie.
113
window in front of him. It is a trick shot, but it is the most dramatic exterior depth of the
film.
For what it is worth, York is still a maverick. By defying any inquest of law, he
preserves the myth of Thursday. The content, the facts of the case, are nothing in
comparison with his continued dutiful devotion to the cavalry troop that is still living. It
has value for the regiment, and it is good for the country to approve of York's legendary
exception to the law.
Peter Bogdanovich refers the final moment of Fort Apache to the idea expressed
in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance by the newspaperman who refuses to print
Stoddard's confession that he was not the man who shot Liberty Valance. "When the
legend becomes fact, print the legend." When Bogdanovich interviewed Ford late in
Ford's career he asked,
"The end of Fort Apache anticipates the newspaper editor's line in
Liberty Valance, 'When the legend becomes a fact, print the legend.' Do
you agree with that?"
"Yesbecause I think it's good for the country. We've had a lot of
people who were supposed to be great heroes, and you know damn well
they weren't. But it's good for the country to have heroes to look up to.
Like Custera great hero. Well, he wasn't. Not that he was a stupid
manbut he did a stupid job that day. Or Pat Garrett, who's a great
Western hero. He wasn't anything of the sortsupposed to have shot
114
Billy the Kidbut actually one of his posse did. On the other hand, of
course, the legend always has some foundation" (86).
The Nietzschean view on the disadvantages of history for life expressed in this
interview is cited in Deleuze's account of Ford's illusions for unanimity. Ford agrees that
there is a connection between the two films. But, this is not at all to agree with the
proclamation of the newspaperman at the end of Liberty Valance. Ford's explanation
does not say that one prints the legend because it has become fact. Yet, neither does Ford
affirm the printing of facts over the making of legends.
Instead, truth is mysteriously created by the legend when masterfully constructed
by a force of what's good for the country: unanimity. As in Plato's Republic, and in
Rousseau's conception of the general will, the legend is a means for the people to feel
pleasure and pain together. There is little to separate religion from good entertainment in
this vision: both have civil unity as their end.
The general will needs the sense given to it by civil religion. This is precisely
because, in execution if not also in form, the law will very likely fail to serve all
particular wills in a way that will convince everyone all of the time that this particular
state of government is better than what one might imagine of the state of nature. Another
expression of the general will is required as a supplement to the law that in fact cannot
carry out the general will all of its own. Civil religion is inserted to cover over the
appearance a kind of failure in civil order.
In introducing the idea of civil religion, Rousseau quietly admits that the law
cannot encompass the unanimity whose will it purports to carry out. Men need to be
115
made to feel unanimous by some other force when the law is in fact the product of
conflicts of interest between groups vying for power more than it is an expression of the
will of the people or the product of consent. This problem is far from closed in The Social
Contract. In some ways it is a key point where Rousseau's ideals for a rational
democracy seem to unravel.
The community must have a space for unanimity that is specifically other than
law. This is the function of the paradox by which Ford's strategy commands by a sublime
respect for the law to judge against the law. Ford produces the general will as an
imaginary exception to the law. Through the sublimity of an illusion, we are capable of
doing that which, in reality, the "we" of the general will cannot do.
The law is in reality the product of the conflict of factions who take the form of
parties, corporations, families, and other competing interest groups, not the will of any
tangible "we."
64
When the law is always a cause and product of civil disagreement, when
it is law that makes men dissatisfied with the state, what could be more gratifying than
the experience, however fleeting, of being part of a community that justifiably makes
exceptions to laws?
64
In Althusser's brilliant reading of Rousseau's Social Contract he explains the seeming
contradictions of the general will in terms of the inability to classify factions as either
individual or general wills. According to Althusser, Rousseau resorts to
the juggling with particular and general, concepts which properly belong
exclusively to the individual and the sovereign, but which serve
theoretically to reduce the discrepancy introduced into Rousseau's
conceptual system by the emergence of the following irreducible
phenomenon: the existence of the interests of social groups.... To deny the
existence of human groups (orders, classes) is to suppress their existence
practically (153-4).
For Althusser, the sentiment of the general will thereby always takes a form that serves
the ruling class and suppresses the already marginal classes and groups.
116
The effects that this strategy persuades in the viewer, equally present in Lincoln as
in Fort Apache, are an expression of the sense of an imagined unanimity to which the
viewer belongs, a sense that is external to the film, though internal to the cinema. This
imagined community judging against the fictional law is thereby freed from the
complications of law. Ford's imaginary unanimity supplies a satisfaction that the law's
expression external to the cinema cannot.
The newspaperman of Liberty Valance, in allowing Stoddard's legend to expire
into fact, merely refuses to challenge the decaying legend now embodied by Stoddard, a
personality that relies more on authority than atmosphere. Likewise in Fort Apache, the
newspaperman gets it wrong that the irony lies in the fact that men like Collingwood
whose name he misremembersend up forgotten while the stars like Thursday get
remembered. The real irony is not that glory is reserved only for a few. The real irony lies
elsewhere.
The ironic part of itbut also the truth for Fordis that the show must go on so
that the community might go on existing, or appearing to exist. The show must go on
regardless of the failings of actual law to enact community and even because of that
failure of law. The show must go on in spite of the failure of individuals to live up to the
country's need for national personalities.
In "Humor, Irony, and the Law" from Coldness and Cruelty, Deleuze discusses
the role of irony in classical and modern thought. In classical thought, "irony is the
process of thought whereby the law is made to depend on an infinitely superior Good"
(82). The death of Socrates is an exemplary illustration of this. "The laws place their fate
117
in the hands of the condemned man, and ask that he should sanction their authority by
submitting to them as a rational man" (81-2).
65
How well the noble deaths of Ford's strategy of healthy illusions fits what
Nietzsche suggested about the dissimulation involved in the myth of Socrates' death.
When Socrates had at last been brought before the forum of the Greek
state, there was only one kind of punishment demanded, namely exile. ...
But that the sentence of death, and not mere exile, was pronounced upon
him, seems to have been the work of Socrates himself, who encountered
the decree with perfect awareness and without the natural fear of death. ...
The dying Socrates became the new ideal of the noble Greek youths (47-8:
12).
The healthy illusions at the core of Ford's strategy deploy something like
Deleuze's idea of classical irony in a manner designed to persuade noble obedience.
Much like Socrates orchestrated his own death at the hands of the stateaccording to
Nietzschethe drama of Ford's Socratic irony provides the sentimental supplement
required to rationalize sacrificing one's own life for the sake of perpetuating the
imperfect laws of what one perceives as one's own community. Ford's classicism resides
in the assumption that the permanent disconnect between the law and the good can be
65
This modern irony, Deleuze sees in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason as an
autonomization of law
where the Good is conceived as revolving around the Law.... The law can
no longer be grounded on the superior principle of the Good, but neither
can it be sanctioned any more by recourse to the idea of the Best as
representing the good will of the righteous" (83).
118
considered as an imperfect rendering of a higher good. The problem of the imperfect
intersection of law and the good is made to seem as though it can be remedied by
equitable exceptions to the lawfictional or realas a means of preserving the belief in
a community, society, or nation's general will.
2.3 Equity. Pity. Nostalgia: MvDarline Clementine and Ford's Other Women
A man who writes always on the same thing is apt to be regarded as a
crank, because to the superficial American every subject is easily
exhausted except for cranks, and if the subject is sexual he is simply
tabooed as a sexual neurasthenic. Hence, I shall dilute my sex articles with
articles on other subjects alternately.
Ernest Jones, Boston 1908 (Clark 262)
Ford's strategy for unanimity encompasses the community by making the viewer
feel like part of a people who collectively approve a filmic exception to law. The
appealing ideal of Rousseau's general will, through which the people become sovereign,
is thus sentimentally imagined to be true. An imagined universality approves of an
exception enforced by a visual architecture that demands respect.
According to Giorgio Agamben's ironic appropriation of Carl Schmidt's
reductive definition of political power, exceptions to law are the defining feature of
modern governmental sovereignty. The sovereign is he, or them, who decide on the
exception. According to Agamben's reformulation of Schmidt, humanity in its entirety
and all life on earth has now come to exist as a mere exception to the law granted by the
utter domination of political sovereignty. The law has placed life itself outside the law.
Life goes on living merely as a deformed exception to law itself. This exception is "the
original structure in which law encompasses living beings by means of its own
suspension" (3).
119
Whether or not Agamben's totalizing of political power holds water external to
the cinema, the character of Wyatt Earp (Henry Fonda) in My Darling Clementine is
quite like a ghostly apparition of this kind of effective sovereignty within the pretended
ritual of group sovereignty that constitutes Ford's strategy for unanimity. But, it is a
tribute to Ford's mastery that we hardly even recognize that this brutal sovereignty is
incarnated in Wyatt. He is easily received as the hero of My Darling Clementine's film-
event. It is true in so far as without him there would be no film. But, it is as if our benign
appreciation of Wyatt in the film parallels Ford's strategic non-confrontation with the law
external to the cinema: Wyatt gets off scot free, even though the failings of his law-
making motivate the film's action. Resentment of civic order is clearly not the aim of
Ford's strategy.
Wyatt embodies the vile principle of law irrespective of the good. Unlike Ringo,
he cannot just take revenge on the Clanton gang for the murder of his brother. He wants
to do it all legally, and more or less succeeds, but at the expense of several innocent lives.
Wyatt makes exceptions to the law only where it suits his own will. Fonda's character
here is more like Fonda's Thursday than Fonda's Lincoln. But, where Thursday at least
spares O'Rourke, York, and the supply train, Wyatt really spares no one. Rather than
extending, altering, or contesting the law for the sake of protecting the good, he must
become the law in order to enforce his own will for revenge and make it all seem normal.
If there are good effects of Wyatt's execution of the law, they are incidental.
The sentiment of unanimity is produced by the film through the atmosphere
centered on Doc (Victor Mature). Doc is clearly the rebel above a depth when in his
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introduction he establishes himself as the most raised character in the film. He shoots
forward along the widening diagonal lines traced by ceiling lamps and the bar of
Tombstone. He arrives rather late in the film considering the crucial role that he will
come to play. But, he gets there just in time to defend Wyatt from a cheating card player,
without the help of any law: a vigilanteor, more like a noble thugdefending a law
man out of professional courtesy.
On the whole, depth is deployed in the film such that Wyatt is rarely as raised as
Doc. In particular, the scenes on the Tombstone arcade never have Wyatt in front of the
foremost vertical beams that line the wooden walkway. In the sequence when Clementine
(Cathy Downs) arrives, one beam remains in front of him as he sits or stands outside the
hotel. He never quite makes it out of this depth to become the foremost face to the
arcade's lines of flight.
At the lunch after he has taken Clementine to dance even though Doc had
demanded of her that she leave town, one finds a composition that distinguishes Doc's
placement in front of the very same depth that Wyatt is recessed within. In this shot, Doc
steps up to the table to express his anger that Clementine has not respected his wishes for
her to leave town and to say that, as he threatened, he is going to leave town, instead. At
the table, the lines of the chandelier create a vanishing point effect with Doc as the face in
front and Wyatt behind retracted towards the point of flight.
Wyatt runs out the door to confront Doc about his outburst. Instead of explaining
his own interest in Clementine, or explaining that she has become his own guest, Wyatt
instead reverts to his maniacal insistence on his own authority. "That's the second time in
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two days that you're trying to run somebody out of town. That's what I'm here for.
That's what I'm gettin' paid for."
In this shot of the two men, latticed moldings running along the ceiling form
another depth effect between the two. Doc is still at the wide point while Wyatt, at the
low end, resembles Fonda's ambitious martinet, Colonel Thursday, more than at any
other moment in the film. Clementine remains just a pawn in Wyatt's game of legalized
vengeance. Keeping Clementine around drives Doc crazy and generates new evidence
largely faultyto further motivate Wyatt's bumbling revenge mission.
As Wyatt's revenge mission moves forward, the relations between "life and law"
in the town of Tombstone begin to resonate with those set out by Agamben. In this way,
My Darling Clementine presents an excellent opportunity for disenchanting ourselves
with Ford's healthy illusions. Understanding the relations between life and law in the
fictional Tombstone will
result from the fracture of something to which we have no other access
than through the fiction of their articulation and the patient work that, by
unmasking this fiction, separates what it had claimed to unite. But
disenchantment does not restore the principle that purity never lies at the
origin, disenchantment gives it only the possibility of reaching a new
condition (Agamben 88).
Disenchanting ourselves with Wyatt and My Darling Clementine and with as much of
the rest of Ford's work as we canrequires demonstrating "law in its non-relation to life
and life in its non-relation to law" (Agamben 88). One key fact to remember in this
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disenchantment is that the lucky craftiness of Wyatt's stupid single-mindednessmore
than an unconscious "dark side" or desire for evilis the feature of his mission that turns
the town of Tombstone into a virtual dictatorship.
In Wyatt's final showdown with the Clantons at the O.K. Corral, the kind of
climax where we would expect a hero to be in raised position, Wyatt gets entirely the
reverse treatment. The ceiling beams point directly down at Wyatt back in the sheriffs
office as he assembles his posse. In the march forward when Wyatt seems to rise up into
nearly clear sky, the camera angle hyperbolically exaggerates his power.
66
Furthermore,
the effects of this extreme low angle in relation to Wyatt's movements are the reverse of
the Ringo Kid's in the shootout of Stagecoach. In the final duel of Stagecoach, Ringoa
lone outlaw against a possejumps low and yet rises from the screen towards us. Here
Wyattleading his well-armed gang of hired legal guns against the dumb, frightened,
holed-up Hearts of the Clantonsapproaches the camera and yet, through the increasing
distortion of his body by the low angle, his face seems to be extended further and further
away until he exits through the top of the frame.
The apparent spatial paradox of this moment also contrasts with the paradoxical
staging of Lincoln's initial resistance to mob rule in Young Mr. Lincoln. In that moment,
Lincoln resorts to threats of violence to persuade the men to adhere to normal procedures
and to submit their mob authority to a fair trial. However, Lincoln does not act by
66
The shot is not unlike those extreme low angles often pointed out in Welles's Citizen
Kane. Welles was known to be a great viewer of Ford's, though his use of depth and
diagonals does more to contradict or play musically upon the viewer's eye than to raise
any particular character. Hence, Kane is set within a deeply-ambiguous atmosphere in
contrast to the gothic lift given to Ringo in Stagecoach, the film that Welles claimed to
have watched 25 times while making Citizen Kane.
123
authority of law in this momentfar from it. He argues for a legal process other than the
law of the mob that is in effect at that moment. He acts by force to coerce and then
persuade them to relax in enforcing the law-creating de facto authority that they
constitute at this moment. By threatening key individuals from the mob, he opens the
door to sentimentally evoke their places in a proper Christian community.
Lincoln's positioning in the composition of this scene registers this seeming
contradiction. The diagonal traced by the log carried by the mob does incline towards
him, as a depth cue. So in fact he is at the top of a depth, yet this line tracing the depth
comes from in front of him. This is a turning point for Lincoln from the young, naive boy
who believes in law to the great leader willing to make exceptions and challenges to the
law for the sake of the good.
67
There was a similar conflict between the lines functioning according to linear
perspective and the location of the compositional element in the depth of the set at the
introduction of Curly sitting behind his desk in Stagecoach. With both Lincoln and Curly,
it is clarified that they are willing to oppose the law for the sake of the good. It is not that
the audience as a unanimous community should feel itself united in making exceptions to
the code of lawlike a mob wouldbut that it feels itself equitable enough to make
67
Agamben, in explaining the role of the exception in defining sovereignty, chooses
Lincoln as a critical threshold in the history of Habeas Corpus's military exceptions made
to the law. He cites Lincoln's speech, where
the president openly justified his actions as the holder of a supreme power
to violate the constitution in a situation of necessity. 'Whether strictly
legal or not,' he declared, the measures he had adopted had been taken
'under what appeared to be a popular demand and a public necessity' (20).
So, the affinity of Ford for Lincoln as an exception-maker is certainly not accidental. One
can find the same story of Lincoln reflected in The Prisoner of Shark Island (1933).
124
exceptions to the actions of law. The sentiment of a community feels itself freed from the
agonies of government by fiction.
Ford made a clear statement about the role of equity in the problem of good and
evil in his films in an interview with the Cahiers du Cinema conducted in 1966. It seems
like he could be addressing the weird sentimental link between Wyatt and Doc when he
boasts,
I do not conceive my heroes dressed neatly in white and the bad guys in
black. Virtue does not always triumph in life, nor in the western.
Sometimes it triumphs and deep inside me, I enjoy that. I remember one
time in a projection hall, I watched the final version of a western and
someone who was there, it doesn't matter who, said to meand this was
at the very beginning of the filmthat he knew already who was the bad
guy. "It is the guy there in the back dressed in black on a black horse." I
became furious and stopped the projection. I had the guy fired but I made
sure the scene was removed. Something wasn't right. It is necessary to be
equitable in life. Equity is our salvation. It's our redemption, no? (Ford
52)
68
My Darling Clementine is interesting, then, for the reason that Doc rather than Wyatt is
the man who dresses in black but who draws more of the atmospheric treatment reserved
for Ford's heroes. The distinction between good and bad is not clear-cut. The film is an
exercise in equity, but a peculiar kind of equity.
68
Translation mine
125
The Equitable is defined in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics as a just act that
makes a necessary correction or exception to the law in terms of a higher good. However,
it is because laws are written to be universal that laws sometimes need to be adjusted to
specific instances in accordance with the highest possible good.
69
According to Aristotle,
the defect in law that calls for an exception only arises due to the coding of law
necessarily oriented towards universal applicability.
So, while in Aristotle, universality is a flaw in the code that obstructs the law in
carrying out a higher good, in Ford's strategy the illusion of universality is external to the
film created by judging the good in violation of law in the film itself. In Aristotle's
formulation of the Equitable, the good is contained in the spirit of the law to the extent
that the law's over-generality can be corrected by equity. Ford's strategy needs another
means to define its fictional higher good that opposes the execution of law. This is the
function of pity.
In My Darling Clementine, both equity and pity hinge upon the character of Doc
and his relationships to Chihuahua and to Clementine, but eventually the pity we feel for
him is transferred into approval for Wyatt through Wyatt's relationship to Clementine.
Pity makes Clementine a more suitable Fordian female than Chihuahua.
69
"What causes the difficulty is this; the Equitable is Just, but not the Just which is in
accordance with written law, being in fact a correction of that kind of Just. And the
account of this is, that every law is necessarily universal while there are some things
which it is not possible to speak of rightly in any universal or general statement.... When
then the law has spoken in general terms, and there arises a case of exception to the
general rule, it is proper, in so far as the lawgiver omits the case and by reason of his
universality of statement is wrong, to set right the omission by ruling it as the lawgiver
himself would rule were he there present, and would have provided by law had he
foreseen the case would arise... this is the nature of the Equitable, 'a correction of Law,
where Law is defective by reason of its universality' (95).
126
Clementine's ambiguous alliance to both Doc and Wyatt ultimately facilitates the
transfer of the sentimental atmosphere around Dochowever uncomfortablyto Wyatt.
The exceptional status of Clementine humanizes the whole catastrophe of Wyatt's
rampage in Tombstone and the sacrifice of Doc. Clementine functions in much the same
way that Julia Kristeva wrote in the analysis of the virgin mother's role for the history of
Christian thought in "Stabat Mater":
Let us call "maternal" the ambivalent principle that is bound to the
species, on the one hand, and on the other stems from an identity
catastrophe.... Thus Christ, the Son of man, when all is said and done, is
"human" only through his motheras if Christly or Christian humanism
could only be a maternalism.... And yet, the humanity of the Virgin
mother is not always obvious, and we shall see how, in her being cleared
of sin, for instance, Mary distinguishes herself from mankind (309).
This maternal ideal guarantees the human by its distinction from general
humanity. It parallels the role of the maternal in Ford. Ford's virgin mothers confirm the
basic purpose of the Fordian hero as for the community by her exceptional and pitiable
status within the community. While Sumiko Higashi has shown that Cecil B. DeMille's
films exploited the changing role of women in society, from wives and mothers to
sexually-autonomous individuals and autonomous consumers, Ford's strategy vigorously
denies this autonomy, preferring the virginal-maternal Christian ideal.
70
70
Higashi writes,
As Walter Lippman argued at the time [of Affairs of Anatol], birth control
and female employment outside the home meant that the sexual
127
Nowhere in Ford's work is there more clearly illustrated the opposition between a
woman who is useful for marshalling the pity/equity of the viewerClementineand a
woman who is notChihuahua.
71
What makes Clementine acceptable as a Fordian
heroine is the willingness to sacrifice that she embodies but that Chihuahua does not
have. However, they both embody different sides of what Slavoj Zizek described as the
figure of the "suffering mother." He offers this characterization as an example of self-
subjection to ideology.
Let us take the care of the suffering mother as the "pillar of the family":
all other members of the familyher husband, her childrenexploit her
mercilessly; she does all the domestic work and she is of course always
complaining of how her life is nothing but mute suffering, sacrifice
without reward ... other members of the family return to her the true
meaning of her own message. In other words, the true meaning of the
experience of women was no longer related to their role as wives and
mothers. Further, contraception which in effect was practiced mostly by
educated middle-class women, dictated that sexual intercourse be
construed as a pleasurable experience rather than as an obligation for
procreative purposes... Anxiety about women's extravagant spending on
fashionable apparel, represented in DeMille's texts as a prerequisite for
the pursuit of pleasure, was more than a concern about household budgets;
it also registered suspicion about women's sexual fidelity.... As evident in
DeMille's representation of upper-class marriage as spectacle that
constituted a form of commodity fetishism for female audiences, the
consumption of images as well as goods functioned as a substitute for
sexual pleasure. Perhaps this was the ultimate irony resulting from the
reification of human consciousness and social relations in postwar
consumer capitalism" (174).
71
Wood points out the nature of the hostility to Chihuahua in My Darling Clementine is a
repulsion of female sexuality: "[Ford] never treats sensuality positively: he can only
tolerate Chihuahua in Clementine when she is shot and dying, whereupon he promptly
sentimentalizes her (the character is the film's one major weakness)" (34).
128
mother's complaint is: "I'm ready to give up, to sacrifice everything...
everything but the sacrifice itself!" The mother's fault is therefore not
simply in her "inactivity" in silently enduring the role of exploited victim,
but in actively sustaining the social-symbolic network in which she is
reduced to playing such a role (216).
In My Darling Clementine, it is as if Zizek's suffering mother were split in two.
The one who sacrifices and the one who complains are two different figures. Chihuahua
complains whereas Clementine sacrifices. Chihuahua can never get enough of Doc's
attention even while she seems to be carrying on with Billy Clanton (John Ireland) when
Doc is not around. Clementine travels by stage all the way from Boston to Tombstone to
find Doc even though he is hiding from her.
In My Darling Clementine, the complaining mother is erased by Chihuahua's
murder, while the sacrificing mother remains. Likewise, the revulsion to Wyatt's selfish
manipulation of the law is erased. The sense of belonging to an equitable community
remains.
Yet it is notas the Cahiers du Cinema editors said of the figure of the mother in
Young Mr. Lincolnthat this suffering mother figure in Ford is intimately allied with
Ideal Law. In fact, Clementine brings Wyatt away from law more than anything else in
the film can. The scene where Wyatt and Clementine dance is one of only a few scenes in
My Darling Clementine where the good is not suppressed in favor of Wyatt's law.
In Lincoln as well, pity for the mother brings us to accept Lincoln's antagonistic
wrangling with legal forces to free the boys accused of murder. Lincoln's work of
129
resistance to constituted authority in the film motivates the whole of the action. It
culminates when he finally bullies Jack Cass to confess and turn himself over to the mob.
Ford's strategic use of women is somewhat similar to the classic theme of rescue
that runs throughout D.W. Griffith's films. However, Ford's women are never as frail and
willowy as Mae Marsh from Way Down East (1920). Again, Ford's most dramatic
difference from Griffith is that Ford's strongest heroes are good-bad men and not agents
of law.
Gaylyn Studlar has made the point that Ford's women are not separated from the
world of men. In fact the women's world and the world of the home are intimately
connected to the world of men in Ford's films.
72
It is this very interdeterminacy of men's
and women's worlds that facilitates the establishment of the good against the law.
However, at the same time the functions of men and of women in Ford's strategy remain
quite distinct. In this strategy for unanimity not all groups are equalized.
For the paradigmatic example of Ford's perfectly suffering mother, one could
look to one of Ford's first mature films, Four Sons (1928) focuses on a mother who must
deal with losing three of her four sons in World War I. Mother Bernle is absolutely
reduced to the function of the pitiful mother figure. However, the importance of pity is
evident even in looking at Ford's strongest female characters.
Pilgrimage's (1933) Hannah Jessop (Henrietta Crosman), who also loses her son
to World War I, is certainly one of Ford's most strong-willed women. Jessop enlists her
72
Studlar frames these observations as a description of the challenge in Ford's films to
Leslie Fiedler's hypothesis that the values of the Western genre are set up in opposition
to the world of women and femininity (2001).
130
own son in the military during World War I to keep him away from a woman at home.
He is killed shortly after arriving in Europe. After years of non-acknowledgement of her
mistakes, she travels to Europe with a group of military mothers to visit the graves of
their sons. She befriends the young Gary who is in a parallel position to that of her son
when she sent him away to die in Europe: in love and in trouble with a woman of whom
his mother disapproves.
Jessop's final heroic act consists in large part of finally abandoning her self-
righteous attitude in order to beg for pity from another woman. In the final scenes of the
film, she makes a breach of propriety by standing up to his upper-class mother, insisting
on Gary's need for freedom. She has to express her own sorrow over her tragedy.
Thus, she stands up as the bad example. It is a heroic act, but one that nonetheless
marshals emotion based on pity for Jessop. This pity is intensified by her visit to her
son's grave afterwards. Her repentance and catharsis in Europe allows her to
acknowledge her grandson and his mother.
Even Ford's most independent and rebellious heroine does not entirely escape this
tendency towards pity in heroines. In Ford's last film 7 Women (1966), the entire good of
the actions of the uniquely-strong Fordian heroine Doctor Cartwright (Ann Bancroft) still
hinges on her rescue of the largely-pitiful group of female missionaries. She submits
herself to the Mongol raiders who have taken over the mission so that they might go free.
In the end, she submits to suicide by poison in order to, at the same time, poison the
leader of her Mongol raiders. This noble and defiant sacrificeenhanced by her last
131
words, "So long, you big ape"is mingled with at least the threat that her life might
become pitiful without the final resort to suicidal violence.
A less-appreciated film of Ford's from the early 1930s, The World Moves On
(1934), centers on a woman who is decidedly unsuitable for pity. Mary Warburton Girard
(Madeleine Carroll) persistently stands up to the men of a wealthy family who want to
wage war and conduct unethical business dealings. Madeleine Carroll appears as two
different characters across two generations from just after the civil war to the early
depression in a way that wonkily gestures towards reincarnation. But, this odd quirky
picture was the project that Ford professed to have hated, it seems, more than any other.
Ford obviously found it easier in Judge Priest and in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
to work with pity for a dead wife that the audience never knows. The product is an
atmosphere of sentimental gravitas around the widower-hero. More difficult to deal with
is a female character who does not at some point become truly pitiable.
The problems that Joseph McBride points out in The Searchers (1957) fall along
similar lines. The film culminates when Ethan (John Wayne) and Martin (Jeffrey Hunter)
73
Ford says of this first film to bear a Production Code Seal of Approval,
I'd like to forget that. I fought like hell against doing it. 'What does this
mean?' I'd say. 'Does it amount to anything?' I pleaded and quit and
everything else, but I was under contract and finally I had to do it, and I
did the best I could, but I hated the damn thing. It was really a lousy
pictureit didn't have anything to sayand there was no chance for
comedy. But what the hell, that was called 'being under contract.' You
were getting paid big money and there was very little income tax, so you
swallowed your pride and went out there and did it. There were a few
awfully good things in itthe battle scenesbut I argued and fought, and
that was how I got the reputation of being a tough guywhich I'm not
(Bogdanovich 59).
132
finally retrieve the young child Debbie who has been living with Comanches since she
was a tiny child having become the wife of Chief Scar (Henry Brandon).
The most glaring flaw in The Searchers is Debbie's improbable change of
heart when Martin, after jumping from the rock formation the Navajos call
John Ford Point, comes to rescue her in Scar's tepee. Almost instantly
reversing her earlier determination to stay with "my people," as she calls
the Comanches, she screams when awakened but then gives him a tight
hug, exclaiming ecstatically, "Oh, yes, Marty! Oh, yes, Marty" (564).
The problematic way that The Searchers calls us to impose our own general will on
Debbie was described well when Martin Scorcese and Paul Schrader compared the film
to Taxi Driver (1976).
Schrader explained, "I feel and other people feel, that the one thing The
Searchers lacksand it is a great filmis a scene between Scar, the
Comanche chief, and Natalie Wood.... If Ford had the guts to show that
their life together had some meaning, it would have made the ending
when John Wayne 'rescues' herbitterly sweet" (McBride 571-2).
Schrader states the case here in euphemistic terms. More to the point, if she was
not required to play the weakly written role of pitiable object for the film, then Debbie's
reaction towards Ethan's "rescue" would likely have been outright aggression and
despair. Taxi Driver, of course, rewrites The Searchers in a way that clearly portrays the
disturbing consequences of the kind of vigilante actions that are the linchpin of Ford's
133
films when they are unhinged from their place in the carefully contrived sentimental
constructions proper to Ford.
In The Searchers, the strategy for unanimity can only work through the final
conflict between Martin and Ethan regarding the raid on the Comanches. Martin
supplements the legal raid for which Ethan is sworn in as he takes the non-violent
vigilante action in order to get Debbie out before Ethan canin his Heraclean madness
murder his own niece as Heracles murders his children and wife.
In that sense, the film might be considered as Ford's attempt to sweeten
Euripedes' Heracles. Instead of wandering the underworld for the sake of his family, then
rescuing his family from his enemy only to murder them in a fit of madness unleashed by
jealous gods, Ethan wanders the desert in a murderous lust for his niece only to be
restored by a fit of sentimentality to spare her and return her to the fold.
Martin's action for the good outside the legal raid on Scar's Comanches does not
account for Ethan's change of heart. Again, Ford rewrites Euripedes if we can think of
Ethan as a jealous Medea. Ethan's satisfaction of his own Medean blood lust on the
object of his jealousy in tearing into the flesh of Scar somehow leads to mercy and not
as in Euripedes' Medeato further carnage in the form of a mad infanticide.
It may be due to the utter imbalance of star power between Wayne's Ethan and
Jeffrey Hunter's Martin that the film's aspirations to youthful illusions end in the
awkwardness recognized by McBride and Schrader. The merciful vigilantism of Martin
dropping from the sky is such a weak example of the usefulness of Ford's sublime
architecture that it is obvious, as McBride and Schrader point out, that the film's de-
134
tragedized ending is only achieved through the suppression of Debbie's will for whom
this festival of donkeys
74
should seem more repugnant than bittersweet.
Through Ford's use of women in his civil religious ritualsweakened in The
Searchersan audience is supposed to pledge itself as community and assert its
existence. But, the viewer's sentiment that a "we" of the ideal community exists is based
on an unjustified presuppositions about this general will. The sacrifice of the self-
determination of female characters, the woman's almost mad desire to sacrifice her own
will to the actions of the heroes determines the good of the male heroes.
Ford's use of women then parallels the issues at play in Michel Foucault's
rereading of the meaning of Descartes's cogito. Foucault's reading of Descartes from
Madness and Civilization contextualized Descartes's assertion, "I think, therefore I am"
by referring to Descartes's foregoing discussions in his Meditations on First Philosophy.
Before Descartes makes the claim for the self-evident existence of his own thinking, he
only imagines his own thought process by excluding the possibility that his very thinking
might be a product of madness. He assumes ahead of time that he is not mad or dreaming.
He knows that his waking life is not a dream. Hence, Descartes assumes from the start
what he is trying to prove by excluding the possibility that this thought he is having is
troubled by the kind of madness that plagues certain other people. He is a rational
74
This is the image that Ranciere takes from the near final episode of Nietzsche's Thus
Spake Zarathustra (313-16: 4.19)translated by Kaufman as the "Ass Festival"to
describe the contradictions of the politics that Deleuze derives from Melville. However, it
belongs better to what Deleuze describes as Ford's "American dream" than it does to
Deleuze's Melvillean "American dream."
135
thinking being who can access the kind of assured truth that a madman cannot: that an
innate rationality guaranteed by a connection to God exists in his conscious process.
As Descartes's cogito exists because it thinks, but thinks only by assuming that it
knows what madness is, the "we" of Ford's imagined community can claim existence as
a general will because it assumes that it knows what the pitiable object onscreen wants.
Descartes assumed that he could think what madness was in order to assume the certainty
that he was thinking, Ford's general will assumes that it knows what the film's women
want. Only then can this unanimity believe in its own existence by willing that the hero
achieve for her what unanimity assumes she wants.
75
There is a theoretical dynamic of inclusion/exclusion of the maternal in the
general will generated by the film-event of many of Ford's films. In Ford's strategic use
of the feminine or the mad to create unanimity, the audience can say "we" only on the
basis of a pitiable object that is isolated and willingly claiming need, insufficiency, or
dependency as her central identifying characteristic. In order to feel the general will, it
seems essential to Ford that there be a weaker willalmost always a female willthat
75
The function of women in Ford's strategywomen's positioning outside of but
interdependent upon men's labor, characterized by a sacrifice of will to the men's
worldparallels the way Foucault describes the positioning of the excluded madman in
Foucault's idea of early modern communities that began segregating the mad.
This community acquired an ethical power of segregation, which
permitted it to eject, as into another world, all forms of social uselessness.
It was in this other world, encircled by the sacred powers of labor, that
madness would assume the status we now attribute to it. If there is, in
classical madness, something which refers elsewhere and to other things it
is no longer because the madman comes from the world of the irrational
and bears its stigmata; rather, it is because he crosses the frontiers of
bourgeois order of his own accord, and alienates himself outside the
sacred limits of its ethic (58).
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wills to be willed for. She is thereby included as an exception within the commonality of
the general will.
We assume we are not like her, therefore we can judge that the hero is acting for
the good. But, each individual who imagines himself or herself within this general will
must also must sacrifice his or her own will to the visual command that belongs only to
the film and the originality of Ford's filmmaking. This is not just the intuited presence
some kind of "narrator-function," but a paradoxical positioning of law and judgment
executed with singular effectiveness in Ford's best films.
This dynamic of the inclusion/exclusion of the mad/woman does not have to take
a woman as its object. It also works with Doc as My Darling Clementine unfolds. In the
scene where Doc recites Hamlet's famous monologue on death and suicide, the shots that
alternate between close-ups of Wyatt and Doc intimate the transfer that is working here.
Doc is the madman/femininized will and hence we must transfer our will over to the side
of Wyatt so as to feel assured that this pitiable sacrificial suicide represented by Doc got
what we/he really wanted.
Doc does cross the gender lines that typically adhere in Ford as he falls from
being the center of the atmosphere. Ford managed a somewhat similar atmospheric
transfer in the very different film, Tobacco Road (1941) where Sister Bessie (Maijorie
Rambeau) seems to carry the atmosphere at the beginning of the film, then goes rather
mador man-crazyand leaves it up Jeeter (Charley Grapewin)heaps more likeable
than Wyatt but less handsometo carry the atmospheric torch as he tries to avoid getting
drunk long enough to prevent the law from foreclosing on his farm. In Sergeant
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Routledge (1960), Woody Strode's Routledge also takes on many of the pitiable
characteristics that are typically centered in female characters in Ford. These important
exceptions highlight that Ford uses pity as a mobile component in his strategy of
unanimity. So, rather than proposing an absolute paradigm of gender relations to which
Ford might be said to have ascribed, all we can say is that more often than not, in Ford,
the pitiable object is a woman.
Hallie from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is key to that film for just this
reason. The triumph of learned Stoddard opens up the possibility for her to learn to read
and to escape her provincial frontier life. This gesture brings her into a greater idea of
progress and inclusiveness, Ford's melting pot extended to women. However, at the end,
our pity for what she has lost while Stoddard has been pursuing his political career is
instrumental in achieving the final sentiment of the film, our sense of Stoddard's star
continuing to revolve in spite of its loss of atmosphere. Her quiet suffering brings us to
reconsider whatif anythingthe continuation of Stoddard's personality politics has
gained beyond the original success of bringing the territory to statehoodthat was
achieved, at least in mere fact, primarily through the efforts of her old beau, Doniphon.
In Stagecoach, Dallas has the chance to become a wife and mother and thereby to
escape her pitiable reputation. The clearest proof of Ringo's virtue is in the disjunction
between his pitiless admiration for Dallas and Claire Trevor's performance that conveys a
persecuted suffering deserving of pity without displaying self-pity. The possibility of
Dallas's transmogrification from prostitute to mother ultimately makes Ringo's revenge
mission into the defense of the future good that we can imagine as their baby-making on
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the family ranch in Mexico. It will certainly be more ftin with Ringo and Dallas down in
Mexico than with the uppity propriety of Lana Borst Martin (Claudette Colbert) and
Gilbert Martin (Henry Fonda) who in Drums Along the Mohawk (1939) have to accustom
themselves vigilantism against indian and colonial law to save their homestead from
raiders.
In Fort Apache, Mrs. Collingwood's (Anna Lee) refusal to rescue Sam
Collingwood from Colonel Thursday's suicide mission is a self-victimization that
generates pity in a manner that will not be redeemedunlike Hannah Jessop's sacrifice
of her son from Pilgrimage. Her decision to allow Sam to go out with the sacrificial
troops rather than to legally exempt him with his late-arriving letter of transfer to West
Point serves the different but related function of making Collingwood's unquestioning
acceptance of Thursday's orders to march to his own death seem more normal. Having
Mrs. Collingwood allow Sam to leave generates less resentment than if she had tried to
stop him only to have him madly refuse. Her surrender of her own will to the mad glory
of Thursday's charge helps to establish a limit. This pity can go without undermining the
sensibility that Ford was trying to achieve, without having the film cross the threshold
that would make it a corrosive ritual of sacrifice like Melville's Billy Budd.
The key thing is that the sacrifice of the will of women to the general will makes
the violent lives of the men seem normal. Nothing could be further from the later
developments of Nietzsche's thinking than what Leslie Kaplan points out is persuaded by
Ford's Lincoln, and I think by many of Ford's films: that "fundamentally, the life of a
citizen is normal" (86).
139
Ford's film-events win the support for the illusory community in the same way
that in My Darling Clementine Wyatt wins the showdown at the O.K. Corral: by
astonishment. "Doc Holliday's with 'em," Ike Clanton (Grant Withers) exclaims
worriedly as the law approaches the O.K. Corral. Doc becomes Wyatt's instrument of
astonishment, his own little rebel for unanimity. Doc's little suicide missionnot too
unlike that of Collingwood in Fort Apacheamounts to little more than a confused
sacrifice to Wyatt's twisted sense of honor. Chihuahua's killer, little Billy Clanton (John
Ireland), has after all already been shot dead in the back by Wyatt.
In the early shots of the showdown, the Corral's diagonals point down to Pa
Clanton (Walter Brennan). In the shots of the Clanton boys, the architecture of the fence
rises above the figures of the men, mitigating the effects of the sky and reflecting a more
ambiguous position. Both Wyatt's posse and the Clanton's family gang seem to believe
they are acting violently to preserve their legal rights.
76
The architecture of the coral and
the cloud cover hold down all of the men on both sides of the showdown.
In spite of the parallels of the O.K. Corral sequence to the murder of the Cleggs
in Ford's Wagonmaster (1950), I think this is an instance of deeper difference within
apparent similarity. Wyatt enforces his legal authority to corner the Clantons. Travis (Ben
Johnson) and Sandy (Harry Carry Jr.) undertake their actions in spite of the law's
inability to protect the Mormons from the Cleggs. The killing of the Cleggs occurs just in
76
Consider that Wyatt's cattle were initially grazing on land that was de facto maintained
by the Clantons. From a certain perspective, he owed Pa Clanton at least a negotiation or
a partial sale if Clanton asked for it, because he was bringing his cattle across the land
that the Clantons managed. That does not justify the murder of Wyatt's brother by the
Clantons, but does set up Wyatt's initial refusal to sell cattle to the Clantons as more an
affront than a rugged assertion of his own clear and distinct rights.
140
the nick of time when lives are at stake. Wyatt's process slogs along at the expense of the
lives of most involved.
When Virgil Earp (Ward Bond) fires on Pa Clanton in self-defense to end the
sequence, he gets a patch of clear. This immediate necessity of the killing of Pa Clanton
caps a string of killings that remain more vaguely legal than directly good for anyone
other than Wyatt. This chain reaction of murders includes the making of the corpse that
Virgil discovers a moment later: Doc's.
There is no Captain York whose dissenthowever inconsistentmight be
mistaken for a message threatening to overwhelm the movie as in Fort Apache. Doc
never speaks up and easily becomes a paralyzed victim, never a truly active opponent to
Wyatt's rule of law. Wyatt ranks among Custer and Pat Garretcited by Ford as those
men who are merely allowed by masterful mythmakers like himself to persist in
functioning as heroes for the good of the country. These men of law are not the
foundation. Out of our disenchantmet with Ford, we of course need to ask what the
foundation of the myth might be. But, as in Fort Apache, it is not the point of the film to
conjure hostility to law or authority. What counts is to achieve the sense of unanimity and
normalcy.
To facilitate the objective, Wyatt does achieve a minimum of mobility, though not
even as much as Thursday in Fort Apache. Wyatt lets himself drift from the law a little
after Chihuahua (Linda Darnell) misleads Wyatt with her lie that Wyatt's murdered
brother Virgil's cross was given to her by Doc. In his chase after Doc, Wyatt does ride up
above the horizon, raised in front of the sky. He is acting impulsively upon his own desire
141
for truth, probably outside of his jurisdiction, rather than mechanically executing the law.
Thanks to his shoddy police work, he is chasing after the wrong man. His philosophy
seems to be that if he just persists in disturbing and even destroying as many lives as
possible then he will eventually stir up the kind of trouble that will wind up in killing the
men who he really wants dead.
When Wyatt catches up with Doc, he does not immediately accuse Doc of
anything or assert his authority as Marshall to place Doc officially under arrest. Wyatt
begins by working with pure ignorant force: "You're coming back to Tombstone with
me, Doc." Doc's countermand could also be read as a legal one: "I'm not going back."
Yet he does not have the power to resist Wyatt in a gun battle. Wyatt answers again
without reference to his legal authority. "Well, I guess then I'll be taking you back"; he is
lifted above the horizon.
77
But, in this moment, at least, Wyatt acts like a Fordian hero,
putting a higher good above due process of law but foolishly on the trail of a red herring.
77
If the reversals of this scene are troublesome, it is important to note that Daryl Zanuck
took over editing of My Darling Clementine, shortening it by at least a half-an-hour
according to Bob Gitt's report. Zanuck wrote to Ford before he made the changes.
It is my opinion that in this picture we have to be big time all the way. We
cannot be big time only in certain outstanding episodes. The critics and the
public alike have been fed up with an avalanche of Western and outdoor
films. They know every gag and every cliche. The moment we let our
guard down for an instant they will smack us right on the button. Anything
that appears even slightly obvious or formula will look ten times as bad in
this type of film. If we permit inconsistencies in continuity or
characterization to exist we are going to be crossed up just as sure as I am
writing this letter. Certain things that we could excuse or disregard in the
average quality picture will never be accepted in this background and with
the type of characters we are dealing with (105).
This scene is a crucial one. It is the main scene where Doc and Wyatt confront each other
in a duel. With only five camera setups comprising the scene, it seems as if this very
likely could have been one of the scenes that were trimmed by Zanuck for reasons of
142
Clementine sweetens the picture more than anything else. It is through his
connection to Clementine that Wyatt can ultimately pass as the hero in lieu of the mad
fallen Doc and then appear as a normal man of the law. In My Darling Clementine,
virtually all of the legitimizations for Wyatt's actions emerge after the fact, from the
momentary subversiveness of his relationship to the exceptional instrument of
Clementine. Clementine is the one who draws him away from law and propriety.
The ultimate sentimental film-event of My Darling Clementine finally leaves only
Wyatt and Clementine as potential objects of sentiment in My Darling Clementine. This
transfer of sentiment to Wyatt occurs in spite of the fact that he so clearly contrasts with
other of Ford's heroes in his relation to the key coordinates of the law and the good. But,
it is the wider sentiment that is the target of the strategy. Resentment is not the point. In
Ford, love for a school marm cannot but be a good.
78
The presence of the sentiment of an
equitable exception in My Darling Clementine is left no hero to whom it can attachDoc
is murdered.
Jacques Derrida's challenge to Foucault's reading of exclusion into Descartes's
cogito is not without relevance. According to Derrida, Descartes did not, as Foucault
eliminating cliches. If that is so, then there may have been more dialogue emphasizing
Wyatt's recourse to law as opposed to his recourse to pure forceduring such moments
as he is depicted in front of the sky. This scene and the awkwardly-elided ride back to
Tombstone would likely have played upon the classical western cliche of the double bind.
78
Maybe if Wyatt had not left his little brother all alone guarding the herd to go get a
shave then he wouldn't have ended up trucking home to his Pa with no cattle and two
fewer brothers. The favorable note upon which Wyatt exits may have been partly a
manifestation of what Zanuck wanted for Henry Fonda. As Bob Gitt shows, Zanuck had
another director reshoot a shot with Wyatt kissing Clementine for the final scene. It
seems like Zanuck certainly must have seen Wyatt as someone more like the populist
hero of Tom Joad played by Fonda The Grapes of Wrath rather than the NosferatuAike
legalistic vampire that he is.
143
claimed, exclude madness from his meditations. In fact, Descartes accepted the risk of a
particularly-philosophical kind of madness. For Derrida, it is then an engagement with
madness that defines the cogito, and philosophy itself, rather than a complete exclusion.
All claims to philosophical truth are madness, asserted Derrida, including Foucault's.
Whether or not Derrida was correct in rebuking Foucault, in Derrida's claim that
Descartes must have had a limited sympathy with madness in order to undertake to doubt
everything but his own awareness that he was doubting. Likewise, in Ford it is not
without a certain limited sympathy that women are placed in the position of a pitiable
object. We presuppose knowledge of what is good for her and this allows us to doubt the
good of the fictional law.
Rousseau's notion of sympathetic pity put forward in Emile is very close to
Ford's. Rousseau's pity, the momentary identification with someone weaker and lower,
in fact served as the foundation of all social bonds. This is set out in Book V of
Rousseau's Emile:
So pity is born, the first relative sentiment which touches the human heart
according to the order of nature. To become sensitive and pitiful, the child
must know that he has fellow-creatures who suffer as he has suffered, who
feel the pain that he has felt, and others who he can form some idea of,
being capable of feeling them himself (174).
Sympathy for the pitiable object's suffering affirms the citizen's own "being capable of
feeling them himself."
The parallel between Nietszche's enveloping atmosphere and Rousseau's general
will born out so strongly by Ford's strategy for unanimity was pointed out by Derrida in
Of Grammatology. Derrida makes the comparison between Nietzsche and Rousseau
that Nietzsche failed to acknowledge.
Is it not remarkable that Nietzsche, sharing completely [Rousseau's]
conception of femininity, of the degradation of culture, and of the
genealogy of morals as servitude to the slave, should have hated
Rousseau? Is it not remarkable that he thought Rousseau an eminent
representative of the slave morality? Is it not remarkable that he should
have seen precisely in pity the true subversion of culture and the form of
servitude of the masters? There is much to say along this line. It will lead
us in particular to a comparison of the Rousseauist and Nietzschean
models of femininity; domination or seduction is equally feared, whether
it takes, alternatively or simultaneously, the form of cloying sweetness or
of destructive or devouring fury. It would be a mistake to interpret these
models as simple affirmations of virility (342nl8).
For Derrida, Rousseau's romanticism utilized pity to extol the virtues of an only-
apparently authentic, healthy, and free society. Femininity in this model of the healthy
society is an ambivalent instrument, an unrecognizable mirror image of what the virile
male citizen needs to become: obedient.
Likewise, in Ford the instrumental use of women as pitiable objects renders
possible the achievement of the paradoxical "subversions" of the "youthful" ahistorical
145
culture inaugurated by the young Nietzsche of The Use and Disadvantages of History.
Particularly in My Darling Clementine and The Searchers the structure of the line
between subversion and legitimization is strategically fashioned so as to be difficult to
gauge.
This is interesting in that much of the theoretical background of the Cahiers
reading of Young Mr. Lincoln was drawn from Jacques Derrida's critique of Rousseau's
surreptitious logocentrism from Of Grammatology. For the Derrida of Of Grammatology,
there was always a more primary "writing," a passive inscription of norms upon the
listening subject that was beyond the control of the speaking subject. Such a "writing"
within the speech itself functioned through naive belief in speech's apparent self-
presence. Though speech may appear as a pure and innocent manifestation of the
speaker's ideas and precisely because a speaker believes himself to be in control of
speech, language secretly inscribes norms, hierarchies, and ethnocentrism into what the
speaker says and what the listener understands.
The Cahiers text on Lincoln described the privileging of speech in Lincoln that
facilitated a more surreptitious filmic inscription within the viewer. Lincoln's speech in
the courtroom, for instance, masks a "Fordian writing" that runs throughout Ford's work
just as Derrida wrote that this theme runs throughout Western philosophy in its totality.
Hence the role of "Ideal Law" in the Cahiers critique of Lincoln corresponds roughly to
the idealization of speech in the history of western philosophy in Of Grammatology.
However, I prefer Deleuze's critique of representation. In Deleuze's Logic of
Senseas in Derrida's Of Grammatologya linguistic proposition is always more than
146
what it represents. The expression is a quasi-cause that enacts its effects through a
representation. "The expression, which differs in nature from the representation, acts no
less as that which is enveloped (or not) inside the representation" (145). That is an
exceptionally-clear phrasing of Deleuze's reconfiguration of representation, where
representation is reduced to its effects, its use, or to the active event relayed through
every representation: a speech-act. The question of whether or not the speaker is in
control in the given moment is not the important question because what is important is
the question of use.
A tool or a weapon can be used carefully or strategically and may serve many
purposes at once, may succeed in the effects intended by its operator or not. But, the
ultimate effects are only determined and adjusted through further interventionss in the
flux of time. A speech-event or a film-event cannot be judged according to whether its
representation is fully present and successful in an instant or not.
If Deleuze speaks of representation, it is only to make representation rely upon
the hidden expression which [a representation] encompasses, that is, by
means of the event it envelops. There is thus a "use" of representation,
without which representation would remain lifeless and senseless.
Wittgenstein and his disciples are right to define meaning by means of
use. But such use is not defined through a function of representation in
relation to the represented, nor even through representativeness as the
form of possibility. Here, as elsewhere, the functional is transcended in the
direction of a topology, and use is in the relation between representation
147
and something extra-representative, a non-represented and merely
expressed entity (Logic of Sense 146).
Hence, the violence of Ford's writing is no accident, yet the ideals of his films do
not originate or emanate from Ford himself. He merely channels borrowed impulses.
Ford's The film-even that his strategy is patterned to enact encompasses a sentiment of
American and human community. The community external to the film but internal to
the cinema is that which is expressed in the film's representation without itself being
represented. This, I think, is something more than advancing the dominion of a speech-
centered logocentrism.
80
As Deleuze wrote in Difference and Repetition of the kind of
intense expressions that we could say belong to Ford's community, "In its role as the
enveloped, it still expresses all relations and all degrees, but confusedly''' (252). Ford's
community is "confused in so far as it is clear" (253).
When Wyatt rides out of town after the shootout/massacre, he does not ride along
Q |
the diagonals of the architecture of the town but off into the weaker space left of frame.
In the final shot with both Wyatt and Clementine, Clementine is now the victim of
79
This idea of a quasi-cause seems strange, but it avoids the idea of a strict relationship
between cause and effect in speech from speaker to listener in speech. This quasi-cause is
more like a swarm of impulses and forces, presuppositions and commands of which every
speech-act consists.
8
Deleuze's critique of representation certainly has features in common with that of
Derrida, but rather than a "writing" that constantly undercuts the agency of subjectivity in
representation, there is a possibility in Deleuze's account of using language and other
representative media in terms of their "sense" to explore and maneuver intersubjectivity,
to escape the dominating, normalizing constraints of language on the subject. It seems
that Derrida's later turn towards studies of the animal, power, and of Deleuze all seem to
manifest a shift towards this other problematic of community definition of the kind that
manifests itself in Ford and away from the terms of logocentrism.
81
The final shots of Wyatt leaving town are in only the pre-release version, hence it is
more Ford than Zanuck.
148
Wyatt's penchant for justice that killed her loved one and she is at the high/raised end of
the diagonals traced by the fence. She is the woman who would have liked to have been
the widow of the man that Wyatt led to his death on a legalized revenge mission.
In the final scene, our approval of Clementine's will to help the town by
establishing a school, coupled with a certain muted pity, is somehow credited to Wyatt.
The two come face-to-face in shot-reverse-shot, the outlines of Wyatt's face are obscured
by clouds behind him. This contrasts with Clementine's placement raised by the
diagonals of the fence. But, when Wyatt utters that line, "Ma'am, sure do like that name:
Clementine," the contours of his face are clear of clouds. It is the new relationship to
Clementine that lifts Wyatt from the clouds: the triumph of the normal.
The surreptitious transfer of sentiment from the mad Doc to the normal Wyatt
should have taken root most strongly earlier in the film. The moment when Wyatt goes to
dance with Clementine even though she is supposedly Doc's girl is key. Since Doc
aggressively expresses the fact that he is no longer interested in her, it could be a
potentially good thing for both Wyatt and Doc if Wyatt got together with Clementine.
This scene gives us a brief vision of the serendipitous hope that Wyatt could get over his
brother's death by exploring a new love with Clementine. Here Wyatt actually puts aside
the law and even defies proper convention to pursue the good. He makes an exception to
his constant attention to the revenge mission, his obsession with law. For a moment, he
takes part in the town's evolving rituals, even though he has forbidden his brothers from
going so that they can keep up their police work.
149
The camera tracks along with Wyatt and Clementine as they promenade towards
the dance. The lines of flight of the town behind them raise them towards the camera. At
this point, too, Wyatt is set well up into the clear sky as his brothers look up to this
uncharacteristic infraction upon propriety.
It is appropriate that Robin Wood focuses on the dance scene in My Darling
Clementine as "the development of civilization within a primitive community." It fits
perfectly in Ford's Rousseauism. Balls and dancesso prevalent in Fordwere for
Rousseau the ideal form of recreation for society and were therefore the best alternative
to the corruptions of the theater. For Rousseau, ideal society was a society without
theater, and therefore without illusion of any kind.
Rousseau voiced his opposition to the theater as a social pastime in his "Letter to
D'Alembert on the Theater." He instead idealized balls, civil rituals, and social circles
where people could observe one another.
82
The ideal for Rousseau was then to "let the
spectators become Entertainment to themselves; make them actors themselves. Do it so
that each sees himself in the others, so that all will be better united" (126). In a sense, this
is what Ford achieved by making cinematic art into a civil religion.
Of course, there are a lot of rituals in Ford's films, but Ford's films are also rituals
of dissimulation.
83
The ritualized collective oath proper to Rousseau's civil religion
occurs only silently and through dissimulation, encompassed as the quasi-cause of the
82
Trachtenberg's Making Citizens: Rousseau's Political Theory of Culture relates the
political concerns of Rousseau's theory of culture in "Letter to D'Alembert" to the
cultural theory of politics from On the Social Contract.
83
Steven Spielberg in Peter Bogdanovich's documentary comments that Ford is above all
a director of rituals.
150
film without the viewer's attention. Through an imaginary connection to imaginary others
that spills over from the visuality of the film, we are persuaded to feel united in a false
vision of a community to which we belong even though we cannot be practically
convinced of the community's functioning.
Ford's civil religious strategies work not in spite of the failures of law to achieve
the good external to the cinema but because of the failures of the community external to
the cinema. The community is won by visual force rather than by logic. It works where
the force of plot logic masks more deceptive forces. My final chapter "Biopolitics of
Originality: Melville's (Neo-)Liberal Helping" will return to the fact such illusions would
likely have been entirely unpalatable to Rousseau considering the call for transparency in
society that seems more basic to Rousseau's thinking than this evaluation of the general
will and civil religion.
By normality's assertion of its existence as a general will, this "we" also asks for
someone else to determine what it wills. Like Descartes's cogito in Foucault's rereading,
this "we" becomes that which it believes it had assumed it knew as the mad/matemal:
passivity, servility, and even madness. Ford grabs us by the Heart so as to corral us in
with a feeling of sovereignty that will only leave us as Agamben's "bare life," life subject
to the exceptions conceived in the Head of an absent sovereignthe position of
sovereignty that we had imagined ought to be filled by ourselves in the form of a general
will. Ford rewrites the madness of Heracles with the sentimental mercy of Ethan only to
deliver us to the naivete of the festival of donkeys.
151
Tag Gallagher, Robin Wood, and Peter Wollen all read history into the film by
locating garden and desert at different points and in different characters within the film.
But, desert and garden are irresolvably shifting signifiers.
84
That Wyatt's effort to avenge
his brother's death and the theft of his cattle "ends up only with more death" does not
Of
stop Tag Gallagher from calling Wyatt a hero. Gallagher admits that "what is
worrisome is his identification of justice and vengeance, of legal form and wilderness
morality."
For Robin Wood, Wyatt brings civilization to Tombstoneagainst wilderness
morality. Wood claims this film merits comparison to The Man Who Shot Liberty
Valance. The initial "sense" one gets that Clementine "seems less complex" than Liberty
Valance
proves on reflection to be illusory: the impression derives simply from the
fact that its complexities are experienced as resolvable in a constructive
84
"Earp, in My Darling Clementine, is structurally the most simple of the three
protagonists I have mentioned: his progress is an uncomplicated passage from nature to
culture, from the wilderness left in the past to the garden anticipated in the future"
(Wollen 96).
Of
Gallagher writes of Wyatt as a great hero even though "doom is his destiny." He
describes that
Wyatt combines the godhood of Lincoln, the passion of Tom Joad, the
directness of the Ringo Kid. Like many another Fordian hero, he comes
out of the wilderness, rights wrongs, and goes on his way. Wyatt embodies
the Fordian hero's traditional urge to squat with his traditional obligation
to wander. And he casts himself as an angel of order. What is worrisome is
his identification of justice and vengeance, of legal form and wilderness
morality. Thus he rejects official help in confronting his brother's killers,
because it's 'strictly a family affair,' and ends up only with more death.
The movie is a series of skits and turns illustrating attempts at community,
most of them abortive. As if looking for answers, the camera stares at the
sky after the battle and down the long road at the finish, "lost and gone
forever" ("Ford til '47").
152
way, the different positive values embodied in East and West, in
civilization and wilderness, felt to be ultimately reconcilable and mutually
fertilizing (23).
However, the only thing "mutually fertilizing" about Wyatt's actions in
Tombstone is that the bodies of the Clantons, two Earps, Doc, and Chihuahua will all be
fertilizing the ground together thanks to Wyatt's ridiculous manipulation of recklessly-
appointed legal authority harvested for his own punitive interests. It is all part of Ford's
confidence game that Wyatt's adverse effects upon the good go unrecognized.
Instead, what counts is the fond civil religious sentiment recognized by Wood as
"nostalgia." This is correct but only according to the first definition for the word in the
Oxford English Dictionary. That definition does not even mention the past or history.
"Acute longings for familiar surroundings, esp. regarded as a medical condition;
homesickness."
Ford's nostalgia is the uneasy product of the strategy to effect a sense of being
enveloped by familiar people. The acute longing for familiar surroundings arises from a
conflict between, on the one hand, the utter knowledge of national and global discontent
that "has nothing to do with the pictures" and, on the other hand, the sentiment of present
universality to which the viewers of Ford's films are persuaded.
It is as if Ford exploited the inconsistencies of Nietzsche's insufficient
formulations of the atmosphere of personality from the exploration of the disadvantages
of history and produced a device for persuading viewers to participate in what is decried
153
oz
in later Nietzsche as a herd mentality. One finds in Ford a civil religion that could
manage a society of all those who have "not experienced great and more exalted things
than others will" who "will not know how to interpret the great and exalted things of the
past" (The Use and Disadvantages 94). It is an opportunity to externalize the audience
member's own desire for civil unitya desire that Nietzsche recognized as a veritable
instinctby projecting the declaration of its existence onto others whose minds we
cannot know.
Deleuze took a good deal of joy in describing how Nietzsche despised Paul.
87
Rousseau's general will is easily appropriated by Ford as a quasi-Paulist universality and
a quasi-Platonic republicanism that reserves the right to table the specifics of law for the
sake of universal unity. From Rousseau to Ford, the theme of the community correlates
directly to 1 Cor. 12:
The body is not one member, but many. If the foot shall say, "Because I
am not the hand, I am not of the body"; is it therefore not of the body?...
86
In The Use and Disadvantages of History for Life, Nietzsche himself cautioned about
the application of the different types of useful history in inappropriate places.
Much mischief is caused through the thoughtless transplantation of these
[three species of history]: the critic without need, the antiquary without
piety, the man who recognizes greatness but cannot himself do great
things, are such plants, estranged from their mother soil and degenerated
into weeds (72).
87
In "Nietzsche and Saint Paul, Lawrence and John of Patmos," Deleuze explains
Nietzsche's revulsion with the formation of the Christian herd in St. Paul:
In truth, it is Christianity that becomes the Antichrist; it betrays Christ, it
forces a collective soul on him behind his back, and in return it gives the
collective soul a superficial individual figure, the little lamb (37-8).
Further on Deleuze cites chapter 42 of Nietzsche's Anti-Christ: "Paul's invention, his
means to priestly tyranny, to herd formation: the belief in immortalitythat is, the
doctrine of judgment(Deleuze "Nietzsche and St. Paul" 37)
154
Now are they many members, yet but one body. And the eye cannot say
unto the hand, "I have no need of thee": nor again, the head to the feet, "I
have no need of you."... There should be no schism in the body; but the
members should have the same care one for another. And whether one
member suffers, all the members suffer with it: or one member be
honored, all the members rejoice with it. Now, ye are the body of Christ
and members in particular (Riley 20).
88
The passage speaks as if it were ripped directly from Plato's conception of the
city in Book V of the Republic. And, we know that the confused reverberations of these
illusions of unanimity are still everywhere deployed for utterly partisan ends. We know
this is a party from which women need no longer exempt themselves.
Rousseau did not float the idea of a civil religion as a palliative to an
incomprehensible legal system without cautioning against a too-strong civil religion.
What Rousseau admitted of a nation founded strictly on an exclusive religion, we might
equally say of a nation convinced that it can in any way be unified and encompassed into
an "American people." This nation
is bad in that, being founded on mistakes and lies, it deceives men, makes
them credulous and superstitious, and makes a people bloodthirsty and
intolerant. ... The result is to place such a people in a natural state of war
with all others, which is extremely harmful to its own security (93).
88 *
This is Riley's translation of the seventeenth-century version Rousseau would have
read.
155
3 Spectacular Stoic: Josef Von Sternberg
3.0 From the Encompasser to the Self
In all fairness, a few more small details must be included in the review of
things that influenced me, which may not have been essential to my career
but could not have been detrimental in preparing me for it. I carried a copy
of Marcus Aurelius in my pocket while looking for work and when that
became torn I replaced it with Epictetus.
An actual slave, in physical bondage, can become an Epictetus. A person
whose thoughts are enslaved by others can, in the final analysis, become
nothing.
Josef Von Sternberg 1965 (Fun in a Chinse Laundry 52, 161)
Epictetus and Aurelius enter into Deleuze's critique of representation in the
Twentieth Series "On the Moral Problem in Stoic Philosophy." By bringing Stoic
philosophy into the discussion, Deleuze sets up an opposition between community and
self as potential effects produced by representation. The same polarity is embedded
within the theoretical framework of Deleuze's Cinema 1 when we contrast the treatment
of Ford and Sternberg because there Deleuze associates Ford with "action" and Sternberg
with "affect" but we will do better to refer to Ford's cinema of community and
Sternberg's cinema of the self.
Michel Foucault considered Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius to be among the great
Hellenistic thinkers and practitioners of the self. The idea of the self dominates
Foucault's lectures from 1981-2 that focus on Stoicism, but the concept of the self is
practically absent from Deleuze's readings of the Stoicism of Epictetus and Marcus
Aurelius in Logic of Sense. However, the polarity between community and self as
aesthetic goals and ethical coordinates will define Deleuze's American problem as it
appears in the cinema.
156
It was in the Third Series of Logic of Sense that Deleuze situated the "sense" of a
linguistic proposition outside of the logic that a proposition signified, an object that it
denoted, or an opinion of the spearker that it manifested. A speech-event is something
other than the three ordinary relations of representation. Sense is the activity or the
speech-event that a linguistic proposition must carry out in order to produce anything that
we ordinarily recognize as representation.
Ford's film-event encompassed the sentiment of a community or a general will
through the distribution of cinematic depth and the positioning of the good against the
law. The product was the illusion of a community external to the film, but internal to the
cinema. In contrast to the Stoic use of representation, the unanimity that this strategy
produced was imagined all too clearly as something external to the viewer himself.
In Deleuze's reading of late Stoicism, the effects of the Stoic use of representation
flow in the opposite direction from the illusory community encompassed by Ford's film-
events. The effects of the Stoic use of representationand of Sternberg's film-events
were to be internal to the representing subject himself The sense of Stoicism's
representation is not a sentiment shared with others.
The Stoic use of representations was included by Foucault, as well as by Pierre
Hadot, as a key part of Stoic philosophy's spiritual exercises, or what in Greek was called
ascesis. Such exercises were part of a set of techniques for an individual to develop his
soul into a self-sufficient internal unity. This philosophical self was irreducible to the
demands placed upon the self by the attitudes of others, or was at least resistant to
uncontrolled sentiment with respect to external objects and other individuals.
157
Likewise, Sternberg's calculated use of close-ups and the positioning of bodies in
the staging of his films work as spiritual exercises designed to conduct the viewer to a
Stoic self of their own. The film-events of Sternberg's Shanghai Express, Morocco, and
Blonde Venus exercise the restriction of internal affect proper to the Stoic self. In
Sternberg's staging, character posture and relative positioning of figures concentrate the
viewer's sense of the freedom of movement of onscreen bodies in particular moments
that exemplify opportunities for Stoic spiritual refinement and detachment from external
concerns. The presentation of freedom of the body is coupled with Stoic freedom of the
mind.
In Cinema 1, Deleuze refers to these moments in Sternberg's filmmaking as
moments of "true choice." The true choice is the "consciousness of choice as steadfast
spiritual determination" (115). It is a choice for a certain spiritual mode of existence.
Translated into the terms of Foucault's Stoic self, these moments of true choice are
moments that exercise the viewer's sense of what it means to have sovereignty over
oneself and only oneself.
Such an ideal of self ought to contravene any sentiment of group belonging.
Correspondingly, in The Scarlet Empress, there is a critique of Hollywood's crowds that
is directly pertinent to Ford's community. The extension of the ethical aim of self-
sufficiency is brought into a reflexive conflict with the idea of belonging to a cinema
crowd. The formation of an illusory group is, indeed, a serious problem for this ethics.
Sternberg's spiritual exerciseswhere the will to control the self is the original
source of ethical valueswould seem to avoid at all costs Ford's kind of illusions where
158
the sentiment of a national or universal community would serve as the original source of
value. However, it becomes difficult to discern a positive politics in Sternberg's films,
extended out from the ethics of Stoicism. Sternberg's final film, Anatahan, was made
long after his career in Hollywood had ended. The film continues to elaborate a morality
of the kind bound up with the control of emotions that is exercised in Shanghai Express,
Blonde Venus, and Morocco, and Anatahan\ morality still entails the resistance to group
psychology enacted by Scarlet Empress. However, Anatahan is exemplary among
Sternberg's films in its emphasis on the failure of an isolated group of human beings to
form a stable community.
In the end, Sternberg falls back on a nostalgic lament for the lack of unity in the
human milieu that it depicts. Anatahan is especially suitable for describing Sternberg's
Stoicism's difficulty when it encounters the problem of what in Stoic philosophy was
called an oikeiosisor "familiarization." Anatahan suggests that what from one
perspective appear to be the freely chosen paths of Sternberg's earlier female protagonists
could equally be seen as failures of a Stoic self to find a means of oikeisosis without the
nostalgic sentiment that underlies the illusion of a united human community.
3.1 The Close-Up and True Choice in Shanehai Express
If scientific practice, scientific institutions, and integration within the
scientific consensus are by themselves sufficient to assure access to the
truth, then it is clear that the problem of the true life as the necessary basis
for the practice of truth-telling disappears. So, there has been a
confiscation of the problem of the true life in the religious institution, and
invalidation of the problem of the true life in the scientific institution. You
understand why the question of the true life has continually become worn
out, faded, eliminated, and threadbare in Western thought.
Michel Foucault (The Courage of Truth 235)
159
For Deleuze, the most salient aspects of "the obscurity of the Stoic theory of
representation such as it has been handed down to us" (Logic of Sense 144) is a theory of
representation that determines "that which constitutes the character of representation,
such that it may or may not be 'comprehensible'" (145). However, the Stoic sage does
not determine the adequacy of a representation through any of the three ordinary relations
within representationcorrespondence to a logic signified, denotation of an external
object, or the manifestation of emotions or opinions.
Instead, this process of evaluation in the Stoicism of Aurelius and Epictetus is an
assignment of value. It judges the representation according to its configuration of values
in such a way that an adequate representation does not place false value on anything that
is not under one's own power. The goal of such a Stoic evaluation of internal
representations is to attain a state of neutrality towards an impression of anything that one
might confront. Deleuze describes this neutrality towards all events: "Stoic ethics is
concerned with the event; it consists of willing the event as such, that is, of willing that
which occurs in so far as it does occur" (143).
This condensation of the ethics of Aurelius and Epictetus is described by Hadot
and Foucault as a means of preparing for external events by working with a system of
exercises, ascesis, that develop rational tests and defenses, what in Greek were called
paraskeuie. Such defenses would allow the philosopher to constitute a systemic, secure,
and unshakeable ethical self. This state of neutrality reached by the ethical self would be
protected from perturbations caused by external obstructions and intrusions.
160
The problem necessitates a method of the kind that was sketched out by Seneca in
his "Treatise on the Tranquility of Mind."
We ask, then, how the mind may always remain the same and proceed on
its way undisturbed, be contented with its self, and look with pleasure
upon its own condition, and not interrupt this joy, but remain in a tranquil
condition, being neither puffed up at any time nor depressed. This will be
tranquility of mind. Let us inquire in a general way how this can be
attained; of the common remedy you will take as much as you like (14).
Seneca calls for a philosophical remedy, a method, and an ethics to attain the
protection of a controlled and tranquil self. Likewise, Sternberg claimed in his
meditations that his highest value was always tranquility of mind, claiming that, "I have
never been fanatical about anything except my peace of mind" (.Fun in a Chinese
Laundry 192).
Aurelius and Epictetus seem to be Sternberg's heroes in this regard. Aurelius is
the second name dropped in Sternberg's book of meditations, Fun in a Chinese Laundry,
after Michelangelo.
89
The multiple references to Stoicism in Sternberg are also allusively
erudite assertions that reiterate in a more veiled way his paradoxical claim to fanaticism
about peace of mind.
89
Sternberg introduces his birthplace, Vienna, with grandiosity. "In the center of the
European cauldron is an old city, once the seat of a mighty empire. The remains of
Marcus Aurelius are part of the soil" (3).
161
Sternberg further makes a case for art as a spiritual exercise in the opening pages
of these meditations. He notes that "taste" and "skill" are words often associated with art.
However, they very well "may have nothing to do with art."
Nowhere is it stated that art might perhaps, be a hygienic search for
obscure values, or a cultural memorandum, or an attempt to rival creation,
an orderly investigation of chaos, or, at best, a compression of infinite
power, spiritual power, into a confined space (2).
Sternberg describes art's spiritual hygiene as the active compression of the
infinite, obscure, and chaotic into a space of orderly investigation. In Sternberg's films,
there are calculated stylistic arrangements for setting up this kind of space. This hygienic
search is carried out by the visual network of the films through a design that should lead
viewers to an ethically-transformed idea of their own selves.
In Cinema 1, Deleuze points to where one should look for the peculiar spirituality
of Sternberg's films. In a note on the spiritual power of the close-up from Cinema 1,
Deleuze suggests that one could begin a spiritual interpretation of Sternberg with the
scene of prayer from Shanghai Express.
90
Sternberg's idea of art as a compression of
spiritual values into a confined space is enacted almost too perfectly in the close-ups of
the praying hands of Shanghai Lily seen within her train compartment in one of the most
iconic shots (Marlene Dietrich) of Shanghai Express.
QTV
The note insists that Sternberg is spiritual as much as Robert Bressontypically
considered a Catholic filmmakeris sensual.
Louis Malle insisted on the sensual elements of Bresson's work, notably in
Pickpocket. Conversely Sternberg could be given a spiritual interpretation,
notably in terms of Shanghai Express (cf. the great scene of the prayer)
(232nl5).
162
Lily's former lover, Doctor Harvey (Clive Brooks) has been taken prisoner by the
Chinese rebel leader Mr. Chang (Warner Oland). Harvey and Lily were just getting
reacquainted after encountering each other for the first time in years on the titular express
train from Beijing to Shanghai. Chang was riding incognito among the passengers, but
after the capture of one of his high-ranking lieutenants Chang has the train hijacked. Then
he takes Harvey, an important surgeon needed in Shanghai, as a hostage for bargaining
with the Chinese government.
Moreover, Chang has a personal motivation for mistreating Harvey. It is after
Harvey physically attacks Chang in order to defend Lily against Chang's advances that
he is taken into confinement from the other train passengers. By defending her, Harvey
proved his renewed duty and devotion to his former lover in a moment of crisis that
reverses his resentful and distant treatment of her up to that point in the film. This earlier
behavior seems due in part to the fact that in the years since they separated, she has
become infamous as a "coaster,"
91
but when Harvey puts himself on the line to protect
Lily he shows what really matters to him.
Lily has been, thus far, the paragon of composure in the midst of all of the rumors
circulating about her life as a coaster. But, with Harvey taken hostage by a sadistic
megalomaniac with a grudge against him, she starts to become riled. Outside of the
station where Harvey is held prisoner, Lily asks Parson Carmichael (Lawrence Grant),
what she can do. He responds, "I suggest you pray." Lily cautiously agrees, "I would say
91
It is explained earlier that "a coaster is a woman who lives by her wits along the China
Coast."
163
you are right if God is still on speaking terms with me." Carmichael responds, "God
remains on speaking terms with everybody."
In what one might expect to be quite an emotional moment, a moment in which
the usually-cool Lily would finally break into an unrestrained catharsis, pleading with
God for the release of Harvey, the film offers nothing of the kind. In the two
progressively-closer framings of her praying hands that follow, the gesture is a mute but
probing expression of a spiritual work that Lily is undergoing. She must simply wait
while Doctor Harvey's fate hangs in the balance.
This unexpected effect is facilitated by substituting shots of Lily's praying hands
for what the viewer would expect in such a moment of heightened dramatic tensionthe
face. This substitution replaces affection-as-unrestrained-emotion with a Stoic emphasis
on affection-as-meditation. The substitution of hands for face makes this scene
particularly appropriate for outlining what matters for Deleuze in his discussions of the
close-up and his whole idea of the "affection-image." For Deleuze, the face in close-up is
notas it was for Bela Balazs's Theory of Filma privileged object for the expression
of human emotion. For Deleuze, the face is not a transparent window into psychological
interiority. Balazs focuses largely on the superiority of the human face as an expressive
organ infused with human spirituality. Deleuze mentions Balazs's study of cinema here,
but his choice of emphasis from Balazs's writings is idiosyncratic.
Deleuze chooses a particular passage from Balazs that abstracts the meaning of
the close-up from the human face and its emotions. The spiritual power of the close-up is
something other than the emotional force of the face. The close-up does the same thing to
164
any object. Deleuze uses the passage to focus on what the close-up does to the space
represented onscreen from shot to shot. No matter what object we see presented in the
frame, "the close-up retains the same power to tear the image away from spatio-temporal
coordinates in order to call forth the pure affect as the expressed" (Deleuze, 96).
The important thing about a close-up is that the shift in scale and perspective in a
close-up is absolute. We are not just referred to a piece of the larger established space. In
viewing a close-up, according to Balazs's claim as it appears in Deleuze, "we do not
perceive space. Our sensation of space is abolished. A dimension of another order is open
to us."
92
What is significant about the close-up and even about the face itself is the
absolute shift in spatial dimension that is more than just a piece of a larger whole.
Deleuze explains
The close-up is not an enlargement and, if it implies a change of
dimension, this is an absolute change.... The affection-image, for its part,
is abstracted from the spatio-temporal co-ordinates which would relate it
to a state of things, and abstracts the face from the person to which it
belongs in the state of things (96-7).
It is the absolute discontinuity of this shift in scale that is important. The true
power of the close-up is not to parcel out space, showing one piece as part of a larger
established space, nor to focus in to display aspects of a character. Though all of this is
what is ordinarily expected of a close-up, the close-up's shift in dimension can do more
92 *
In Balazs, "Facing an isolated face takes us out of space, our consciousness of space is
cut out and we find ourselves in another dimension: that of physiognomy" (306).
than convey the internal space of the person or the character. Instead, the ethical power of
this shift consists in alerting viewers to the autonomy of their own internal affections
from external circumstances.
Sternberg seemed to recognize the dimensional possibilities pointed to by
Deleuze's revision of Balazs when he wrote that what was important about D.W.
Griffith's innovations was not that Griffith invented the close-up but that he varied the
perspective of the camera. Thereby, Sternberg writes, Griffith could not only
"concentrate on what was considered important" (Fun in a Chinese Laundry 30). Painting
had been doing this for centuries, more importantly, Griffith's editing amongst shots from
different scales "moved his audience"(F in a Chinse Laundry 30).
93
The close-up of the praying hands should move us, but towards what? Lily
discovers what in Sternberg's films is referred to as "faith." The theme appears explicitly
at least in The Salvation Hunters and Morocco, as well as in Shanghai Express.
Sternberg's idea of faith as Lily discovers it is not a faith in any other person, nor is it a
faith that God will do the best for her, for Doctor Harvey, or for the other passengers on
93
Sternberg writes that Griffith
is credited with being the inventor of the "close-up," an unimportant
accomplishment, as long before him it was customary to eliminate the legs
of a subject in photography and painting and to concentrate on what was
considered important. Griffith's contribution was much more significant:
he was the first to make use of the most valuable function of the camera,
its ability to move and to change its viewpoint.... This was a decided
advance in technical stagecrafthe moved his audience (30).
166
the hijacked train.
94
Instead, Sternberg's faith is a spiritual strength and patience that
allows Lily to accept whatever does not depend on her own actions.
This exercise of faithStoically redefinedentails a shift into a dimension of
another order, like the shift from the long shot to the close-up. This moment of prayer in
Shanghai Express coincides with the crucial task of the philosopher according to
Epictetus. The first principle stated in Epictetus's handbook sets out the difference
between a set of internal forceswhat Deleuze calls affectionand everything else:
On the one hand, there are things that are in our power, whereas other
things are not in our power. In our power are opinion, impulse, desire,
aversion, and, in a word, whatever is our own doing. Things not in our
power include our body, our possessions, our reputations, our status, and
in a word, whatever is not our doing (Seddon 30: 1.1).
Epictetus's list of "things that are in our power" enumerates aspects of the kind of
interior space that Deleuze will refer to as affection. "Opinion, desire, aversion" are key
pieces of the flows that are internal to the self and that can be and must be controlled.
94
This theme of reconciling one's self to the world as if it were the best world possible
was treated particularly well in Deleuze's reading of Leibniz's principle of sufficient
reason. Stoic philosophy, like Leibniz's baroque philosophy and like Lyrical Abstraction,
manages to achieve modern effects without being entirely modern. Deleuze's passages on
Leibniz's "optimism" in of The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (68-75) explain very
clearly that to say that God has chosen the best world does not mean that God wills the
best possible good for all individuals, but only that God works with a rationality and a
rubric of evaluation for choosing worlds that outstrips the desires and wills of any
individual. Individuals must aspire instead to understand and reconcile themselves to the
world as God has made it to be. These themes of salvation, free choice of the individual,
and God's will and knowledge are central to debates on Jansenism and Reformism
important to Leibniz, as they were to Pascal. They were to the Stoics, as well, but as
Foucault discusses in his lectures on the "Hermeneutics of the Subject," salvation for the
Stoics was the creation of the self in life, rather than after death.
167
Stoic ethics maintains that the internal responses of affection are subject to internal
control. The Stoic self is based on processes of determining one's internal response to
external circumstances. To "suppose to be yours only what is yours" (30: 1.3) and to take
control over affection is the basic prerogative of the Stoic sage. All of the rest of ethics
should follow from this.
Affection, for Deleuze as for the Stoics, is not defined as emotion that is
externally expressed, but as the internal response to external circumstances. For the
Deleuze of Logic of Sense, it is the elimination of all those representations that do not
allow one to will all that comes to pass that allows one to determine one's internal
response to the external world. The goal of attending to affection is to put the will in
harmony with the world. In the Dialogues written in the years intervening between Logic
of Sense and Cinema 1, Deleuze described, "Stoic morality is undoubtedly this: not being
inferior to the event." (65). One must render one's internal composure adequate to
withstand anything that may happen.
So Lily's means to achieving faith is not a plea for miraculous intervention for
Doctor Harvey. Nor is it a moment of repentance for her life as a coaster oriented towards
the past. Instead, the prayer scene must be the moment when Lily reconciles herself with
the very event that is coming to pass in that moment. We might imagine that what is
going on with Lily here is something more like what in Stoic philosophy was described
as a praemeditatio malorum. Foucault describes the idea as it appears in Seneca as "a test
of the worst" (Hermeneutics 465).
168
The praemeditatio malorum consists in training oneself in thought to
assume that all possible evils, whatever they may be, are bound to occur. It
is an exhaustive review of evils, or, inasmuch as the exhaustive review of
possible evils cannot really be practiced, it consists in considering the
worst of all evils and assuming that it is bound to occur. (Hermeneutics
469)
In imagining all evils as if they must inevitably come to pass, the goal of this
praemeditatio malorum, according to Foucault's reading of Seneca, is to avoid being
"permeable to the event" (Hermeneutics 469). The goal is to imagine and prepare in
advance to accept with total resolution and tranquility of mind all of the kinds of
suffering that would plunge an unprepared soul into fear and confusion. We cannot know
for sure what Lily's method of meditation is in this moment of prayer, but there is a good
chance that a practice like the praemeditatio malorum is what frees her to eventually act
with composure in Doctor Harvey's favor.
Working through such a meditation towards the end of reconciling herself with
possible ills of the worst kind would help Lily to resolve herself to, as Deleuze wrote,
"willing the event as such, that is, of willing that which occurs in so far as it does occur"
(Logic of Sense 143). The overlay with the expulsion of steam from an approaching train
isolates the event that Lily resolves to will, thereby opening her attention into that other
dimension of "consciousness of choice as steadfast spiritual determination" (Cinema 1
115).
169
Sternberg seems again to hint at his understanding of the close-up's function in
his spiritual exercises in one of the few passages from his meditations that even
approaches a concrete statement on film form. It is subtly concealed in an anecdote about
his first days as an assistant director with Emile Chautard at the Fort Lee Studios in New
York. However, the statement about his time spent with Chautard nonetheless reveals an
important insight. Sternberg claims that Chautard
carefully instructed me in the rudiments of his craft, graphically
explaining his methods to me (none of which I have ever forgotten).... As
a small example of the care he took in transferring his knowledge to me,
he would place a chair for the camera and point out to me that all four legs
were now visible in the lens, explaining that if less than four legs were
seen to support a chair on the screen it will attract undue attention and
some idiot might wait for that chair to fall over. This detail, which could
appear to some to be ridiculous, alerted me to inspect everything before
the camera through the lens and soon paved the way for me to appraise the
dimensional impact of everything in front of the lens, including the value
of light and shadow (42).
This "dimensional impact" of framing restricts the access of the viewer to an
onscreen object. By limiting the space of an object and thereby eliminating the object's
context, the camera can free the object. A chair might appear free to fall at any moment
according to what the film artist chooses to conceal and reveala crucial aspect of
170
Sternberg's definition of the artist.
95
The dimensional impact of the same kind of
reductive framing that permits the viewer to think that a chair with a leg hidden by the
frame is free to fall over plays a crucial role in the hygienic compression of spiritual
values that Sternberg recognized as film art.
Reducing the availability of an object to the viewer's perspectivea process that
reaches its highest level of intensity in the close-upcan produce a sense that the object
is undetermined and free. This is the same consideration that Deleuze emphasizes from
Balazs's observation about the restrictive framing of the close-up. The body in close-up
permits the viewer an impression of the person while leaving the rest of the person's
body in a space of absolute undetermined freedom outside of the frame. Increased
restriction of the view brings about a greater sense of freedom of what escapes this
enclosure. Deleuze acknowledges this paradoxical aspect of the space of the close-up by
borrowing a phrase from Claude Oilier's analysis of Sternberg's Anatahan: "The more
white space is closed and exiguous, the more precarious and open to the virtualities
outside of it it is" (Cinema 1 94).
95
Here again Sternberg links art with ascetic philosophy, this time with Diogenes of
Synope:
Each light furnishes its own shadow, and where a shadow is seen there
must be a light. Shadow is mystery and light is clarity. Shadow conceals,
light reveals. (To know what to reveal and what to conceal and in what
degree and how to this is all there is to art.) A shadow is as important in
photography as the light. One cannot exist without the other. The great
Alexander threw his shadow over Diogenes when he asked the man who
dwelt in a barrel to name his wish. "Stand from between me and the sun!"
It is doubtful whether this answer meant that Diogenes craved the sun, as
he attempted to achieve the enviable position of craving nothing. More
likely he was irritated by a meaningless shadow (312).
171
Likewise, in Logic of Sense Deleuze acknowledges that on the moral level, there
is very much a paradox in the idea that one should choose to will whatever is happening
already. "The Stoic paradox is to affirm destiny and to deny necessity" (169). In Cinema
1, the spatial paradox also translates to the moral level in what he calls Sternberg's,
"Lyrical Abstraction." The effects of the kind of spiritual determination proper to Lily's
scene of prayer are produced through a "theoretical or practical evasion" (117). If one is
only free to will whatever is already about to happen, then where is the choice or freedom
in that?
For the Deleuze in Logic of Sense, the interest of the paradox of the freedom
accessed by Stoicism had everything to do with time and the event. His appreciation for
Stoicism's reduction of time to a pure present instant is not absent from Deleuze's
discussion of affection in Cinema 1. Deleuze notes a few pages above his discussion of
Sternberg and shortly after his discussion of Balazs that
the Stoics showed that things themselves were bearers of ideal events
which did not exactly coincide with their properties, their actions and
reactions: the edge of a knife... (Cinema 1 97).
96
Strangely, the text trails off with an ellipse once the Stoics come up. Foucault had
begun working on the Stoics in his lectures but Deleuze and Foucault were estranged by
this time; perhaps Deleuze wanted to refrain from discussing the Stoics. Or, perhaps
Deleuze may not have felt that Lyrical Abstraction was adequate to the high regard in
which he held Stoicism. Deleuze wrote in 1992, "In truth, only the philosophies of pure
96
Ellipsis in original.
172
immanence escape Platonismfrom the Stoics to Spinoza or Nietzsche" ("Plato and the
Greeks" 137). Yet, the Lyrical Abstraction of Sternberg, Bresson, Rohmer, Dreyer, and
even Nicholas Ray is described as
an extreme moralism which is opposed to morality, this faith which is
opposed to religion, is a strange way of thinking. It has nothing to do with
Nietzsche, but has much in common with Pascal and Kiekegaard, with
Jansenism and Reformism" (Cinema 1 116).
Deleuze's Stoicismnot necessarily the same as Foucault's or Hadot's Stoicism of the
selfis a philosophy of pure immanence leading to Nietzsche. By contrast, Sternberg's
Stoicism/Lyrical Abstraction has "nothing to do with Nietzsche." As will become clear in
Melville's approach to the American problem, Deleuze's Stoicism is ultimately the
product of emphases that make for a picture that is truly different from the Stoicism of
self-sufficiency reconstructed by Foucault and Hadot and different from that which on the
whole characterizes Sternberg's Lyrical Abstraction.
Lyrical Abstraction's Stoicism, a treatment of these "ideal events" that "do not
exactly coincide" with action, is merely mentioned in Cinema 1. But, the Stoic potentials
of the affection-image recapitulates the idea of the pure affect as expressed that Deleuze
described in the Twentieth Series on Stoic ethics from Logic of Sense. Representation
should confine one's concern to only that which is in one's own power, which for
Deleuze means willing an event as it occurs. The Stoic evaluation of representations
required a reduction of the will to one's internal state in the present moment. Thereby,
"the Stoic sage 'identifies' with the quasi-cause" (146). Any representation of the present
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moment is tested according to how well it encompasses the swarm of forces and events
that comprise the present instant in order to enact it upon the self that is resolved will it
all. Deleuze describes,
On the one hand, it would be a question of participating to the greatest
possible extent in a divine vision which gathers in depth all the physical
causes in the unity of a cosmic present.... On the other hand, however, it
is a question of willing the event whatever it may be, without any
interpretation, thanks to a 'usage of interpretations' which accompanies
the event ever since its first actualization, assigning to it the most limited
present possible (144).
The ability to restrain oneself to the thought of the "most limited present possible"
by reevaluating, renewing, and restoring limitations on the self is the same kind of ethical
process targeted by certain of Sternberg's close-ups. When the entire body is concealed
outside of the frame, the viewer's impression of the body's freedom is no longer
determined by what is onscreen. This philosophy of choice can be enacted in the exercise
of the camera's dimensional shift, its absolute isolation of a single object or a restricted
view of the body.
The stylistic compression of spiritual values into an orderly space of investigation
reinforces the moment of prayer of Shanghai Express as a refined spiritual event. The
way that the close-up of Lily's folding and unfolding hands abstracts the spirituality of
this moment from the progression of action in the film situates the viewer in the event
that presents itself to Lily. By this utterly compressed visualization of prayer, Lily
174
confines the event to the smallest possible present. The viewer's awareness is also
compressed into that spiritualization of a moment, through the confinement of screen
space to her hands alone.
Yet a dissolve also expands this space to encompass a column of smoke from the
approaching train that will largely determine Doctor Harvey's fate as Chang's hostage.
That train will reveal whether the Chinese government will meet Chang's demands for
the release of Harvey. This is the present event as it is occurring that Lily wills whatever
it may be. Lily's hands reflect a moment of resolution to the state of affairs. She can do
nothing, but if she is a Stoic sage and a master of affection she finds herself free to
choose to will to do nothing.
This is not to say, however, that she will do nothing about her friend being
imprisoned. More to the point, she must accurately perceive her duty in relation to what
is happening. This does not preclude action. Deleuze isolates the key idea of sacrifice as
the mode of action for Sternberg's Lyrical Abstraction in Cinema 1.
The true choice, that which consists in choosing choice, is supposed to
restore everything to us. It will enable us to rediscover everything, in the
spirit of sacrifice, at the moment of the sacrifice or even before the
sacrifice is performed (116).
At the moment of prayer, Lily is indebted to Doctor Harvey for his having thrown
off Chang when Chang tried to force himself upon her in the rebel headquarters. After the
night of prayer, she offers herself to Chang, pledging to remain with him even after the
train leaves. In return, Doctor Harvey will be released unharmed.
175
It is already rumored amongst the busybodies of the train that Shanghai Lily
remembered by Doctor Harvey as his Madelinehas been "living by her wits" and
Parson Carmichael briefly references the case of a close friend who she drove to ruin.
Now she must apply her wits to the problem of Mr. Chang for the sake of reciprocating
Doc's noble sacrifice in rescuing her. Adherence to duty in this case may very well mean
that she will never see her beloved Doctor Harvey again, but what she loses in sacrificing
the object of being with Doctor Harvey, she gains in nobility of self.
The next day, Lily's action emerges out of her night of prayer in the same way
Marcus Aurelius's aphorism describes the link between an internal reservation of
affection and a power that leaps up in strength out of its own internal control:
The sovereign power within, in its natural state, so confronts what comes
to pass as always to adapt itself readily to what is feasible and present to it.
This is because it puts its affection upon no material of its own choice;
rather it sets itself upon its objects with a reservation, and then makes the
opposition which encounters it into material for itself. It is like a fire,
when it masters what falls into it.... [When one adds such an amount of
wood] whereby a little taper would have been put out... a bright fire very
quickly appropriates and devours what is heaped upon it, and leaps up
higher out of those very obstacles (23, IV. 1).
Aurelius describes the power of the self as, first and foremost, the ability to
maintain a "reservation" of "affection" from the objects it sets upon. The sovereign
power of the self is constituted only in the choice to reserve affection. To put one's own
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self above all other "material" is to protect "affection" from the outside world. In this
way, the self is even reinforced and strengthened by all that oppose it. The self
appropriates that which resists spiritual freedom. It alters the force of resistance, absorbs
it, and converts it to strength within itself.
It is hardly out of unrestrained passion but rather out of pure spiritual
determination that Lily acts when she enters Chang's makeshift office the next morning.
She argues for Harvey's life and attempts to pull a gun from the table to shoot Chang.
This explosion is too forceful to be calculated dissimulation, but neither is it pure mad
passion.
Lily's spirit "leaps up higher" in duty as she acts as if on the edge of a knife. A
power that emerges from her night of prayer brings her to sacrifice herself for the sake of
Doctor Harvey. She convinces Chang to exchange her company for the release of Doctor
Harvey and to save him from Chang's threats to take Doctor Harvey's eyesight as
revenge before releasing him.
The events that follow the scene of prayer in Shanghai Express follow out the
strange implications of this Stoic logic of submitting to the natural reasonability of the
events that transpire. The reasonableness of nature takes its course for the good of all of
the characters except for Mr. Chang. Before the train leaves, he is murdered in revenge
by Hu Fei (Anna Mae Wong) who becomes a hero. She was the victim of Chang's
lasciviousness on the previous night. This allows just enough time for Harvey to retrieve
Lily from the rebel headquarters and for the train to get on to Shanghai with the two
safely on board.
177
The Stoic reconciliation to events, although it is a refusal to choose this or that
object or aim, isat its bestthe constant maintenance of the possibility of choice and in
this sense is the same as what Deleuze in Cinema 1 refers to as "the spiritual space where
what we choose is no longer distinguishable from the choice itself' (117). The choice is
the openness and acceptance of events as they might occur. Even when one is forced to
accept seemingly-intolerable circumstances, one still has the ability to choose one's
interior state, to choose a mode of existence that manifests "steadfast spiritual
determination."
Aurelius phrases the advantages of this philosophy in terms that are strikingly
similar to Pascal's wagerDeleuze's source text for the Lyrical Abstraction of Robert
Bresson (Cinema 1 114). Aurelius claims that one has everything to gain in tranquility
from wagering that a divine will exists:
The Universal Nature felt an impulse to create a world; and now either
everything that comes into being arises by way of necessary consequence,
or even the sovereign ends to which the ruling principle of the world
directs its own impulse are devoid of reason. To remind yourself of this
will make you calmer in the face of many accidents (67: 7.75).
The advantage of this viewpoint comes in the form of the spiritual determination that is
gained from the faith in "the sovereign ends" of the "ruling principle of the world."
However, the vast majority of characters in Sternberg's films have not attained this
universal reason. The true choice is exceptional and Sternberg's staging reflects that. To
explain these cinematic spiritual exercises, it is necessary to reconstruct the stylistic
178
principles of Sternberg's spiritual exercises in a manner that extends outside of the
Lyrical Abstraction of Sternberg's close-ups, and outside of what appears in Deleuze's
purview when he discusses Sternberg.
179
3.2 Refraction of Bodies and Immanent Spiritual Light: Morocco/Blonde Venus
When I direct, I am completely cold.... There is no emotional relation to
my work.
The chicken does not talk about his own broth.
Josef Von Sternberg speaking in 1967 with Cineastes de Notre Temps
Bodies that are twisted, blocked, or obscured are so pervasive in Sternberg that it
is the exception rather than the rule that a body should be displayed facing the lens
unencumbered. In that sense, the positioning of the bodily postures of the actors in
Sternberg's films is organized in a way that is true to the rarity with which an individual
might access or experience true freedom in the Stoic sense.
97
This twisting and blocking
of the bodies of the actors is designed to deal with the problem relating cinematic form to
the Stoic goal of the regulation of affect that is articulated in the opening intertitles of
Sternberg's first film, The Salvation Hunters. "There are important fragments of life that
have been avoided by the motion picture because Thought is concerned and not the
Body." Cinema tends to neglect ideas in favor of the body.
98
97
If Sternberg were a reader of Spinoza as well as the Stoics, he would only have had to
turn to the concluding words of Spinoza's Ethics to find that
the wise man, in so far as he is regarded as such, is scarcely at all
disturbed in spirit. ... If the way I have pointed out as leading to this result
seems exceedingly hard, it may nevertheless be discovered. Needs must it
be hard, since it is so seldom found. How would it be possible, if salvation
were ready to our hand, and could without great labor be found, that it
should be by almost all men neglected? But all things excellent are as
difficult as they are rare. (270-1: 5.14)
98
The film is "dedicated to the derelicts of the earth," and begins with,
180
It is easy to display the body in the throes of emotion. Hence, cinema has
appealed to emotions of the Body at the expense of Thought and at the expense of the
"steadfast internal determination" that might control the emotions. However, it is very
difficult to direct the body into behaviors that authentically convey these internal ideas of
the true choice, of freedom, and of Sternberg's idiosyncratic idea of faith.
The bodies of the actors are more often shown within the obstacles and awkward
stage directions that Sternberg claims to have laid out to make things difficult for the
actors. Sternberg explained in a 1967 interview for the French television series, Cineastes
de Notre Temps, that
the actor when left alone, to walk through an empty room is foolish, you
have to have interference ... when he walks through a door he should have
to bend ... and he has many props and many interferences. Everything is
made to give the greatest amount of interest to the actor's behavior. ... I
spent a great deal of time making it very difficult for an actor to work.
This seems to be very evident in my films.
Shanghai Express begins with the cluttering encumbrances of the crowd of the
train station" and the stable-like arrangements of the windows of the train constraining
Foreward: There are important fragments of life that have been avoided by
the motion picture because Thought is concerned and not the Body.
Thought can create and destroy nationsand it is all the more powerful
because it is born of suffering, lives in silence, and dies when it has done
its work. Our aim has been to photograph a thoughtA though that guides
humans who live close to the earthwhose lives are simplewho begin
nowhere and end nowhere. The Thought.
99
In her discussion of "The Use of the Frame," Carole Zucker lists clutter as "a constant
property" of Sternberg's films. "Sternberg chooses to deny the frame's capacity for deep
181
virtually all of the characters. Once the train starts moving, Shanghai Lily and Hu Fei are
the most remarkably lens-oriented of characters unnerved, by the judgments and gossip
of the train that are being focused on them. So at the beginning of the journey of
Shanghai Express, it is Lily and Hu Fei who are depicted in freedom facing the camera
directly and staged as if with the ability to move towards the camera/viewer.
However, just before the night of prayer when Doc is taken prisoner, Lily's
movement becomes more restricted and she falters for a moment. She paces back and
forth as if suddenly completely disturbed. When Carmichael intervenes to tell her to pull
herself together and pray, his positioning as he insists on God's continued openness to
her is the most free and lens-oriented that he receives at any point in the film. He helps to
restore her faith, and in the process, his previous judgmental attitude towards her
reputation is altered.
In Deleuze's lectures on cinema prior to the publication of Cinema 1 (La Voix de
Gilles Deleuze en Ligne) he was grappling with this aspect of Sternberg's staging.
Working from his own viewing of Sternberg's films as well as from Louis Audibert's
article on The Scarlet Empress and Claude Ollier's article on Anatahan, Deleuze was
sorting out the functional effect created by the way that Sternberg's actors rarely faced
the camera. In the lectures, the orientation of the body of the actor or actress in close-up
space. He withholds depth by insistently drawing the eye to the frame's foreground....
The congestion and flatness confound our expectations of habitable space" (20).
However, clutter is only one piece of a wider strategy. As Zucker writes, depth is
minimized, but clutter is opposed to the clarity and refinement of certain close-ups that
are free of clutter. To generalize "a sense of suffocation" (21) as an invariable
characteristic of all of the images of Sternberg's fils would miss the moments when a
peculiar sense of freedom does suddenly explode upon the scene.
182
relative to the camera is crucial, but this aspect of Sternberg's style is omitted from what
appears in Cinema 1.
On February 23, 1982, Deleuze explained that in typical close-ups, unlike in
Sternberg, the orientation of the body towards the camera sets up a situation where the
actor is "face to face" with the viewer. Such positioning, particularly in shot-reverse-shot,
guarantees a "reflection" of emotion from the actor to the viewer. Deleuze had already
mentioned earlier in the lecture that he did not believe that the direct address of the
camera alerts the viewer to the falseness of cinema's illusion in the same way that
Brechtian theories valued this technique. The face-to-face effect of orienting the actor
towards the camera does not necessarily break the cinematic fourth wall.
Instead, for Deleuze any close-up where the actor very nearly faces the camera
could just as well be called a regard camera, or in English, direct-address. The product is
a reflection of gazes with the viewer. Deleuze continues,
I say for the sake of convenience that in the ordinary close-up there is a
total reflection or short reflection and on the whole, there isnot identity,
but an affinity or an assimilation of the point of view, the perspective [of
the camera] and the point of view of the spectator. Therefore yes, there is a
kind of face to face, a kind of face to face that defines the conditions of the
reflection.
Deleuze's point in describing these ordinary situations is that Sternberg overwhelmingly
avoids these reflections that are proper to the direct or near-direct address of the typical
close-up.
183
This preliminary discussion of the reflection of the near-direct address that
characterizes the ordinary close-up is Deleuze's way of trying to set Sternberg apart from
the shot-reverse-shot system that depends on these reflections. In Sternberg's films, there
are close-ups that do something different. There are close-ups that "refract" rather than
reflect the gaze of the viewer.
Imagine now ... there are a certain number ofnot all, but a certain
number ofSternberg's close-upsimagine now that the camera takes
the face in close-up from an altogether different point of view, that of a
spectator who is called to see it... I see a face in close-up, but it was shot
in relation to my own position, it was taken much higher and a little to the
left. It's true that it is a close-up, that I see a face, but what is it? It is a
space of disequilibrium, disequilibrium set up between the image and the
sight of the image that is going to be the effect of refraction. And now
understand. I am finishing up. It's really not clear, I can see that.
So, Deleuze conceives of this effect of "refraction" in Sternberg in terms of a
disjunction between the look of the spectator and that of the camera. The relation
between image and spectator shifts from the relationship of reflection that they have to
one another in a film dominated by shot-reverse-shot. This disequilibriumthat could be
achieved by a number of methods, here Deleuze describes the avoidance of anything
close to direct addresswould then reposition the viewer in another space. Instead of a
reflection of the gaze back to the spectator, there is a refraction of the gaze into a space
that is totally other than where the spectator is sitting.
184
This is the idea of a folly-transcendent dimensional shift, that dimension of
another order that Deleuze extracts from Balazs, or the dimension of another order of
controlled affection from Stoicism. Already in the lectures, Deleuze is working on
developing the stylistic potential of the close-up to a spiritual or ethical principle. The
conflict between camera angle and gaze may have the potential to refract the viewer's
awareness into a transcendent spiritual dimension. Deleuze was attempting to work with
the idea of the orientation of Sternberg's actors in terms of a space of affection that
transcends not only filmic space, but the viewer's own position in the audience.
Even upon closer inspection, Deleuze seems to be right that Sternberg's formal
refusal of the shot-reverse-shot system is designed to achieve a transformed sense of the
self, or of affection, in relation to the rest of the audience and in relation to the image.
However, there seem to have been three problems with this characterization of the
orientation of Sternberg's bodies towards the camera. First, Sternberg's avoidance of the
direct "reflection" of the face towards the camera and the orientation of bodies is not
total. As Deleuze concedes, "not all" of Sternberg's close-ups exhibit this refraction.
Secondly, the discussion from the lectures is also too dependent on generalized
statements about close-ups in Sternberg without being tied to many specific moments.
Deleuze does not make entirely clear the links between the significance of situations in
which Sternberg's close-ups reflect and when they refract. This problem has its genesis in
the form of Audibert's article upon which Deleuze was relying in the lectures.
Ultimately, it seems that the question was not resolved enough to be fully elaborated in
185
Cinema 1. None of this discussion of regard camera nor of Audibert's article appears in
the published study.
Finally, Deleuze was discussing only close-ups. This discussion of orientation
towards the camera is too formally restricted to include the way that it plays out in
medium and long shots. After all, there is nothing that would prevent character
orientation towards the camera from exhibiting in medium and even long shots the same
patterns it does in close-ups. Since Deleuze was working on the very idea of affection
which is formally linked to the close-up, he seems to have restricted his analysis to close-
ups.
There is a wider pattern over the course of Sternberg's films that is missed if one
focuses on close-ups alone. In fact, the turning of heads and bodies and Sternberg's
reticence in orienting the bodies of actors towards the camera extends Sternberg's
spiritual exercises into medium and long shots as well. The rationale for this technique
revolves around a play with nearly-direct address. The principle that organizes this play is
that the character exhibits the most freedom when he or she faces the camera
unobstructed.
Sternberg's staging is devised so that in comparison to the moment of true choice
other bodies seem constrained. The bodily positions of certain characters in certain shots,
and especially in close-ups, can appear uniquely free because the vast majority of
Sternberg's bodies are twisted or blocked from the viewer. The predominance of
character positioning in what Deleuze called a refraction of the gaze allows for the
intensification of moments when the actors' bodies are oriented towards the camera.
186
These intensified moments are still not ordinary moments of reflection, but they are
moments that, true to the spiritual power of the close-up, are calculated to draw the
viewer's attention to their own individual capacity for spiritual freedom. Orientation of
the actor that nears direct address is reserved for these rare moments.
Hence, in Shanghai Express, another moment of true choice is expressed with the
bodies of Lily and Doc positioned with a direct avenue of movement towards the viewer.
After Lily's wager and her sacrifice succeeds and the train escapes the rebels, Lily
continues to need this kind of spiritual determination even though she and Harvey are
both in safety on the train. She continues to advance this doctrine because there is still a
lesson about faith that Doctor Harvey needs to learn and that Lily teaches him by
demonstrating her own faith in herself.
She will not allow Parson Carmichael to explain to Harvey the nobility of her
decision to join Chang as a bargain for Harvey's eyesight. She forces Harvey to refuse
judgment of her on principle and thereby to live in his own "most limited present
possible." For a while, Harvey continues to act out of his judgments of Lily's actions
events from the past that certainly do not depend on his own control. Even as the train
continues in the last segment of the journey towards Shanghai, he is still struggling.
Lily steps out into the hallway of the train and the camera tracks in on her. Once
she gets to Doc's cabin, Doc's positioning in this scene is a demonstration of a condition
of near freedom. He is verging on a breakthrough, facing the camera. Yet, his head still
awkwardly nods back towards Lily in a posture expressing an inability to fully give over
to the true choice, constantly interrogating her about why, if she was just going to give
187
herself to Mr. Chang, she prayed for Harvey the night beforethe one mysterious detail
about what has transpired that Parson Carmicheal reveals to Harvey.
The idea of choice that Lily initiates in Doc is the same one that she chose: to
refuse aims or ownership of any other person as an object. In offering herself to Chang in
exchange for Harvey's freedom, she chose the kind of duty and authentic love that is free
of judgment of anything that is outside of one's own control. Anything outside of one's
own pure unshakeable reserve of affection is not the object of true choice.
In short, Harvey needs to attend to evaluating and controlling his own emotions
rather than to evaluating hers. Rather than asking if she were untrue to him, he should
heed Aurelius's aphorism,
Another does wrong. What is that to me? Let him look to it; he has his
own disposition, his own activity. I have now what Universal Nature wills
me to have, and I do what my own nature wills me to do (41: V.25).
The lesson that Harvey has to learn from Lily is the meaning of the true choice of
self that leaves the dispositions of others outside of one's own core values. Elsewhere in
Aurelius, even when one asks of the actions of others, "to what end does this man do
this?" Aurelius still adds, "And begin with your-self and first examine your-self."
100
Lily turns away from Doc's interrogations and returns to her compartment. There,
she looks upwards into the light, hand raised to her face. She assumes a free and
independent pose with her gaze uplifted. The way this shot is intercut with Harvey links
100
The full aphorism reads, "Accustom yourself in the case of whatever is done by
anyone, so far as possible to inquire within yourself: 'to what end does this man do this?'
And begin with yourself and first examine yourself' (100: 10.37).
188
these disjunct spaces. Here Harvey faces the camera straight on. The conversion is
underway.
Through the the way that editing links these two separate spaces, it is conveyed
that Doc has "discovered the spiritual opening which overcomes all its formal obligations
and material constraints by a theoretical or practical evasion" (Cinema 1 117). What
Deleuze writes further about Lily's attitude seems to intimate the effect that her behavior
has on Doc.
She has chosen on a single condition: not justifying herself, that of not
having to justify herself, to give accounts.... If the others maintain the
affect as actuality in an established order or disorder, the character who
makes true choice raises the affect to its pure power or potentiality
(115).
101
By refusing to give Harvey the explanation that he wants, Lily shares the internal
reservation of affection that is central to Stoic thought with him. She challenges Harvey
to resist caring about what other people think in order to find faith in internal self-
sufficiency.
This principle of minimizing the freedom of movement of onscreen bodies is also
well illustrated by the interrelationship of Amy Jolly (Marlene Dietrich) and Legionnaire
Tom Brown (Gary Cooper) in Morocco. The two meet on the first night of Jolly's
performance at Lo Tinto's (Paul Porcasi) club. Jolly invites Tom Brown to her apartment
101
The text of the English translation reads "he" but it is clear from the French that the
referent is feminine. The description refers to Lily and not Doc (L'lmage-Mouvement
162).
189
after the show, and this begins a series of sacrifices whereby they alternate in giving up
on their love affair out of duty demanded by their ethics of choice.
First, Tom Brown demonstrates his respect for Jolly by graciously leaving her
apartment, bidding her goodbye forever. She changes her mind about inviting him over
and asks him to leave upon discovering that he has been with other showgirls before her
in the same apartment. Jolly runs after him, but then the two are interrupted by attackers
hired by Brown's jealous former lover, Madame Cesare (Eve Sothern), the wife of
Brown's commander.
Then it is Jolly's turn to sacrifice as Brown faces a court marshal for defending
them against the attackers. So, in the next noble sacrifice, Jolly must offer herself to the
rich La Bessiere (Adolphe Menjou), with his many society connections. La Bessiere
persuades Brown's commanding officer to pardon Brown. As Brown is being released,
Brown and Jolly plan to run away together so that Brown will not have to go to the front
and fight. The order is Cesare's (Ullrich Haupt) last resort in order to get even with
Brown without a court marshal.
Now it will be Brown's turn again. Brown comes to Jolly's dressing room the
night after his release, so that they can plan to leave together after her performance.
Before he arrives, when La Bessiere is in the room, the wires and light bulb hang as
obstructions in front of the older man and the woman in need. It is crowded even in the
dressing room.
Once Brown enters and La Bessiere leaves the room, things change. The camera's
view is no longer obstructed by the wires. They are away from the crowding effects that
190
were present when La Bessiere was in the room. In this scene, the figures of Brown and
Jolly enter into a visual relationship that plays with attachment and obstruction in ways
that were not present in the depiction of Jolly and La Bessiere. In their embrace, the mass
of Brown's body clearly obstructs Jollyit is to him that she is attached, not to La
Bessiere. La Bessiere stood, correspondingly, not in front of her but to one side.
However, even in this embrace the Brown over/in front of Jolly dynamic begins to
shift as Jolly's strikingly white hand comes around Tom Brown's back. The shift is fully
accomplished when the mirror enters into play to fascinating effect. Brown's back is to
us and he is in front of her in real space. In the mirror, Jolly is in front of him.
The reversal corresponds with the shift in power dynamics entailed by the
sacrifice that she promises: to leave aside all of La Bessiere's offers to marry and protect
her and to instead run away with Brown. This would make Brown beholden to her. She
would become an encumbrance upon his sense of duty. She leaves the room in a position
that exerts her freedom of movement toward the camera, firmly facing towards the
viewer as she steps backwards out of the room and closes the door.
Brown realizes that this escape plan is a trap for them both. As he tries on La
Bessiere's top hat and understands that he cannot compete, or would not want to join in a
competition with La Bessiere for possession of Amy Jolly. He would have been asking a
sacrifice of her, to accompany a soldier in desertion. He would not be able to give her
anything that would save her from being a "suicide passenger"
102
or rejoining "the
i no
Earlier in the film, the captain of the ferry arriving in Morocco tells La Bessiere that
they call performing girls on their way to Morocco "suicide passengers."
191
foreign legion of women."
103
It would have been foolish to bring her on such a flight
because it is thoroughly lacking in nobility to attempt something beyond one's power and
thereby further inflict one's own suffering on a friend.
In this moment of true choice, Brown now faces forward clear of obstructions
with the help of the mirror. His blunt writing on the mirror, "I changed my mind," breaks
from what would have been their common endeavor. He thus frees them both. He does
not have the means to be responsible for her happiness. He sacrifices their future together
so that neither she nor he will have to sacrifice further. In the moment of sacrifice, he
throws aside the hat that temporarily obscured him, he purifies himself of the possessive
and paternal attitudes that he perceives as the mark of the Morocco elites.
This staging can be viewed as a continuous extension of Deleuze's discussion of
Sternberg's principles of light, the version of the idea reflection and refraction that
appears in Cinema 1 purged of any considerations of direct address. As the discussion of
Sternberg's unique use of refraction appears in Cinema 1, Deleuze relies much more
heavily on Goethe's dualistic theory of the visual perception of light. He contrasts the
light of Sternberg's Lyrical Abstraction to the use of shadow and depth in expressionism.
The "pure, immanent, spiritual light" (117) of Lyrical Abstraction relies on one aspect of
Goethe's theory of light while the shadows of German Expressionism rely on the other.
104
103
When Brown visits her apartment, Jolly compares the wandering flight that brought
her to Morocco to being part of a "foreign legion of women."
104
This Lyrical Abstraction is differentiated from the expressionist dominance of
shadowy depth. Both are referred to different aspects of Goethe's dual theory of light. In
Deleuze's contrasting idea of expressionism, light and shadow are autonomous
competing forces. From the perspective of Lyrical Abstraction, light is dominant and is
only subjected to variations in intensity secondarily. In the first part of Goethe's theory of
192
This discussion of light parallels the contrast between free bodies in the moment
of true choice and constrained and blocked bodies turned away from the camera.
Sternberg's bodies are more often than not refracted. By his arrangement of characters
with their heads turned away from the camera or with our view of them obstructed for the
vast majority of the film, bodies are rarely offered in a manner that is straight, direct,
pure, and free are reserved for the true choice. Sternberg's cinematic spiritual exercises
limit those moments of pure freedom of the body, especially those moments when an
actor demonstrates the ability to move along a straight line towards the viewer. There is a
certain immanent force of freedom in movement, or potential movement, that directly
addresses the camera. Such movement does radiate a "pure, immanent, spiritual light."
However, Sternberg seems to avoid overstatement even within this technique. For
instance, he defers the face to the pure white of Lily's hands beaming themselves
outward from the surface of the screen in Shanghai Express. The same kind of
understatement is evident in the visual treatment of the resolution of the love triangle at
the end of Morocco.
Brown's choice to toss away the hat also earns him the nobility characteristic of
the Stoic self through dis-identification with the false nobility of Morocco's upper
color, color is itself a product of the shadowing of different wavelengths of light. In its
other aspect, light is autonomous from shadow, subject to variation only through
refractions and changes of direction. The polarity between Ford's romanticism (and
expressionism) and Sternberg's Lyrical Abstraction turns up again in this opposition.
Ford's depth lifts the encompassing hero from dissolution into the mysterious, shadowy
atmosphere of depth in order to encompass the imagined will of the community
enshrouded in shadow and mystery. Sternberg makes light emerge from an image of a
single individual's perfected autonomy.
193
classes. In his moment of sacrifice, Brown rejects the careless deployment of his own
power over Jolly. He would be careless if he convinced Jolly to run away with him. This
would be the kind of act he associates with the upper classeswith the exception perhaps
of La Bessiere.
La Bessiere also slowly works towards the true choice of sacrificing his love
affair with Jolly. From their first scenes together, the relationship between La Bessiere
and Jolly is marked by a visual antagonism. When they are depicted together they are
face to face. Their two bodies do not overlap but their heads turn away from the camera
to look at one another. La Bessiere and Jolly merely distract one another from the posture
of true choice. This stands in contrast to the repeated positioning of the bodies of Amy
Jolly and Tom Brown such that they directly entangle and interfere one in front of the
othereven when they are not embracing.
La Bessiere gets the closest to constraining Jolly in the scene before the night of
their engagement. The pearls he has bought her are strung around her neck like a leash.
This connection is a feeble one and Jolly will accidentally rend the string of pearls later
when she flees the celebratory dinner to look for Tom Brown among the returning
legionnaires. Even the embrace of Jolly and La Bessiere here is depicted with their bodies
side by side in relation to the camera.
Her figure occludes that of La Bessiere for a moment, but it is only in the dining
room when he reports the news that Cesare was killed, causing them both to recall Tom
Brown. Her continued love for Tom Brown gives her a power over/in front of La
Bessiere. After Jolly returns from fleeing the dinner party to enquire about the
194
whereabouts of Tom Brown from the other returning legionnaires, the same adversarial
positioning continues.
Finally, La Bessiere will make his sacrifice. He confesses to the guests that he
loves Jolly. Because he loves Jolly, he will drive her to find the man whom she loves. In
this act of sacrifice, when La Bessiere agrees to drive Jolly, he is portrayed actively in
medium shot facing the camera.
When they do eventually find Brown a few towns over, Jolly only finds out that
Brown is still thinking about her by seeing that he has etched a heart with her name in it
on the table in a bar. He never expected her to see it and he never expected to see her
again. He thought that his sacrifice was complete. Understanding this, she can only love
Brown more, especially because she wants nothing to do with the high society that she
has joined reluctantly thinking that Brown was no longer interested in her.
Brown gains back in nobility of self all that which he sacrificed for the good of
his friend. As Deleuze writes of the true choice, it "is supposed to restore everything" to
us that was sacrificed. The same adherence to true duty and love causes Jolly to give up a
life of wealth with La Bessiere for an undetermined march into the desert. Amy Jolly
bolts into the desert to join the women following the legionnaires. Rather than a sacrifice
of herself for the cause of moral altruism, she follows Brown because she could not live
with herself, knowing that she allowed Brown to give her up. The good life with La
Bessiere is not worth losing Brown.
This sacrifice for the sake of her own nobility of self culminates in the final shot
of the pure, immanent, spiritual light reflected from the desert. This final moment is
195
prepared by the orientation of bodies throughout the film, but the final shot empties the
screen of bodies and presents the viewer with a space that is as purely white as the screen
could be. The landscape of sand dunes beams forth the pure free light of Jolly's true
choice to sacrifice the good life with La Bessiere.
The key distinction of Sternberg's vision of "sacrifice" from what in his
meditations he decries as the "moss-covered themes of love and sacrifice" in
Hollywood
105
is that Sternberg's sacrifices are made for the self. In Sternberg, the
sacrifice is an action taken for the salvation of the self, rather than something done to the
self for the sake of a love affair or for someone else's sake.
These sacrifices of Morocco are not so different from the sacrifice of George
Bancroft's characters. Thunderbolt in Thunderbolt (1929), Bull Weed in Underworld
(1927), and Bill in Docks of New York (1929) have to make sacrifices similar to those
made by Jolly and Brown in Morocco. The bodies of Bancroft's characters similarly
break free of the obstructions and face forward in that key moment when they finally
make good.
The ending of Underworld is particularly striking as Bull Weed turns away from
his ex-girlfriend Feathers (Fay Wray) and his best friend Rolls Royce (Clive Brooks). He
105
Sternberg describes his appropriation of the idea of sacrifice,
The film was called Underworld... I had provided the work with many an
incident to placate the public, not ignoring the moss-covered themes of
love and sacrifice. Human kindness was demonstrated by showing a
murderer feeding a hungry kitten.... In spite of all the concessions I made
to popular taste, I had fooled neither the author nor the sales force.
Without a moment's hesitation they had detected a sinister artistic purpose
and had recognized it for what it wasan experiment in photographic
violence and montage (216).
196
leaves them to their lives together, turning himself over to the police and to a death
sentence. He escaped from prison to take revenge on them for betraying him, but Bull
finds out that they tried to sacrifice their relationship to break him out of prison. They
have taught him that he can allow them to keep their happiness together, gaining all the
more in nobility for what he has given up. He bares his body towards the camera, arms
out to the sides in a pose that isin a strangely understated wayChrist-like.
For Sternberg, the love triangle is convenient for demonstrating sacrifices to duty
for the sake of the self. One can trace the sacrifices that circulate amidst the different
instantiations of these love triangles as their corresponding power dynamics are
performed in staging. Specifically, the configuration of the older man, younger man, and
the woman caught between them is present in Sternberg beginning at least with
Underworld (1927), and appears again and again up until Sternberg's last film with
Dietrich, The Devil is a Woman (1935).
In Devil is a Woman, Dietrich's Concha is not the devil. The title was chosen by
someone other than Sternberg. She actually manipulates the aggressive desires of the two
men who are fighting over her in order to send Antonio (Cesar Romero) safely away into
exile. She then returns out of duty to take care of the wounded Don Pasqual (Lionel
Atwill).
Thematically the love triangle also works as a means of contrasting Sternberg to
Ford, at least to The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. In Underworld, the sacrifice to save
the older man is made collaboratively by the younger Rolls Royce and Feathers, a
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sacrifice that inspires Bull Weed to turn himself in to the law and leave the two to their
lives together.
In Liberty Valance, the choice between the older Doniphon and the younger
Stoddard seems very much to have been made for Hallie. Admittedly, there is a
competition of sacrifices between Stoddard and Doniphon. Stoddard risks his life in the
duel against Liberty Valance, then Doniphon pretends to have arrived too late, thereby
leaving Hallie and Stoddard to their lives together. These sacrifices are made for Hallie
and for the community.
While the final sacrifice of Bull Weed in Underworld seems to mirror that of
Doniphon, leaving the younger couple to their happiness together, the motivations are
altogether different. What matters for Doniphon, what makes murder something he can
live withor so he claimsis that "Hallie's happy." His sacrifice imposes a general will
onto the pitiable object. For Bull Weed, giving himself over to a death sentence is a part
of the game of alternating sacrifices towards greater nobility. His ex-girlfriend, Feathers,
and his right-hand man, Rolls Royce, had sacrificed their relationship to break him out of
jail, so he must sacrifice for them, for the sake of his own nobility.
In Morocco, Amy Jolly bravely plunges into the desert in this game of sacrifices.
In Liberty Valance, Hallie is psychologically corralled into a garden to mate with
Stoddard. There is no final deal made between La Bessiere and Brownin fact, this was
just the kind of thing Brown resisted when he tried on the top hat in Jolly's dressing
room, scribbling on the mirror only to let her know, "I changed my mind." In Liberty
Valance, Doniphon all but deeds Hallie over to Stoddard with his signature on a contract.
198
Hallie's regret at the end of the film seems to illustrate that there was always
some lingering doubt about whether the right decision had been made for her. The
apparent benefits that Stoddard brings of literacy, wealth, and travel are all undercut by
Doniphon's death and her final melancholy in leaving the territory is expressed in the lie
that she has had to tell herself in order to authorize her lifestyle after leaving Shinbone.
"It used to be a wilderness and now it's a garden." At the end of Devil is a Woman,
Concha retains the freedom not to leave with the young man, Antonio, and to return to
the older man Pasquale. Hallie, in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, clearly gave up
those alternativesor was forced to give them up.
Sternberg's visual style is also at the opposite pole from Ford's. In Ford, cues that
extend the two-dimensional space into the sublime illusion of deep space intensify and
hierarchize the characters within. In Sternberg, the space between the lens and actor is a
space for play with the actor's potential for movement. Characters can entangle, distract,
and block one another from demonstrating freedom of movement towards the camera, but
this is totally different from Ford's sublime hierarchy in deep space.
Sternberg's visual means of conveying the final sacrifice became more and more
subtle with the Dietrich heroines. What could be more evocative of the freedom of the
dimensional shift of the true choice than to evacuate the screen of bodies altogether to
how the immanent spiritual light reflected off of a desert dune as in the ending of
Morocco'? However, there is an equally-subtle effect in the shots consisting of the close-
ups of Dietrich's praying hands in Shanghai Express. As will be introduced in the next
section, the shot of the child's hands in front of the crowd of the carousel in the final shot
199
of Blonde Venus serves a similar function of understatement in conveying Stoic spiritual
freedom.
3.3 Distinguishing the Self from the Crowd in Shanghai Express and Blonde Venus
Failure of CINEMA. Ludicrous disproportion between immense
possibilities and the result: the Star system.
Robert Bresson (47)
Never say of anything, "I have lost it," but rather "I have given it back."
Has your child died? It has been given back. Has your wife died? She has
been given back. Has your land been taken from you? Well, that too has
been given back. "But the one who took it from me is a bad man!" What
concern is it of yours by whose hand the Giver asks for its return? For the
time that these things are given to you, take care of them as things that
belong to another, just as travelers do at an inn.
Epictetus (Seddon 65:11)
Sternberg's ethics takes on a more specific meaning when considered within the
context of Hollywood marketing and star-making. The ascesis of Sternberg's films had to
confront a cinema industry whose business was based on the public eroticization of
bodies and faces. Audiences judged personalities based on their purportedly-unique
abilities to display authentic emotions and passions.
Sternberg's exercises are calculated to advance a spiritual technique that involved
a management of desire, an erotics, confined within the dimensions of the subject itself.
In Sternberg's ethics, authenticity was not unrestrained expression and catharsis, but
control. Authenticity was not personality, but spirituality in an idiosyncratic Stoic sense.
When Foucault described the Stoic self, it was distinguished from the self as the
object of knowledge in Platonic thought, and equally from the self that was the subject of
obedience to external authority that Foucault described as predominating in much of
Christian thought. The Stoic self, according to Foucault, was a product of principles that
200
were composed of exercises and tests. However, this philosophical program did not entail
the self as an object of knowledge as in the Socratic dictum from the Alcibiades "Know
thyself." Nor did it entail the subordination of self-knowledge to a higher authority.
106
Foucault placed Stoicism in opposition to his characterization of truth based on the
confession.
Richard DeCordova borrowed Foucault's idea of truth based in confession to
describe the role of truth in fan magazine discourse of the American silent era. Star
personality, according to DeCordova, was based on the expression of true emotion in the
film and on the truth of the star offered in the confessions to the authorities of fan
magazine discourse external to the film.
107
Star discourse always promised to reveal an
internal secret to the audience, the truth in the form of a confession.
106
This distinction runs throughout the lectures from 1981-2 and appears elsewhere but is
well condensed in the lectures of March 3,1982.
The practice of the self in the Hellenistic and Roman epoch, is very clearly
and precisely distinguished from Christian ascesis on a number of points.
First, the final, ultimate objective in the ascesis of the practice of the self is
evidently not self-renunciation. Rather, the objective is to fix yourself as
the end of your own existence, and to do this in the most explicit, intense,
continuous, and persistent way possible. Second, this philosophical ascesis
does not involve determining the order or sacrifices or renunciations you
must make of this or that part or aspect of your being. Rather, it involves
providing yourself with something you have not got, something you do not
possess by nature. It involves putting together a defensive equipment....
Third, it seems to me that the principle of this philosophical ascesis is not
the individual's submission to the law. Its principle is to bind the
individual to truth (Hermeneutics of the Subject 332).
107
DeCordova made this connection on the basis of Foucault's published History of
Sexuality alone, without the benefit of the College de France lectures that reveal much
more about Foucault's work on Stoic, Christian, and Platonic thought.
Foucault shows how sexuality has been constituted primarily as a problem
of truth in modern western society and notes the ways a "will to
knowledge" elicited concerning sexuality has become a particularly
201
Sternberg's Hellenistic principles naturally came into conflict with Hollywood's
deployment of techniques of authority, confession, and relations of obedience between
audience and star that still bore the outline of some of Foucault's ideas of the Christian
10S
self of obedience. The product of the techniques of Stoicism was the self s relation to
the self, not obedience to pastoral authority, nor the pursuit of the truth of the self.
In so far as truth is involved in this Stoic ethics, it is not the interior truth about a
self, but the ability of the self to participate in true discourse that mattered. This theme of
a conflict between group eroticism and private internal maintenance of control over one's
desires is treated most forcefully in the outright parody in the Scarlet Empress, but the
conflict runs throughout Sternberg's work.
The kind of pleasure that Sternberg was correcting with his spiritual exercises is
not simply a relation between the viewer and a body represented. At issue in the
formulation of the true choice was the kind of group ecstasy that Roland Barthes evoked
in "The Face of Garbo" entry in Mythologies.
privileged site of truth, in some contexts no doubt the ultimate truth. This
is certainly the case in the star system. This will to knowledge noted by
Foucault aptly describes the fan's intense and insistent involvement in
discovering the truth of the star's identity. And, as I hope I have
demonstrated, that truth is, at its limit, the truth of sexuality.... The will to
knowledge about sexuality, Foucault argues, has been constituted by two
related forms, each of which appears as a crucial component of star
discourse. The first is the constitution of the truth of sexuality as a
secret.... The second interrelated form supporting the will to knowledge of
sexuality was, for Foucault, the confession (141-2).
10R
Pierre Hadot criticized Foucault's rationale for drawing such distinctions between the
different types of cares of the self in platonic, Hellenistic, Christian, and Modern
philosophy. Whether the distinctions are entirely valid for classifying these different
periodizations was something that even Foucault did not assert with absolute certainty,
but we can still make use of the conceptual distinctions he made in describing the idea of
self that activates Sternberg's work.
202
Garbo still belongs to that moment in cinema when capturing the human
face still plunged audiences into the deepest ecstasy, when one literally
lost oneself in a human image as one would in a magic love potion, when
the face represented an absolute state of the flesh, which could be neither
reached nor renounced (56).
In Bardies's description, one seems to lose oneself not only in the human image, but in
the rest of the cinema audience's plunge into ecstasy. The crowd is what remains when
the object of desire, the "magic love potion" of the unique aura of a person, is located
completely out of reach.
The tuxedo number in Morocco is one of Sternberg's greatest gestures towards
the vulgarity towards which spectacle tends. This is true not in terms of what is being
represented, but in terms of what is being expressed. The way that the number obviously
marshals some form of bisexuality worked miracles for establishing Dietrich's star
identity in her first film in Hollywood. But, this performance is Amy Jolly's parody of
the elites of the audience.
"Dietrich's cross-dressing," recognized by Stanley Cavell (185) and what James
Naremore describes as
the way that the sequence explicitly introduces the theme of lesbianism,
eroticizing Dietrich's approach to women while devising fetishistic
strategies to reassure the movie audience that she is safely heterosexual
(145)
203
are both part Jolly's assault on the upper classes of the audience. She mimics the dress of
the crowds who are known to abuse performers in Lo Tinto's club. As La Bessiere
remarks, the audience's "usual refined courtesy" is to harass the performers. What seems
to have counted for Sternberg in this revolutionary tuxedo scene was an assault on the
vulgar group eroticism of the Morocco elites and their spectacle.
The way she kisses the young woman as she walks amongst the aristocratic
expatriates is a mockery of the vulgarity of the elite's false refinement. She can still
seduce a woman better than they can with all their money and patriarchal power. There is
a bisexuality here, but one in which her being less effeminateor at least better able to
seduce a womanthan the men of the upper echelons of the theater while still remaining
extremely feminine is an assault on those on the other side of the class divide who would
have relegated her to the role of a "suicide passenger."
Michel Foucault pointed out an important aspect of "the relationship to political
action" in the Stoic care of the self, which entailed that the self was not so much a
preparation for political action
109
but an act of distancing oneself from the crowd.
We should also remember that there is a second principle of limitation to
this generalization. This is that the effect, meaning, and aim of taking care
of oneself is to distinguish the individual who takes care of himself from
the crowd, from the majority, from the hoi poloi who are, precisely, the
people absorbed in everyday life. There will be an ethical divide then,
109
The Platonic care of the self defines the self as a preparation for political action. "You
remember that in Socrates, in the dialogue of the Alcibiades, it is quite clear that the care
of the self is an imperative addressed to those who wish to govern others and as an
answer to the question, 'how can one govern well?'" (Hermeneutics of the Subject 74).
204
which is entailed as a consequence of the principle "take care of yourself,"
[which in turn] can only be carried out by a moral elite and those with the
ability to save themselves (75).
The refusal of the shared emotions of the hoi poloi, the privileging of a moral
elitism over a rejected vulgar economic elitism, is written directly into this performance,
one of the most iconic performance scenes from Sternberg's work with Dietrich. Amy
Jolly's tuxedo addresses the power dynamics of the group eroticism of the spectacle by
its refusal of any duty to please the audience.
Instead she conveys to the crowd how little they please her, as if the crowd is
there to receive her mockery. This does not so much emphasize the masochism of the
audience. It emphasizes Jolly's own strength in the face of the pressures of the groupa
strength that Tom Brown appreciates.
Sternberg's outsider position relative to the erotics of Hollywood was recognized
in different ways by the history of American cinema studies. Sternberg was clearly
situated as an outlier by Laura Mulvey in relation to her structuralist framework of
voyeuristic male desire. The stage performances through which women's bodies are
displayed in Sternberg lacked a shot/reverse-shot structure.
According to Mulvey, it was through shot/reverse-shot that other classical
directorsparticularly Hitchcockmarked the gaze of a male character with whom the
viewer was guided to identify. Sternberg's films lacked a clear point of identification
within the fiction. This alternative, nonetheless, did not escape patriarchal structures of
205
the gaze. Women in Sternberg are still offered to the viewer but they are presented as "a
pure fetish."
110
Gaylyn Studlar gave a wholly different value to the kind of features to which
Mulvey referred as the pure fetishization of the image of Dietrich. Studlar looked for
structures that resisted fetishization altogether in favor of masochistic idealization of the
image of the powerful woman (In the Realm of Pleasure 43). She projects Deleuze's
reading of Masoch onto Sternberg. However, Sternberg's female protagonists are subject
to the goals of noble self-sacrifice as much as the male characters. There is a mutuality to
the game of sacrifices that does not constitute a reversal of gender hierarchy.
The allusions to erotic visual art in Sternberg's meditations hint that Sternberg
had views on sexuality that would have been considered radical for Hollywood audiences
adjusted to the production code.
111
He may have, for example, held the kind of sexually-
110
Mulvey situated Sternberg's alternative fetishism:
For [Sternberg] the pictorial space enclosed by the frame is paramount
rather than narrative or identification processes. While Hitchcock goes
into the investigative side of voyeurism, Sternberg produces the ultimate
fetish, taking it to the point where the powerful look of the male
protagonist (characteristic of traditional narrative film) is broken in favor
of the image in direct erotic rapport with the spectator. The beauty of the
woman as object and the screen space coalesce; she is no longer the bearer
of guilt but a perfect product, whose body, stylized and fragmented by
close-ups, is the content of the film, and the direct recipient of the
spectator's look.... There is little or no mediation of the look through the
eyes of the main male protagonist. On the contrary, shadowy presences
like La Bessiere in Morocco act as surrogates for the director, detached as
they are from audience identification.... There are other witnesses, other
spectators watching her on the screen, their gaze is one with, not standing
in for, that of the audience (841).
111
Erich Kastner, Goya, Aubrey Beardsley, Marquis de Bayros, Zille, Baudelaire,
Huysmans, and Felicien Rops are amongst the references that Sternberg uses in Fun in a
Chinese Laundry to describe his time in Weimar-era Berlin (228-31).
206
permissive viewpoint that could consider prostitution as a perfectly legitimate activity.
This is what seems to have been indicated in the outline for the lost film The Case of
Lena Smith.
Ornitz's second version is particularly interesting in its characterization of
Lenaand one wonders if Sternberg might have had a hand in this. "Lena
is an immigrant girl of Polish peasant stock; with native intelligence and
mother wit; a positive character.... With a peasant's forthrightness, she
makes the most of her splendid body. Lena has the European point of
viewa prostitute is a working woman. Lena has a good opinion of
herself. She provides well for her two loved onesher little boy and her
petted sweet-heart. She is... never a victim of lechering males. Rather,
men obey her" (Bergstrom, "The Sternberg Paradox" 59).
Even if one could claim that Sternberg's often-understated portrayal of prostitutes
seeks to legitimize a "European point of view" on sex work, there is still more to
Sternberg's treatment of women and sex in his films' spiritual exercises. Any libertinism
in Sternberg coexists with a morality that is hard to discern if the idea of erotics is
conceived of in terms of a dichotomy of sexual interdiction/transgression. The presence
of the European view that a "prostitute is a working woman" is tempered with an attitude
like that expressed by Epictetus
Once they reach the age of fourteen years, women are addressed by men
as 'madam'. Accordingly, when they see there is nothing else but pleasing
men with sex, they begin to use cosmetics and dress up, and to place all
207
their hopes in that. It is worth our while, then, to make sure they
understand that they are valued for ... their good behavior and self-respect
(141:40).
Frankness towards the sexuality of women does not replace an ethical program of self-
development, but for the Stoic Sternberg, the former would play a role in the
advancement of the latter. There is more going on in terms of calculated effects of the
film on the spectator than Studlar described.
These films do not pay homage to nature or political agendas but to
fantasy, to desire, and to the magical thinking of primary process.
Masochistic eroticism is formalized in an aesthetic that confers a
"spiritual" quality on violence and the excess of perversion by putting the
two "at the service of the senses" (91).
This generalization of Sternberg's films as pure sensualism and excessive homages to
fantasy and perversion seems incomplete. It seems downright off if one references films
before or the work with Dietrich. If this is all that Sternberg's work has to offer then the
films have little lasting value. Compared with the perversions of just a short list of
filmmakers like John Waters, Federico Fellini, Jess Francoor in Sternberg's time, Lon
Chaney or Todd Browningthe perversions of Sternberg's films seem rather weak. The
same goes all the more for a comparison of Sternberg with the perversions achieved by
the literature of Masoch or Sade. All achieved much greater perversion and sensualism
than Sternberg. This was not only because Sternberg was subject to the demands of the
MPAA.
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Perhaps Sternberg had internalized much of the Viennese writer Arthur
Schnitzler who, as John Baxter describes, Sternberg passionately admired before he
became a film maker.
112
However, Sternberg seems to have borrowed more from the
reflexivity of Schnitzler's Professor Bernardi or Schnitzler's puppet plays than from the
blatant portrayal of sex proper to the Schnitzler of La Ronde. More than exposing a
hidden underbelly of society marked by sexual behavior where people of all types and
classes copulate apart from morality, Sternberg's films take on the question of the power
dynamics and erotics of the spectacle itself.
As Professor Bernardi uses hypnosis as a reflexive element within the story or as
Schnitzler's puppet plays use puppets to reflect on spectacle and the audience, there is a
goal common to all Sternberg's films to redirect the audience's attention in relation to the
spectacle. Sternberg described this goal when he claims to have constructed his final film
Anatahan "so as to take the audience away from the film itself, from the motion picture,
and to think about their own reactions, to stop them from looking at the film."
113
Sternberg is a moralist of the spectacle.
Janet Bergstrom applied the alternative configurations that Mulvey saw in
Sternberg to F.W. Murnau's women, but she modified Mulvey's assertions by adopting a
distinction from Freud's early description of the basic structures of the subject, Three
Essays on the Theory of Sexuality from 1906. Freud distinguished between active and
passive aims that the subject may hold regarding an object. Such a distinction provides
112
According to Baxter, "For the rest of [Sternberg's] life, an inscribed photograph of
Schnitzler hung in his office. Of [Schnitzler's] boldly sexual plays and tales, he said,
Schnitzler 'was the first one to give me artistic courage'" (33-4).
113
Interview for the French Television's Cineastes de Notre Temps from 1966.
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for a wider array of spectator types than the single possibility allowed by Mulvey's idea
of the gaze.
If the distinction between active and passive aims can be applied to the cinema
viewer, not every cinematic gaze is bound within the same parameters. Certainly not all
viewing pleasure is derived from the sadistic need to actively dominate an image as in
Mulvey's picture of the male spectator. Indeed, the possibility of such a mobile gaze with
a passive rather than active aim seems a precondition for Sternberg's exercises in
Stoicism, even the goal of his technique for directing the audience to take an active aim
on the object of their own emotions.
114
However, this requires taking the viewer away
from what Barthes described as the plunge into group ecstasy exposed to the "absolute
state of the flesh" reflected in the close-up.
Female performers' dressing rooms are perfectly situated for Sternberg's direction
to address the conflict of private spiritual power and the bonds of public demands
extremely well. This space is situated on the border between, on the one hand, the staging
the group judgment of emotion and eroticism, and on the other hand, the possibility of an
authentic internal composure of the emotions. As the border space where public display
114
Bergstrom phrases this challenge to "Visual Pleasure,"
While Mulvey makes use of the distinction between object choice and
aim, she uses them as if they were both gender-specific in narrative
cinema; woman is object, man is subject of the gaze: "the image of woman
as (passive) raw material for the (active) gaze of man." The contemplative
look that seems central to erotic pleasure in Murnau's films might be
conceptualized in terms of a passive sexual aim, unlike Mulvey's "(active)
gaze of man," and libidinal investment need not be tied to any single or
gendered object (201).
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and a certain private eroticism meet, the space of the dressing room is even more
characteristic of Sternberg's films with Marlene Dietrich than the stage itself.
A dressing room scene begins the relationship of Helen Jones (Marlene Dietrich)
and Nick Townsend (Cary Grant) in Blonde Venus. Helen has returned to work on the
stage to earn the money to pay for her husband Ned's (Herbert Marshall) expensive
medical procedures that are available only in Germany. When the club owner brings
Townsendone of his wealthiest patronsback to Helen's dressing room, the room
crowds up with Townsend's group of friends.
Helen faces the camera through the mirror, but the space between her body and
the camera is crowded by the group of men. Out in the club, palm fronds had likewise
crowded in on the men throughout the whole of the performance. Now that the crowd has
leaked into her private space, they clutter the room. The crowd had been subordinated to
Helen's performance in the "Blonde Venus" number moments before, but now it
threatens to invade her private space.
This predominance of the crowd does not last for long. Even through the crowd,
Helen faces the camera clearly through the mirror. Once the men leave the dressing room
upon Townsend's command, Townsend has to turn again to look at Helen, who still
resists returning his gaze. In the mirror, she faces straight at the camera freely and
directly, unconstrained by the presence of Townsend.
During Helen's performance, Townsend's head was already dramatically turned
and twisted as he looked at Helen. Now his body is further refracted with constraints
forced upon him by his developing relationship with Helen. These constraints on
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Townsend contrast with the treatment of Townsend's posture in relation to Taxi Belle
Hooper (Rita La Roy), his former girlfriend. When Taxi stood behind Townsend, all but
pleading for his attention, Townsend barely turned his head towards her, and not for more
than a second.
Townsend has flowers brought in to the dressing room. They block the space from
Helen to the camera, but she quickly puts them aside, parrying this moment of
infringement on her freedom of space. Townsend's positioning afterwards depicts him as
extremely twisted just to get a look at Helen behind him from where he sits.
When she agrees to see him after the next act, she faces the camera in a
completely frontal fashion. The check for Ned's trip dissolves over her face when in a
close-up she dons the hat for the next number. She is in control in these scenes because
she has reconciled herself to the circumstances of saving her husband.
Once Ned leaves for Germany the affair with Townsend continues. When Ned
returns earlier than expected and discovers the affair, he threatens to take Johnny (Dickie
Moore) away from Helen. But, Helen's choice to leave with Johnny and flee from Ned is
not the true choice. Helen's wandering progress through her various entanglements in
Blonde Venus does not lead to freedom until she can return to her home without being
coerced to do so.
Considering Helen's actions in taking the child, it is tempting to ask whether the
characterization of Helen in taking the child is sympathetic. However, there is no logic of
sympathy in Sternberg's films. They are not geared to work at the level of character
action or interiority. If there is anything like sympathy at work in Sternberg's exercises, it
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finds an analogue in Sergei Eisenstein's idea of achieving emotional reactions in the
audience through "motor reproduction."
Eisenstein touches on the idea briefly in his "Montage of Film Attractions." The
convergence of Eisenstein's idea and Sternberg's comes in their common emphasis on
the possibility of a sympathetic resonance with the bodily expression of the actor
onscreen. Such a sympathetic resonance with bodily movements should occur
autonomously from the plot-logic and from the understanding of the psychological
interiority of a character. Eisenstein contextualizes the need for an effective construction
of disconnected moments of sympathetic impact:
We have a very valuable confirmation of the correctness of our approach
to construction, to an "effective construction" (in the particular instance of
film), according to which it is not the facts being demonstrated that are
important but the combinations of the emotional reactions of the audience.
It is then possible to envisage in both theory and practice a construction,
with no linking plot logic, which provokes a chain of the necessary
unconditioned reflexes (44).
It is not true that there is "no linking plot logic" in the construction of Sternberg's
films, any more than in Eisenstein's films. But, the important part of this idea of the
assembly of viewer reactions is that the movements of the actor might have mimetic
effects in the viewer apart from the intelligible facts of the story.
Because emotional perception ... is achieved through the motor
reproduction of the movements of the actor by the perceiver, this kind of
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reproduction can only be caused by movement that adheres to the methods
that it normally adheres to in nature. Because of the confirmation of the
correctness of this method of influence and perception 1 agree with
[Theodor] Lipps ... "the emotional understanding of the alter ego through
the imitation of the other leads only to a tendency to experience one's own
emotion of the same kind but not to a conviction that the alter ego exists"
(43-4).
Eisenstein refers to Theodor Lipps' idea of a kind of empathy that functions apart from
the totality of any ego to convey that it is the expressions of the body, fragmented by
editing from one shot to another, that matters to his theory of emotional imitation. Simple
isolated movements and gestures matter to the master of montage over and above any
belief in the unity of a sympathetic "alter ego" of the character made intelligible
onscreen. For Eisenstein, movements and body positioning that can be varied suddenly
and discontinuously from instant to instant are more important than the emotions justified
by the plot or unified character.
The question of whether the actions are sympathetic is the wrong question to ask
of Sternberg's films in the same way that it was not the main source of motor
reproduction for Eisenstein. The unconditioned reflexes from moment to moment impact
the viewer in a manner quite other than a sympathetic or unsympathetic judgment of
character traits or actions.
However, in Sternberg's spiritual exercises, the body needs to cease exhibiting
emotion in order to display the internal sufficiency of self that is the ultimate impact of
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Sternberg's exercises. Sternberg worked by minimizing and rendering subtle the effects
of audience mimesis whereas Eisenstein was concerned with taking mimesis to shocking
moments of absolute ecstasy. If the imitative reaction of the spectator in response to the
movements of the actor is to neither come into conflict with plot, nor merely to illustrate
emotional interiority as a way of adding further content to the plot, then the emotions of
the face and of gesture have to be reduced to a minimum.
In his writings, Sternberg emphatically de-emphasized emotions. In a 1949 letter
to Curtis Harrington, Sternberg expressly distanced his poetic work of "sounding out
cinematic power" from "selling emotions."
Poetry is not exclusive to any single medium of expression, and you will
find a clue to much of my work, if not to all of it, in noting that I use
images and sound like others have used words.... I have always avoided
emotionalizing my films, choosing rather to present emotion as a casual
component of other elements. The world is avid for easily digestible
formulas, and in exploiting film to carry no such apparent solutions, I
could not escape severe criticism. But I also did not escape praise, though
it was not always correctly applied. I sought to find a way to sound out
cinematic power, leaving it to others to employ it in selling emotions
(Weinberg 135-6).
As much as the idea of using "images and sound like others have used words" begins in a
way that sounds a bit like Eisenstein for Dummies, the passage hints at the poetic
principle in Sternberg's staging that works with a physical sympathy without emotions.
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The principles of staging in Sternberg's spiritual exercises were designed to work
through the viewer's motor reproduction of understated movements rather than with
ecstatic emotions. When emotions are minimized, subtle bodily orientations might then
have the effect of ordering and organizing the viewer's motor reproduction of the
movements and positioning of the actors' bodies. Using variations in the freedom of the
actor's body, the film directs the viewer towards the moment of true choice.
The force of the close-up and of near-direct address of the camera fits within such
a strategy. For example, when an actor runs directly at the camera, the viewer's
appreciation of effort and gesture is more heightened than than when an actor runs
parallel to the camera. The effect here is different, though, from Ford's use of depth. In
Sternberg's exercises, it is a question of, as Eisenstein puts it, "influence and
perception"as sympathetic shockrather than the shocking spatial distortions proper
to Ford's use of depth.
In that sense, if the Lumiere brothers' Train Arriving at La Ciotat is key for
understanding Ford's use of depth, the final shot of Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train
Robbery (1903) may be key for understanding Sternberg. The actor's direct orientation
towards the camera maximizes the intensity of motor reproduction. But to make use of
this technique requires deploying the basic technical situation at just the right moment.
Sternberg's exercises work by restricting the motor reproduction of freedommaximized
by the direct addressto very select moments. He found new ways to keep these
moments understated as well, as his career goes on.
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The question of Helen's flight is not whether its place in the plot logic is
sympathetic or not. Instead, the staging during Helen's flight is characterized by
obstructed views and the sense of restricted motor and spiritual freedom as Helen flees
with Johnny. During the flight, neither Helen nor Johnny is really depicted in bodily
freedom.
When Helen carries Johnny to the train, Johnny hangs in front of Helen thereby
blocking her. The veil in the dressing room in the first club where Helen leaves Johnny to
go perform also blocks the two figures of Helen and Johnny just before she exits. The
strange mask on Johnny's head disrupts and weighs down his face. Later as they hitch a
ride on a hay cart, Johnny lies across her lap. They are both constrained by her choice to
take him away and flee from Ned and the law as much as she was constrained by Ned in
his initial state of illness. Her choice to run with Johnny is not the true choice.
Blonde Venus exhibits a difference in the staging of Townsend-Helen and Ned-
Helen similar to that in the staging of La Bessiere-Jolly and Tom Brown-Jolly in
Morocco. La Bessiere and Jolly are most often shot face-to-face, antagonistically. The
authentic binds between Tom Brown-Jolly has them overlapping, one in front of the
other, in much of the staging of Morocco.
The love triangle in Blonde Venus is also a love triangle with unequal sides. The
authentic binds between Helen and her family are not present in the staging between
Helen and Townsend. Helen is blocked by Ned and Johnny throughout the first sequences
of the film before Ned's departure. Her family is that which binds her through most of the
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film. In the two scenes in Ned's laboratory before his departure, she is placed so that she
is blocked behind Ned. But, Ned's circumstances force her back onto the stage.
When she returns to the apartment to find that Ned has arrived home early from
Europe while she has been staying with Townsend, her head is awkwardly turned to look
at Ned. The pattern shifts to convey Ned and Helen's separation in this scene of
confrontation about the affair with Townsend. The two figures of Ned and Helen become
antagonistically dislocated from each other. First, there is a series of alternating close-ups
where both figures are turned slightly. Then they are literally faced off against one
another in medium shot as Ned threatens to take Johnny away from Helen. However,
Helen does not appear unobstructed as she responds to this adversarial positioning by
running away with Johnny.
Even when, earlier in the film, Helen ended up behind Townsend in his office in
the scenes that follow Ned's departure on the trip to Europe paid for by Townsend, the
relative positioning of Helen and Townsend contrasts with the blocking and constraints of
her body in scenes with Ned. Helen is behind Townsend but Townsend's head cranes
around towards her and he himself is often blocked in front, in the office, by his desk.
The way that Townsend is forced to contort his neck firmly establishes his more
constrained and weaker positioning relative to Helen's. The emphasis is placed on his
own loss of freedom relative to Helen and on her power over him rather than on the
constraints that he imposes on her. When the positioning of these two characters is
reversed and Townsend is positioned behind Helen, she does not turn her head towards
him. This contrast is evident when Townsend and Helen discuss Ned's arrival, with
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Townsend standing behind her. She does not turn to look at Nick. Her body refracts only
when Johnny runs into the room.
Things are only really cleared up for Helen in the final scene when she is no
longer caught between the stage and her family. In the penultimate shot of the film
depicting Helen with Ned above her she is facing the camera. Ned is set off to the side so
that he no longer blocks her. While facing the camera more powerfully than at any other
moment in the film Helen says, "Let me stay with you Ned". The high angle shot where
Ned approaches her is truncated with a cut to the shot of Johnny's hand. So, Blonde
Venus ends with a shot of a hand that in a sense works like the praying hands of Shanghai
Express. In this moment where she and Ned are clearly back in each other's arms, the
film resists showing their two bodies together in an explicit embrace. The final shot
offers only the pure, immanent spiritual light reflected from Johnny's hand that is
positioned in front of the circulating dolls. The rotating bodies of the carousel behind
Johnny's hand juxtapose to Helen's true choic of the natural affection for her family with
a crowd of refracted bodies of the kind that Helen has broken wth.
The final shot of Blonde Venus uses Johnny's hand to reflect the spiritual values
that Helen's family has discovered. The shot refuses questions of motivation or of the
value of the events for the judgment that is so important to Ford's strategy for unanimity.
It is the viewer's sense of the potential autonomy of the individual spirit that counts for
Sternberg.
There is a new shared freedom for these three individuals produced through
Helen's sacrifice in giving up the power amongst the crowd. Certainly, Townsend with
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his noble sacrifice in bringing Helen home is still perhaps not out of her life completely.
Lea Jacobs is right in her study of censorship that the film uses ellipses to elude
censorship, and that
the film uses spectacle to destabilize the unity or "identity" of character.
By this means, it is possible to suggest a whole range of motivations for
Helen's actions which lie outside wifely sacrifice and devotion (104).
This sacrifice is not a matter of wifely norms or even passionate devotion. The final true
choice is meant to have nothing to do with the judgment of others regarding what is and
is not "wifely."
However, there is perhaps the kind of naturalness of familial duty thatat least
according to Cicero's De Finnibus IIIwas crucial to Stoicism.
They believe that it is relevant to the matter discussed to see that it
happens by nature that children are loved by their parents. From this
starting-point we derive and explain the universal community of the
human race. This must be clear already from the shape and members of
the body, which make it clear that nature has arranged for the procreation
of offspring. Nor could it be mutually consistent that nature should want
offspring to be procreated and should not take care that the offspring be
loved. Even in animals the power of nature can be seen: when we see their
labor in bearing and rearing their young, we seem to be listening to
nature's own voice. Therefore, just as it is evident that we shrink from
pain by nature, so it is clear that we are impelled by nature itself to love
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those to whom we have given birth. From this arises a natural common
attachment of man to man, so that just because he is a man, a man must be
considered not alien to another man (Engberg-Pederson, 123).
The sense of the naturalness, the accordance with universal reason, of the affection
between these members of the family is intensified by the non-normative conditions of
the resolutionwith Townsend waiting in the wings. This power and freedom attained
by the family assemblage is placed over the obstacles posed by society's norms that had
encroached upon their "natural common attachments" throughout the film. The final
sense of the Blonde Venus is the triumph of the spirit connecting all three through a
natural duty that is specifically other than normative determinations on their freedom.
Emotional sympathy is strikingly absent from this final shot of the hand.
Sympathy as a function of emotional interiority would appeal to the cathartic truth of the
authenticity of a star's personality. The final shot of the hand throws the viewer back on
him or herself through its rejection of emotional sympathy or of judgment of Helen.
Yet, this final reuniting of Helen, Ned, and Johnny begins to express the
indeterminacy of the sense of duty described by Cicero as the basic value of family
attachment in Stoicism. For Cicero, the family was not just a duty above all else, but the
template for the duties that Stoicism should extend to the entire human race. Cicero
presents the argument that nature demonstrates the expansive humanistic destiny of such
attachments by the further similarity of bodily forms. But, this duty to humankind sits
only uneasily with Helen's rejection of the crowd and her return home. Such a rejection
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of the crowd is expressed with even greater vitriol in the The Scarlet Empress and is
rediscovered equally uneasily but on different terms in Anatahan.
3.4 Steinberg's Critiques of the Crowd: From Scarlet Empress to Anatahan
The very opposite of the scarecrow is the actor: his function is to attract
he frightens no one but himself.
Josef Von Sternberg, Fun in a Chinese Laundry (90)
There are thousands upon thousands of coxcombs and charlatans in the
world, made up of just such a jumble of worn-out, forgotten, and good-
for-nothing trash as he was! Yet they live in fair repute, and never see
themselves for what they are. And why should my poor puppet be the only
one to know himself and perish for it.... Well! Well! I'll make a scarecrow
of him after all.
Mother Rigby in Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Feathertop " (1122)
Sternberg's crowd scenes are important for solidifying the opposition between the
Stoic ethics of Lyrical Abstraction and the emphasis on personality that motivated much
of Hollywood star marketing and the opposition to Sternberg's cinema of the self to
Ford's cinema of community. Crowd scenes fit into these exercises as the kind of space
that is most opposed to true freedom and to all of that which the clear white light of the
face in close-up clears away in the moment of true choice.
As the final shot of Blonde Venus juxtaposes the close-up of a hand in front of a
crowd of statues, Shanghai Express ends with a newly-renewed love placed over and
above the crowd. At the end of Shanghai Express, Harvey finally accepts Lily's gesture
of love and her Stoic ethics of non-judgment allegorized in the gift of a watch: to help
him confine himself to the smallest possible present.
Harvey and Lily are in the Shanghai train station when Lily walks in a circle
around him. He reaches towards the camera in order to embrace her. Both of these
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staging devices emphasize their freedom of movement. The dissolve with the crowd in
the final kiss brings this spiritual outlook into direct confrontation with the crowd. The
mass of the unperfected appears as that which these two true individuals reject and
overcome. Of Sternberg's reluctance to flaunt emotion, he wrote, "No talent at all is
required to have two lovers gaze at each other soulfully and twiddle with each other's
fingers" {Fun in a Chinese Laundry 197). So, in this scene, he hides the kiss, and shows
the crowd to the audience, as if to say, "This is what you are if you are bothered by my
concealing this from you."
In Sternberg's spiritual exercise in the final shots of Shanghai Express, the viewer
is vigorously moved across the distance between the rare moments of free bodies and the
chaos of the crowd, forced to traverse conceptually the space from the public clutter and
dissolution of the crowd to the space of the spiritually-steadfast self.
An individual that has succeeded in forming a self that is protected and abstracted
from this cluttered and unmanageable space of the crowd, is protected by anonymity with
respect to all but oneself and one's intimates. This is the freedom that Harvey and Lily
experience in this space of anonymity. The positive value of the self within such
anonymity could not be further from Ford's unanimity. Anonymity frees Lily and Harvey
from the encumbering judgments emblematized by the chatter of the moralizing
passengers of the train. The little group of train passengers was in itself just a
manifestation of the various forms of the nonsense endemic to all crowds. It was a crowd
cluttered and jumbled into the constricted space of the train.
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Caught between individual and crowd eroticism, the power of the close-up and of
the emotional face always threatens to collapse into a wanton display of freedom. Like a
chair without legs, the face in close-up needlessly threatens to fall over into activity and
emotion, unless it is used judiciously. The ordinary close-up's display of freedom is
rarely truly free, and the crowds who value such a display are never truly liberated. The
moral choices in Sternberg's use of the close-up have everything to do with avoiding
flattery of the crowd.
Sternberg even managed to turn close-ups into a crowd in the gangster ball in
Underworld. The close-ups follow one another in increasingly-rapid succession as the
intoxication of the night moves onindicated by the turning hands of a clock reeling
through the precious moments being discarded by the participants in the revelry. The
scene obviously recalls Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin where the workers blend
together into the righteous force ready to overthrow the Bourgeois government.
Sternberg's version of this de-individualization of close-ups through rapid editing
has a different value altogether, however. He uses the technique to detail the passage of a
group of individual criminals into a new group formation whose individuals are dissolved
into shameless drunkenness. This false group is amusing but not innocent. The party will
lead to the attempted rape of Bull Weed's girlfriend Feathers by his rival Buck Mulligan
(Fred Kohler). After this, Bull Weed murders Buck Mulligan in revenge. In this party
sequence of Underworld, just as in the party of Dishonored, or the parades of Devil is a
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Woman, excessive confetti rends the screen into chaotic fragments.
115
The screen
becomes crowded and cluttered as the individuals lose their ethical coordinates of self in
the crowd.
Sternberg arranged the same disorienting crowded screen effects with human
bodies in the bar scenes of Docks of New York. In the street scenes of Morocco, filigree
on the praying men and the foreign legion soldiers serves to facilitate the disintegration of
figures into de-individualized crowding and clutter on the screen. In American Tragedy,
Clyde (Phillips Holmes) attempts to pressure Roberta (Sylvia Sidney) into allowing him
to come up to her apartment. The shadow of a branch further obscures their two figures in
the darkened street making these two into a crowd in themselves. At multiple points in
Scarlet Empress, branches awkwardly placed between the lens and the future empress's
entourage serve to further fragment the view of Catherine's little crowd.
What appeals to the crowd, in Sternberg, is the vulgar display of freedom. In
Helen's "Blonde Venus" number when she first performs for Nick, she exhibits a pose
that appears frequently in Sternberg: arms akimbo with hands on hips that are thrust out,
legs spread wider than the shoulders. It is this posejust a posethat at first elicits
Townsend to fall under Helen's spell.
This is the pose of false self-sufficiency exhibited by Lola Lola (Marlene
Dietrich) in her first number in The Blue Angel. Lola Lola appears on the poster that the
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The opening scenes of Devil is a Woman is another good counter-example. There,
Concha Perez and Antonio are in fact separated out from the crowded screen space of the
parade by their masks, just as in the final scene of Shanghai Express Lily and Harvey are
shielded from the crowd by anonymity. In both cases, the consistent senses of the
selfhood of the two are not determined by the crowd.
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young shopwoman imitates at the very beginning of the film. It is also the pose of the
tyrannical captain (Clyde Cook) entering the bar in Docks of New York ready to throw his
weight around where much of the crowd action of that film takes place. In such a gesture
the body's demonstration of its own self-sufficiency is pushed to appoint that is too
extreme and exaggerated. Its vainglorious display undermines the very principle of the
freedom and internal peace demonstrated by a more muted approach to utilizing the
intense experience for the viewer of an actor orientation toward the camera.
In Blonde Venus, Helen is again still not free when she returns to the stage after
Johnny is taken from her. The corruscating white flashes from the lapels of her tuxedo
distract and visually clutter her in the performance's momentary display of false freedom.
She is relying on the crowd Peter Baxter points out that
something "magical" indeed seems to occur with the particular dissolve
that carries Helen so swiftly from indigence, over the wide and moonlit
waves of the ensuing shot, to fame and fortune in Europe ... it operates, so
to speak, on a different plane of reality from straight narrative (103).
However, the rapidity of this elliptical move through time and space seems to
indicate that in fact nothing has changed, from indigent to sparkling starlet. There is not
necessarily a difference in degree of spiritual freedom from one station to the other. Only
when Helen makes the choice to confront Ned and to show her authentic natural love for
both him and Johnny does she finally become free.
Sternberg's staging of the conflict between group and private eroticism that runs
throughout his use of Dietrich as a stage performer is demonstrated with the most vitriol
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by The Scarlet Empress. Deleuze gives a striking amount of attention to this film even
though he acknowledges it as a film of Sternberg's where the true choice is absent.
Deleuze focuses on the moment in Scarlet Empress when the single isolated face of
Dietrich's Catherine becomes a crowd.
An intertitle has just informed us that Catherine has given birth to an heir to the
throne. It is up to us to infer that this newborn future emperor is the more than likely
illegitimate and the son of the palace guard whom Catherine seduced in the previous
scene, not her idiotic husband, Peter the Grand Duke (Sam Jaffe). We find young
Catherine resting in her bed. She is surrounded by a curtain of fine netting. Deleuze
focuses on the visual qualities of the close-up in which she is given a pendant that swings
with the hypnotic motion of a pendulum.
The face of the young woman is caught between the white of a voile
curtain and the white of the pillow and the sheets where she is resting,
until we see the astonishing image, which seems to have been taken from
video, where the face is now only a geometric incrustation of the voile ...
this reduction of space by abstraction, this compression of the location by
artificiality ... defines a field of operation and leads us by elimination of
the whole to a universe, to a pure woman's face (Cinema 1 93).
Through the placement of Catherine's face out of the range of the lens's focal length, the
distinction between the two depths is compressed into one encrusted jewel-like surface.
Catherine has become joined with these veils and nets that earlier merely covered her or
entrapped her. In this image, the veil becomes a kind of second skin through which her
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face has been rendered artificial. She has been virtually remade in order to serve as a
more effective object for the crowds who will be her subjects.
Scarlet Empress's recurrent motif of veils covering, obstructing, and trapping
Catherine pivots on this crucial moment for young Catherine's transformation into the
highest star of the Russian people. She is brought to Russia having been told by the
hyperbolically-ravishing envoy Count Alexei (John Lodge) that she will be marrying a
handsome and strong future emperor. However, she finds her husband to be only an
imbecile, who plays with dolls, already has a girlfriend (Ruthelma Stevens), and is utterly
dominated by his aunt, the reigning Empress (Louise Dresser).
After the young Catherine treats her husband with a total lack of interest,
Catherine's own motherdominating, but much beloved by Catherineis sent away.
The domineering Empress takes over in grooming Catherine to be her replacement.
However, this grooming amounts to a kind of entrapment and hypnosis.
The pendulum movement of the necklace in the scene where Catherine lies in bed
after the birth of the heir recalls the hypnotic motion of the censers in the earlier wedding
sequence. In that terribly elaborate sequence, she is also enshrouded by a huge corridor of
suspended veils and, with another covering over her face. The film is permeated by a
literal net-work that visualizes the manner in which Catherine is caught up in a process
beyond her own control. In the close-up shot of this bedroom scene, the interaction of
foreground netting and background faces is more fused with the surface of Catherine's
face than in any earlier scene because the focus of the lens has been split between veil
and face.
228
Doane explains the reflexivity of this moment of "incrustation" pointed to by
Deleuze.
The veil mimics the grain of the film, the material substrate of the
medium, and becomes the screen as surface of division, separation, and
hence solicited transgression. In mimicking the grain of the film, this
gesture might be viewed as deconstructive par excellence, for it indicates
the woman's status as the substrate of representation (72-3).
However, this is not just any woman or a signifier for femininity in general. Catherine is
an empress and a star. The overall allegorical trajectory described by Robin Wood
outlines the film as a parody of the actress's progression in Hollywood. The Scarlet
Empress
could be seen as an allegory (on whatever level of consciousness) about
Hollywood and the star system: Sophia Frederica is groomed for stardom
from infancy by her ambitious mother; "discovered"; taken to Hollywood
(the court), where her name is changed and her mother becomes
superfluous; is given a new image and presented to the public (the
wedding); learns to take her career into her own hands and pursue power
ruthlessly; ends up enshrined as "star" but finally imprisoned within her
image, no longer existing as a private individual (140).
Installed within The Scarlet Empress is an assault on Hollywood's phony spell of
personality. The overlapping image of the crowds of Russia celebrating outside the
palace in these shots after the birth makes the link with the group of followers. In this
229
moment emphasized by both Deleuze and Doane, the crowd is visually fused with the
encrusted, crowded face of Catherine, the future empress.
Wood writes further that Catherine's entrapment within the network of veils and
the stifling decor of the film humorously subvert Catherine's final triumph absolutely."
6
Catherine's face, the mouth exaggerated by make-up, has become a
hideously grimacing mask, its expression recalling both the Empress's
look of triumph at the end of the wedding sequence and the insane smiles
of Peter, "the look" no longer directed at a human individual and no longer
returned (139-40).
Furthermore in the final scene of the film, Catherine's face turns uneasily side to side in
relation to Catherine's freedom of movement towards the camera. This movement of
Catherine's head in this final scene is the kind of movement that Raymond Bellour
discusses when he attempts to link together the various motifs of The Scarlet Empress.
This mechanical head movement from side to side marks Catherine's internalization of
the hypnotic clockwork that proliferates through the film from the pendulum-like censers,
to the moving figurines, to the prince's strange soldier dolls, and to the images and
statues all around the castle's surreal decor.
116
Hence, it is hard to agree with Gaylyn Studlar that
The harness prescribed as a cure for the sick girl and the "horse doctor"
who prescribes it evokes the rigging and the animal that legend says led to
Catherine's death ... later her body will be subject to state control.
Catherine breaks that domination by discovering the power in her
sexuality.... The child tended by the horse doctor is transformed, by
dream logic, into a woman whose bedroom adventures are so
polymorphous as to include bestiality (155-6).
230
What Bellour describes especially well about The Scarlet Empress is the way that
the frozen statues are meaningfully integrated into the space that they share with the
living and moving characters. This aspect of these elements of the film's elaborate mise-
en-scene toys with the tension between frozen volume and white flatness that
characterizes cinema's illusion of depth. Thus, the tension created by the presence of the
statues in the decor of The Scarlet Empress dramatizes the two crucial aspects of
cinema's own capacity for illusion: its falsification of movement, and also its falsification
of depth.
117
More can be said about Bellour's opposition between the statues and the white
images in relation to the allegorical interpretation of the film described by Wood. By
sharing the frame or by appearing in adjacent shots with Catherine, the white images are
persistently associated with Catherine rather than the other members of the royal family.
The royal family shares the frame or alternates shots with the statues.
The first appearance of these white images occurs before Catherine even arrives at
the palace. At the border of Russia, Catherine boards the sledge that is to transport her for
the remainder of the journey. As the sledge pulls away, the camera makes a conspicuous
move from Catherine's face down to the adornments on the side door of the sledge. As
117
Bellour's argument refers primarily to the contrast between the motion of the actors
and immobility of the statues. Such a play on mobility/immobility puts into play a tension
between the appearance of movement and the static nature of the frames captured by the
camera. At the same time, the mobility/immobility dichotomy re-enacts the tension
between the visual experience of movement and the spectator's own immobility in
watching a film. The film registers precisely the agonies of the cinematic illusion of
movement. Equally interesting is Bellour's observation about the opposition between the
three-dimensional statues and the two-dimensional white images that adorn all of the
surfaces of the castle. It recapitulates cinema's conflict between two and three
dimensions.
231
Catherine is preparing for her wedding, she holds a mirror with the virgin and child
painted in bright white. The mirror blocks her from a pure reflection to the viewer.
Furthermore, in this shot there is one three-dimensional contorted statue that is
dramatically associated with Catherinebut it is itself rendered into two dimensions.
Above her in the large mirror, the exceptional statue is visible only for the first few
moments of the track-in. A veil is pulled over the statue in a way that mutes and
compresses the volume of the form's monstrous suffering. The statue appears only
reflected on the two-dimensional surface of a mirror. Like the body of Catherine herself,
it is only with a supplemental second skin, a veil that visually traps it and alters its form,
that it is forced into this other polished glowing world, forced from the old world of the
statues for the new glowing world of flattened, white, cinematic two-dimensional depth.
Since the suffering of the fully three-dimensional statues share the frame with
other members of the declining royal family,
118
Catherine's rise to power then appears as
lift
It is the other occupants of the palace, the regime to be outdone by Catherine, who are
associated with statues through alternations in adjacent shots or by proximity in the shot.
1) The statue riddled with arrows at the bottom of the castle stairs appears prominently
more than once. It is introduced for the first time as the Grand Duke leaves from the
wedding to his sterile bridal suite. Alexei is also depicted in proximity to this arrow-
riddled statue just before young Catherine resists his advances, speaking from the landing
above him.
2) On the nuptial bed that, of course, the young Catherine will utterly scorn, there is the
statue of mother and child. We see it when it is being blessed on their wedding night.
3) Also strongly-associated with Alexei are the gargoyles of the Empress's chambers.
These overlap with him in the scene when Dietrich repeats the lesson in heartache that
the empress gave her earlier. She substitutes herself in the empress's position, Alexei in
her former position, and Captain Orloff takes the place Alexei had in the earlier lesson.
4) There is also a conspicuous and important statue that appears for the first time in the
final sequence of the film: the shiny metallic figure on the crucifix carried by Catherine's
guard. This writhing figure on the crucifix that seems as if caught up in a seizure is most
un-Christlike in its lack of grace and is best seen as a double for the Grand Duke. The
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the rise of the two-dimensional, glowing white over the old regime of the statues. The
film's visual allegory of a shift from a three-dimensional regime to two-dimensional
regime is something like that explained by Georges Bataille's "Hollywood, Place of
Pilgrimage" in 1929.
With Hollywood's illusions that are impossible not to detect, it truly seems
as if one could find nowhere else in the world women so unnatural and so
lamentably fake. It is to these illusions that every person on the earth
throws their money day in and day out as if to avoid being abandoned in
the desert. Those in earlier times did the same with statues of gods and
saints. This is a sad way of taking all that might rescue the heart and
investing it in a glistening mirage (199).
The materiality of the moment of Catherine's "incrustation" by the veil exhibits the very
"fakeness" of Hollywood's images of women and thereby fulfills a more complex
function within the visual network of the film's veils and statues. The rise of the white
images over the statues follows out the transformation Catherine undergoes so that she
might serve as a stronger substitute of the old Empress and over her own vile husband
after his brief reign as emperor.
The role of these techniques that supplement or even supplant the skin of the
actress on camera with an artificially enhanced white illusion of surface smoothness is
dramatized in the triumph of the white images over the statues. The triumph of the power
Duke's chambers are shown in parallel with the ride of Catherine's royal guard, led by
this crucifix, until the shiny-faced Duke is strangled by Orloff behind a large broad-
paneled cross, arms outstretched and writhing like the shiny Grand Duke-Christ.
233
of cinema's illusion is secured in its projection of volume and dimension onto a two-
dimensional white surface. The visible veils figure for the effects that veils were
technically used to produce: soft light and soft focus.
Such effects are themselves a play with depth and volume. Soft light's play with
dimensionality on the white screen was one of the greatest strengths of black and white
cinema. Softening the light reflected from an actress's face and body moderates
variations in the skin's surface, compressing and refining what might otherwise be seen
as blemishes and imperfections, substituting a smooth gradient between the depth of
shadows on the edges and around the eyes.
The Scarlet Empress formally reflects on the art of cinema when it falls far short
of what Sternberg set out as the goals of art in his meditations: "an orderly investigation
of chaos, or, at best, a compression of infinite power, spiritual power, into a confined
space." Instead Catherine's rise to power is the power of cinema when it is merely a
vulgarization of the force of "pure, immanent spiritual light" that was so carefully
circumscribed in Morocco, Blonde Venus, and Shanghai Express.
The Scarlet Empress visually allegorizes the transformation of the woman into
what Sternberg described in his article, "The Von Sternberg Principle" that was published
in Esquire in 1963, where he wrote that "Glamour in a photograph is the treatment of
surfacea surface that is not even skin deep" (53). Catherine is a "skillful effigy," "the
fraudulent image," and "a visual stimulant achieved by flummery" ("The Von Sternberg
Principle" 52-3). Sternberg observes in his meditations that "The actor is often confused
with the source of power" (57).
234
Likewise, once Catherine gives birth to an heir, she appears to hold the veils in
her own hands, manipulating the means to her "glamour" by her own power. She will be
"confused with the source of power" however much her new regime arises to fulfill the
old. From before the birth of her son to after, she comes to wield the veils, her glamorous
"imponderables," as what she herself describes as "weapons that are far more powerful
than any political machine."
This hardly signifies that she has overcome the trappings and passivity of the
earlier stage prior to the birth. She has merely become integrated into the machine that
has inflated her idea of her own individual power in becoming "what Russia wants her to
be." The entire sequence of preparations that we follow to this point indicates that she is
not responsible for the power so much as she is the product of a pre-existing power
structure.
119
The new regime shows more continuity than discontinuity with the old; these
illusions are just a retrenchment of the power that has vacated the old statues.
Sternberg asserts in the article from Esquire that the truth is completely the
opposite from what the audience/royal guard believes and what Catherine herself believes
about her own her own control of her glamour.
Glamour is an elastic concept, composed of a play of fluid values, of
imponderables artfully arranged in a spiritual space.... The craftsman who
manipulates the subject with little concern for its welfare and bounces
119
Sybil Delgaudio claimed that Sternberg used glamour as a technique of resistance to
narrative (124-6). However, rather than situating Sternberg's films as a battle for
spectacle against narrative, these statements of Sternberg's seem to place his use of film
technique as an intervention within the commercial power structures that produced
glamour.
235
light on it to capture a fleeting moment is responsible for the glamour of a
photograph, not the object in front of the lens (52).
The final product constituted by Empress Catherine II is conjured through the horse-like
rearing in which she is made passive. The production of her new image begins when she
is prescribed a harness to wear as a small child to address some issue that the film leaves
comically unspecified. As her up-bringing continues, the process is once again figured as
a process of animal-like rearing when the Empress places of a harness-like headdress on
her head before the wedding. In the final scene, she stands paired with a horsehaving
overthrown her husbandand she bares her teeth. She rotates her head from side to side
having assumed the behavior of the clockwork figurines of her mad husband as much as
the appearance of a trained animal.
She has been integrated within a power structure that is larger than anything under
her control. Her relationship to her own self is sacrificed for the creation of an image that
is conceived first and foremost in relation to the crowd of guards and the Russian crowds.
Yet, to her crowd, she appears as just what Hollywood audiences were taught by fan
discourse to want of their stars and starlets. That is, she appears in control of her image.
Sternberg bristled at the idea that star quality was located strictly within an individual.
There was a whole institution that produced stars and crowds. Sternberg was responding
to the legitimization of the relationship of the star to the audience.
Just a peek at the kind of fan discourse generated around Dietrich demonstrates
how star culture eroticized and moralized the alleged uniqueness of the kind of qualities
that were built up as the essence of star personality. From early in her career in America,
236
the question of the essential suitability or unsuitability of Dietrich for popular admiration
was pondered by American fan magazines by classifying her as a personality product
competing with Greta Garbo.
Exemplary for juxtaposing fan magazine discourse on Dietrich with Sternberg's
assertions is a discussion of "X" in an article in Photoplay from 1933 by Hillary Lynn.
The article offers a sustained discussion of "X" as a new form of star quality, declaring
that the age of "IT"the label created by author Eleanor Glyn and borne by Clara
Bowwas over. The article's subtitle claims,
And Now, You Are Asking: What is this Thing Called "X," Women of the
ageswhose charms knew neither time nor raceCleopatra, Lady
Hamilton, Lillian Russell, Bernhardt, Pavlowa. ...IT, as everyone recalls,
was feminine allure combined with radiating energy"pep." ...Then of a
sudden, people began saying "scram" to pep-out-of-season; to jazz babies
and boop-a-doop girls.... In other wordsanother type of seductive
womanhood was granted to us poor humdrum sinners (26).
Garbo is the epitome of the woman who embodies X, but among the other bearers of
apparently-unique permutations who proliferate as star choices is Dietrich:
Today however, we may give the inimitable Swede a classification. Let us
say that she represents "X." Garbo is the living symbol of the X-woman.
What every woman longs to be. What every man longs to possess. The X-
woman who imprisons a man by the movement of her hands instead of by
the dimples in her knees.
237
Xthe quality which illumines a woman until she appears to both sexes a
goddess to be worshipped. Heart's desire. Woman of the heights.
Xthe new personality factor. The fourth dimension of feminine allure.
Xthe stuff of which dreams and dream-women are made.
Xwhich men through the ages have been willing to die for.
Xa million charm and glamour miles removed from IT (28).
The article's critical theory of stardom further attempts to reassure itself and its readers
about the consistency of this category. In a one sentence paragraph, "Yet x is in no way
connected with the success or popularity of a star or personality" (89).
This is a far cry from Stoic internal self-sufficiency of spirit for either star or
audience-member. Sternberg compares the actor to the "very opposite of a scarecrow,"
whose "function is to attracthe frightens no one but himself."
120
Sternberg pointedly
discusses that cinema's actors, and more frequently actresses, are used to "decoy throngs
into a theater" through
a simple formula that has been developed by a highly paid corps of
hucksters, large beyond belief, whose mission it is to sell everything that
cannot sell itself. It is the specialty of this group to dangle bait, to promise
something that cannot be delivered, not to represent but to misrepresent
(66-7).
1
Sternberg muses that the "scarecrow" has been rarely written about in literature except
for "Percy Mackay's play and the strawman in Victor Fleming's Wizard of Oz" (89), but
he fails to mention that Mackay's play was an adaptation of a Nathaniel Hawthorne short
story.
238
Cinema offers an illusory object for the audience's love. Sternberg specifies that the
"bait" is designed to appeal to the demands of the crowd by serving as the shared basis by
which the individuals of the crowd can submit to forming a "mass." This mass is "a
homogeneous herd, united on its lowest level, easily swayed by its most common
denominators, and not to be budged against its collective instincts, such as they are."
Furthermore,
this mass elects as its idols only those with qualities similar to its own
not its best, but its worstthereby absolving itself from any feeling of
guilt.... [This mass] has its own character and it is not an accumulation of
various characters, but seems to have been welded into another larger unit
that no longer resembles any of its components (69).
It is the loss of individuality to a cinema idol's appeal to the worst qualities
common to all individuals that bothers Sternberg. Sternberg's deprecation of "the herd"
sounds rather Nietzschean, certainly truer to the later Nietzsche than Ford's unanimity,
however much Ford's unanimity was fostered by healthy illusions. The crowd of guards
of Scarlet Empress mirrors Sternberg's observations in Fun in a Chinese Laundry about
the vulgar formation of the crowds of mass culture. By their shared love for Catherine
they come to form a group united around her.
However, this aphoristic observation that the "collective instincts" of the crowd
are "not an accumulation of various characters" forcefully recalls a work that serves as a
powerful reference text for The Scarlet Empress: Freud's Group Psychology and the
239
Analysis of the Ego from 1921. Sternberg's invective against the herd and its idols points
to Freud's "Group Psychology" as well as to Gustav Le Bon's The Crowd from 1895.
The Scarlet Empress recapitulates many of Freud's observations on the formation
of groups around powerful individuals, while transposing Freud's formulations into a
universe of tropes for the materiality specific to cinema as Sternberg knew it. The
artificial seductive white glow imposed on the human body by the veils in the Scarlet
Empress interlock with other poetic motifs that function in the film to convey the truth
about the film industry, or to "sound out cinematic power."
Catherine the Great's crowd of admiring guards and her association with Christ
imagery flamboyantly fuse the two groups that serve as the primary examples of groups
101
in Freud's study of crowds: the army and the church. Freud explains his examples of
Two white crucifixesin addition to the shiny crucifix that doubles the Grand
Dukealso play into this association of pure two-dimensional whiteness with Catherine.
First, during the religious ceremonies late in the wedding night, Catherine is not present
visually, but in idea only, in the sense that we are told by an intertitle that the crowds are
praying for an heir to the throne. What is shown is a three-dimensional statue: a large
white crucifix. However, these three dimensions are still exceptional in that, first of all,
the body on this crucifix does not fit into the grotesque style of the other statues of the
palace, since its forms are conventional in proportion. Also, like the statue that shares the
mirror with Catherine during her preparations for the wedding, this body is transformed
by soft lighting into a two-dimensional glow. The soft, cold light that is cast upon it will
be recalled in the lighting on Dietrich's or Orloff s faces, polished and so bright that the
sense of volume seems to be compressed and muted into an even glow, which obscures
even the contours of the face. Its appearance in polished pure glowing white escapes the
other statues of the palace.
The second white crucifix is introduced in the next scene and it is the most
striking of all the two dimensional images. It is seen as Catherine is bounding about the
staircase of the castle with her ladies in waiting. It looms above the staircase and will be
seen again, much more ominously, only when Catherine's guard rides past the crucifix to
crown Catherine as empress. In that shot of the final sequence, the camera will rise from
the riders for a moment and take in the equine face and long defined body, which
240
the church and of armies in greater detail by comparing the psychological state of the
members of these groups to hypnosis or falling in lovebut on a mass scale.
The church shares Christ as that object which the entire group loves. Hence, all
members feel equal in this love and all feel equally loved by Christ. The army has the
leader as its shared "ego ideal"that person whom everyone in the group aspires to be
like. Hence, all members in the army also see themselves as virtually interchangeable.
Through the sharing of a love objectexemplified by the church's love for Christor
through the sharing of the ideal that one aspires to bein the case of the army or
perhaps through some admixture of the two, the members identify with one another. They
all want to have or to be the same thing and feel that they are identified with one another,
interchangeable in that shared desire that constitutes them as a group.
Raymond Bellour's interest in Freud's Group Psychology lies in the potential of
the study's concepts for comparing cinema to the state of hypnosis. Freud's discussion of
the role of the "ego ideal" makes the text useful for comparing hypnosis to cinema. The
comparison of the cinematic crowd to hypnosis is suggested by the comparable presence
of the concept of the ego-ideal in Freud's treatment of the crowd and in his studies of
hypnosis. This comparison is a means of conceiving of cinema's ability to mute the
viewer's capability for reality testing and elicit his or her absorption within the fiction of
the filmwithout going so far as to compare the viewer's experience of the film to the
absorption in a dream.
contrasts totally with the writhing shiny body on the cross (doubling her murdered
husband) that they carry and thrust into the air.
241
Hence Bellour's comparison of hypnosis and the crowd via Freud is a
modification of the functional idea of the "reality effects" of narrative cinema that was
drawn up in theories of the cinematic apparatus best exemplified by a number of 1970s
essays by Jean-Louis Baudry and Laura Mulvey. For example, Baudry's argument in
"The Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus" was premised on the
idea of the viewer's "identification" with a viewpoint in the fiction. This kind of
identification with a character viewpoint is the kind that D.N. Rodowick, in his preface to
The Crisis of Political Modernism, claims was the "linchpin" of theories of the spectator
in 1970s film theory (15).
Baudry, for example, wrote that the viewer of a narrative film believes himself to
be within an absorbing illusory world accepted for true realitylike a dream state. This
happened, according to Baudry, through the use of the immobility and trance-like state of
the spectator and through editing that forces identification with a single dominant point of
view in the film.
The arrangement of the different elementsprojector, darkened hall,
screenin addition to reproducing in a striking way the mise-en-scene of
Plato's cave ... reconstructs the situation necessary to the release of the
"mirror stage" discovered by Lacan.... But for this imaginary constitution
of self to be possible, there must be ... suspension of mobility and
predominance of the visual function.... The "reality" mimed by the
cinema is thus first of all that of "self' (353).
242
The viewer chooses an onscreen character as a point of identification, as a child
recognizes his image in a mirror and identifies with the visual presentation of himself as
the reality of himself. This false immersion in reality was achieved when cinema
alternated first the image of a dominant (male) character with whom the viewer identifies
himself and then images from the point of view of that false "self." The false self
alternates with impressions of reality that the viewer takes for truth.
122
In this way,
cinema's use of reaction shots could interpellate the spectator into a convincing ideal
reality, an ideology through their identification with an onscreen self.
Bellour's comparison of cinema to hypnosis relies on far fewer totalizing
statements about viewer experience while providing a more generalized account of
cinema's ability to offer an ego-ideal to the audience is really based on the viewer's sense
of the shared quality of cinema experience. Cinema's relaxation of reality testing does not
reach the level of complete dreamlike immersion in a false reality because the hypnotic
ego-ideal is not the same as the mistaken identification of the viewer with a character in
the fiction.
122
Baudry claimed that there are two sides to this identification with the image.
Because the reflected image is not that of the body itself but that of a
world already given as meaning, one can distinguish two levels of
identification. The first, attached to the image itself, derives from the
character portrayed a center of secondary identifications, carrying an
identity which constantly must be seized and reestablished. The second
level permits the appearance of the first and places it "in action"... Thus
the spectator identifies less with what is represented, the spectacle itself,
than with what stages the spectacle, makes it seen, obliging him to see
what it sees: this is exactly the function taken over by the camera as a sort
of relay (353-4).
243
Bellour's ego-ideal is not necessarily localized in the subjectivity of any onscreen
character. Instead, the ego-ideal's central trait is an experience of desire held in common
by the members of the audience. The "ego ideal" located onscreen has virtually no
essential reality content whatsoever. It is mutable and may be formed out of love,
admiration, interest, or perhaps any emotion held in common by a group of viewers who
share attention to the cinematic apparatus or text.
Bellour points out that for Freud the association of the ego-ideal with the
hypnotist in the process of hypnosis could be due to the hypnotic situation as "a crowd of
two." In both cases, the susceptibility to suggestion is exploited by social pressure. Like a
hypnotist persuading the patient to reshape his or her desire by manipulating how he
imagines his "ego-ideal," what he or she wants to be. It need not have anything to do
with the perceived self, or what Eisenstein named as the "alter-ego" of a character. In that
sense, we might say that the illusion of the cinematic or hypnotic ego-ideal is future-
oriented, rather than present-oriented like that of a dream experience.
The effect of forming a group through identification with one another is the
reason for being of the object, the encompasser, or the ego-ideal. This ego-ideal has less
to do with narration and more to do with group spectatorship, taste, appreciation of the
performance, and the social significance of the film that permits entry into a peer group.
Hence, it is fitting that Miriam Hansen used Freud's Group Psychology in her reading of
female fan culture around Rudolph Valentino. Her emphasis is on the effects on the
individual who perceives a "common quality" with other members of the group rather
than the existence of the ego-ideal. She describes,
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Freud discerns a type of "partial identification" in the perception of an
analogy on the part of the ego with others, "a common quality shared with
some other person who is not the object of the sexual instinct." In the
measure that this common quality gains force, "the more successful may
this partial identification become, and it may thus represent the beginning
of a new tie." This kind of a collective transference no doubt played a
major part in the Valentino cult, as a particular manifestation of a female
subculture. In the films, the collective dimension of the star's appeal is
accentuated in precisely those moments of direct display which inscribe
the viewer as a member of a public body rather than an isolated peeping
torn (283).
Catherine, in her moment of star triumph, manifests just this collective dimension of the
star's appeal. The crowd of admirers that in the target of the allegory would have largely
been female is presented as a group of moustachioed soldiers.
This would likely have gotten a rise out of viewers on whatever level of
consciousness. The response in 1934 of Katherine Albert, writer for Photoplay and
Modern Screen, seems to respond to the parody. The article begins by pleading with the
viewer,
I want you to see The Scarlet Empress. I honestly want you to watch the
beautiful, fascinating Marlene Dietrich plowing her way through that
cumbersome, massive film. And then, if you're as great a Dietrich fan as I
am, if you have a belief in her very real acting abilitymaybe you'll sit
245
down and write her, begging her to try another man at the megaphone. I
think that Von Sternberg has failed in his duty towards Marlene's public,
in the duty he imposed upon himself when he discovered her in Germany.
I want to know what you think about it. It has taken a long time but from
picture to picture Von Sternberg has been slowly and surely devitalizing
Dietrich.... But Dietrich needs to step out and become the real, the vibrant,
the great actress she can be if she will shake lose the Von Sternberg
dominance.... Let's try to convince Dietrich that she needs someone else
on the set. Write to her. Tell her so.... And youMarleneyou're greater
than Von Sternberg. He has done all he can for you. He brought you to
America. He discovered you. You want to be loyal to him, I know, but you
really should show some loyalty to the fans who believe in you. Listen,
Marlenejust between you and mewhy don't you just try another
director!" (29)
It is as if Dietrich has a moral "duty" to conduct herself as if she belonged to her
fans, and as if her fans have a moral obligation to believe in her. Sternberg likewise has a
moral obligation to facilitate the fans' shared experience of adoration of her. Within
Albert's outrage, Dietrich's personhood is located essentially in her "loyalty" to her
audience, and her duty is to become "real." It is her responsibility to her fans to exhibit
and display agency and not to permit Sternberg to stand in the way. It is only through her
fans that she gains "vitality" and a "vibrant" identity, the kind around which fans can
form competing groups.
246
Albert's protests actually show continuity with contemporary scholarly studies of
Dietrich that work hard to liberate the Dietrich persona from Von Sternberg's
authorship.
123
However, Sternberg never claimed to be the author of "the artificial
buildup of personality" outside the film studio, but only of Dietrich's acting and
appearance in the films. There is a discursive reality in fan discourse to which
Sternberg's philosophy found itself opposed. There was a whole industry that produced
personality in a way that inevitably turn self-hood from a relationship of oneself to
oneself to a relationship of individual to the crowd.
So, Sternberg intervened into this "simple formula that has been developed by a
highly paid corps of hucksters, large beyond belief' in the kind of act that Michel
Foucault described as parrhesia, or truth-telling. Foucault qualified parrhesia as an
aspect of Stoic philosophy, saying,
Of course, parrhesia also involves acting on others, but not so much to
order, direct, or incline them to do something or other. Fundamentally it
involves acting on them so that they come to build up a relationship of
sovereignty to themselves, with regard to themselves, typical of the wise
and virtuous subject, of the subject who has attained all the [tranquility of
mind] that is possible.... Flattery really is the adversary, the enemy (385).
The truth that Scarlet Empress, reflects to the (female) viewers in the crowd of
moustachioed soldiers is just the process by which cinema's fan-making apparatus
motivates and utilizes the viewer's desireor such a process as it was perceived with
1
See Lutz Koepnick's and Joseph Gankarz's articles, at least, in Dietrich Icon.
247
perhaps less than Stoic disdain by Sternberg. It is the desire of the "homogeneous herd"
to be absolved of individual guilt through a sense of similarity and identification with the
other members of the larger group.
Though guilt does not appear explicitly among Freud's concepts in Group
Psychology, Freud's group forms because it fulfills individuals' desires for a momentarily
stable sense of identity. The crowd offers a sense of liberation from destabilizing forces
of self-doubt. Membership in the group provides just such a sense of unity of self by
seeing its doubles and reflections everywhere in the group. The idea that everyone is
doing it or feeling it constitutes the appeal of joining the mass.
Even if Catherine the Great in Scarlet Empress is a successful ruler, it hardly
means that she was a successful self. The further parrhesiastic truth of the Scarlet
Empress is the truth of the artificial build-up of the star, the notion that the star's image
was the product of a whole institution constructed to produce glamour. Catherine's
appeal to the members of the guard is produced largely by the cruelty of the lessons of
the old Empress who teaches her to become a shared love object. The emphasis in Scarlet
Empress is on the manner in which a woman is passively taken up in a system of glamour
in order to allow a collective identification amongst the members of the cult of the crowd.
Unlike in Ford's apology in the The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, there is no
momentary victory to be gained by the master director in uniting the group. Sternberg's
critique is more total because it is not a critique of just the inadequacy of personality to
its illusory elevation by the image and by film technique. Sternberg's Stoicism hinges on
an ethical divide from all crowds that form around such illusions. The whole set of
248
gender relations at stake is different, but there are core differences that are not reducible
to gender roles.
What stands out from the mob milieu confronted by Ford's Lincoln is a false
community formed by the mob, what Deleuze calls a pathogenic milieu. Lincoln lifts
himself above the milieu and reinstatesat least temporarilythe encompassing
community. When the mob appears in Ford, it is the group's opposition to the good that
is the problem. Lincoln calls out individuals to remind them of the authentic Christian
community to which they normally belong. Hence, in Ford the crowd is something to be
mastered, transformed, and converted en masse through the appearance of the
encompassing hero, an image or illusion enveloped in an atmosphere that can only be
produced by the master director.
Sternberg's crowds both look different and achieve something different from
Ford's mobs. The crowd is not something that can be mastered. It is something to be
escaped, to be fled from, to be diverted in favor of the inner peace of the reserved space
of the affection of self on self. The true choice and the true self is located somewhere
completely other than in unity with a group. In Sternberg, the use of the cinema's
representation of depth, the reduction of the filmic medium to its purely present surface,
expresses the solitude of the ethical and self-sufficient individual. In comparison with the
truth of interior integrity and steadfast spiritual determinationthe star essence proffered
to the hoi poloi by technicians and marketers alike is nothing but hokum from hucksters.
Sternberg's distance from the herd and the cinematic image is voiced as the parrhesiastic
Stoic teacher that Sternberg wanted to be.
249
Sternberg wrote in Fun in a Chinese Laundry that "the face and its framing values
must be viewed objectively as if it were an inanimate surface" (324). The instruction
seems almost like an exercise to maintain Sternberg's own coldness relative to the image
itself. In Sternberg's claim to having a cold approach to the face, he applies a "spiritual
umbrella"
124
against the group ecstasy that, again, was connected with the silent cinema's
representation of the face by Barthes in "The Face of Garbo."
Marcus Aurelius had a similar aphorism that is directed at reducing the passion
for sexual intercourse that one might apply as well to the enjoyment of food.
Surely it is an excellent plan, when you are seated before delicacies and
choice foods, to impress upon your imagination that this is the dead body
of a fish, that the dead body of a bird or a pig ... and in matters of sexual
intercourse, that it is attrition of an entrail and a convulsive expulsion of
mere mucus. Surely these are excellent imaginations, going to the heart of
actual facts and penetrating them so as to see the kind of things they really
are. You should adopt this practice all through your life, and where things
make an impression which is very plausible, uncover their nakedness, see
into their cheapness, strip off the profession on which they vaunt
themselves (45: VI. 13).
124
In Fun in a Chinese Laundry, Sternberg describes how "the Orientals believe that the
air, like a cave full of bats, overflows with a swarm of demons and evil spirits who swoop
down on humans to plague them, and entire complex systems of theologies are based on
trying to open some spiritual umbrella to keep from being pelted" (338-9).
250
As Aurelius's aphorism is designed to contravene attachment to the pleasures of sex and
food, Sternberg's cold approach to the face in terms of its "inanimate" aspects might be
designed to contravene his participation in audience group ecstasy.
In the earlier films, the goal of Sternberg's spiritual exercises may have been
limited to detachment from the image itself. Sternberg seems to have been highly
suspicious of the close-up and the way that it was used ordinarily. He was suspicious of
the role of spectacle, the illusion of the actor as the free source of the power of the image.
At the same time however, Sternberg also professed mastery over the cinema's
tools of "flummery," and he carefully constructed the scenarios through which the soft
reflective face and the free body might be used. In Sternberg's ethical aesthetics there is
an uneasy alliance between craft and the face. This comes out in a contrast between
Sternberg's cold mastery of craft that nonetheless had the face as its object and a refined
human self as its target and Deleuze and Guattari's invective against the face in A
Thousand Plateaus.
According to A Thousand Plateaus, the human face is not a representative feature
of the human being. The face is not a natural organ but only a flexible signifier produced
by societally variable, but equally inhumane, forces.
Although the head, even the human head, is not necessarily a face, the face
is produced in humanity. But it is produced by a necessity that does not
apply to human beings "in general." The face is not animal, but neither is
it human in general; there is even something absolutely [inhumaine] about
the face. It would be an error to proceed as though the face became
251
inhuman only beyond a certain threshold: close-up, extreme
magnification, recondite expression, etc. The [inhumaine] in human
beings: that is what the face is from the start (171).
125
The human face is something that is not essentially human. The face is an inhuman
illusion that is falsely understood as a representation of what is human. This is true, for
Deleuze and Guattari, not only when viewed from the perspective of a technician or when
it is placed in extreme or amateurish lighting. In A Thousand Plateaus, as in Cinema 1,
the suspicion of the idea of the face as a totalizable unity expressing a constituted human
person goes beyond a critique of the superficiality of the image in the context of the
commercial cinema. Deleuze and Guattari had already cited Sternberg a few pages above
when they asserted that the face is always already the product of artificial forces imposed
upon the body. The imposition of an invariable social role or identity on an individual
distinguished by the face is a means to an inhumane restriction on individual freedom.
This is all part of Deleuze and Guattari's overall argument in the two books of
Capitalism and Schizophrenia. There, they advance the idea that psychotherapy's view of
the human individual had been institutionalized so as to cooperate with the other
dominant institutions of modern society. According to Deleuze and Guattari,
psychotherapy had become a collection of techniques for accommodating individuals to
modern institutions of family, company, state, media, schools, and consumer culture.
125
Mussumi translates the French inhumaine only as "inhuman" in A Thousand Plateaus,
but Deleuze and Guattari's rhetorical conflation of human and animal is better captured
by the emphasis that certain aspects of living as a human being amount to being treated in
an an inhumaine way.
252
Deleuze and Guattari treat all of these institutions as different systems for
producing social norms and they trace how psychotherapy fails to question the ways that
these modern institutionsbehind the back of a politically disengaged psychotherapy
produce, in fact, the problems that psychotherapy is then forced to treat. So, Deleuze and
Guattari look to an eclectic array of literature, art, philosophy, and anthropology for
alternative viewpoints to reconsider the way that individuals are produced and
normalized. The face, or "faciality," functions, for Deleuze and Guattari, as a "regime"
for accommodating individuals to these institutions.
It does not seem that Sternberg shared this suspicion of the effective unity of the
human individual as something produced by inhumane institutional forces. Provided the
self was cultivated with an ethics of self-sufficiency where the rational head might hold
control over the animalistic emotions, the individual formed into a coherent self was still
Sternberg's ideal. Sternberg's spiritual exercises hinge on the refinement of the
conditions under which the pure spiritual reflection of the self can appear. But, that self is
still authentically embodied in the unity of the facewhen it is depicted with proper
lighting, at least.
Deleuze and Guattari operate a strange conceptual inversion that considers the
very signifier of a human being, the face, as just another means of inflicting something
inhumane on human animals. This inversion accuses Sternberg as much as it accuses the
commercial cinema generally. To say no to power, to attachments to luxuries, and
certainly to membership in the crowd are all interconnected in Sternberg. However,
problems of how to do this, of what new values one should adopt, and of how to install
253
them in oneself external to the cinema, is never precisely laid out in either the rapidly
moving enigmas of the films nor in Sternberg's meditations.
After Sternberg's career in Hollywood, and as his ancestral Austria was being
annexed to Nazi Germany, Sternberg claims to have been working on a filmic "essay on
the subject of mankind" (281). Following descriptions of his attempts to write a film
version of Zola's Germinal, he describes in Fun in a Chinese Laundry how the planned
film essay, entitled The Seven Bad Years,
dealt with man's fixation on an infantile level, and its purpose was to
demonstrate the adult insistence to follow the pattern inflicted on a child in
its first seven helpless years, from which a man could extricate himself
were he to recognize that an irresponsible child was leading him into
trouble.... I proposed no remedies. Who can? ... I did plan to investigate
the unreliability of emotional ramifications that stem from unguided
feelings. The film was meant only to encourage the viewer to re-examine
his defenses, providing he could ever be made to know precisely what he
was defending (279-80).
Sternberg never produced this planned investigation of how one might achieve control of
the emotions. He did, however, eventually manage to make a similar "not easily
understood experiment in indirect mass psychoanalysis" called Anatahan that he claims
as his best film (283). Here, the anthropocentric aims of Sternberg's philosophy emerge
most clearly. He aimed to
254
show what happens to humanity when it returns to the level of the cave
man. The men I pictured were not the Japanese of a counterfeit folklore,
they were ordinary human beings subject to the ordinary strains without
which there is no life (290).
But, on the island of Anatahan there is no room for the logic of sacrifice that motivated
the ethics of the earlier films. Once Sternberg's ideal of self-discipline confronts the
situation of "man reduced to the level of the cave man" and once ethics are located in a
political situation outside of the hermetic situation of the love triangle, the whole
possibility of tranquility of mind breaks down.
The Japanese sailors of Anatahan remain marooned on a tropical island for
several years, refusing to believe that World War II has ended unfavorably for Japan.
They spend the film fighting for control over two found pistols and over a single woman,
Keiko (Akemi Negishi). The result is that five men are killed due to the group's
abandonment of their common humanity and their regression to an animal state.
Sternberg's voiceover provides a kind of moral commentary to all of the action.
"Human beings react according to a set pattern" the voiceover analyzes. Further,
Sternberg's voiceover describes that the men were "still human beings, and that
classification is broad enough to cover quite a variety of behavior."
The final sequence of Anatahan resorts to obliterating the very convention that
had defined Sternberg's earlier career: the extremely conservative use of orienting the
actor towards the camera and of unobstructed motion towards the camera. This special
action is muted and reserved throughout segments that take place on the island of
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Anatahan as throughout Sternberg's earlier films. But, after a film that is truly brutally
cluttered by studio sets saturated with plant matter and filigree, the epilogue where the
men return to a Japanese airport abandons Sternberg's characteristic parsimony with this
most direct motion and demonstration of freedom.
The men are all shown one after another in quick succession approaching the
camera out of darkness. The direction here seems to insist on the common humanity of all
these men for which, as a group, they failed to care. After showing the men who return to
Japan, those who were murdered are shown rising from the shadows. The ending of
Anatahan visually shouts at the viewer about the tragedy of the failure of human self-
control that the film has depicted. Finally, the face of Keiko is shown with her gaze
directed offscreen towards a future of a higher morality that remains undefined.
Without the love triangle's logic of sacrifice to work with, the moralized
statement of Anatahan demonstrates the difficult choice offered to women even in the
apparently liberated position that Sternberg's films seem to grant to their heroines. The
island of Anatahan is a social environment that is effectively limited by the group's belief
that they are constantly being subjected to tricks by American enemies trying to convince
them that the war is over. Hence, Keiko's choice to flee the islandand thereby to attain
her freedom from the feuding sailorsseems on an allegorical level all the more like a
suicide. She exits entirely from the highly-confined space of the film. As Claude Oilier
pointed out, "When Keiko runs away, it is all of life itself that leaves the island: nothing
is left but to win an empire of shadows, a vanquished Japan of which [the sailors] do not
dare conceive" (32).
256
This inconsistency of Sternberg's spiritual alternative remains the most effective
point made by the study of Sternberg's Morocco by the Cahiers du Cinema collective in
1971 that they published as a sequel to the essay on Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln,
126
The
final gestures of at least Anatahan and Morocco convey the future of their heroines, as
the Cahiers editors wrote, as a kind of "impossible elsewhere" in which "the fetishism of
the woman would no longer be valid currency" (93).
The problem common to both Keiko's and Amy Jolly's "line of flight," to use
Deleuze and Guattari's terminology from A Thousand Plateaus, is that the spiritual
alternative of this flight lacks any kind of substance. They are very different in so far as
the ending of Morocco rejects the face whereas the ending of Anatahan hurls the face at
the viewer like Sternberg never had before. However, the resolutions to both films turn
the films themselves into worlds without spiritual connection to the world outside the
cinema.
The ending of Morocco, where the desert landscape is ostensibly substituted for
the final emotional statement of any face, flirts with de-privileging the face as an
expressive entity. It is the undetermined purity of the image of the desert that gives the
final scene of Morocco its spiritual force. But, even with Tom Brown out there in the
19A _ .
The technique by which Sternberg's exercises propose his spiritual alternative is not
by pushing "to the limits the process of devaluation of Amy Jolly which was marked
from the beginning of the film" (88). The Cahiers described Sternberg's critique of
Hollywood star fetishism as an attempt to progressively force Dietrich's character into a
transgression of social and class relations, thereby undoing her star value. The critique of
the fetishization of stars and of spectacle in Sternberg's films is based on an ethical logic
and not only on trashing the Dietrich franchise in order to build up the Sternberg
franchise. There is more than just "fancywork aesthetic" to Sternberg's calculated
arrangement of postures and direction. The films are organized according to a logic of
nobility and sacrifice for the sake of the self.
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desert, Amy Jolly's flight in Morocco seems as much undermined by the lack of
definition of the landscape of the desert itself as it is enhanced by the pure white of the
sand and the sound of the wind.
From the perspective of the comparison with Anatahan, the formal appearance of
pure glowing whiteness of the final desert scene in Morocco leaves little of the spirit
intact. Disenchanting ourselves with this final scene can also follow a similar line to the
questions Deleuze and Guattari raise about landscape in art, considering it a no less
repressive and artificial regime than that of the face.
Now the face has a correlate of great importance, which is not just a
milieu but a deterritorialized world.... The close-up in film treats the face
primarily as a landscape; that is the definition of film, black hole and
white wall, screen and camera (172).
Citing Sternberg's technical comparison of the face to an inanimate landscape, Deleuze
and Guattari configure the false unity of the depiction of landscapes in the history of
western culture as a regime that parallels that of the face.
Deleuze and Guattari advocate replacing such a paradigm of thinking about any
isolated landscape as an organic whole unto itself or the organic unity of a community, an
individual, or an architecturalized landscape. The alternative they advocate is simply the
continual exploration of an interconnected network of forces linking the human body to
the material earth in the form of "a thousand plateaus" of related energies.
127
Sternberg
127
The title of A Thousand Plateaus, the second volume of their Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, is taken from the ecologist and systems theorist, Gregory Bateson.
Ecology and economy have the same root word as oikeiosis, the oikos or household.
258
seems to have failed to provide such an alternative to the forces of artifice and
identifications that moved the crowds of men and women into the cinema. Deleuze and
Guattari looked to Herman Melville for an example of an author who became obsessed
with going beyond the face.
Sternberg's Stoicism seems to leave uslike Herman Melville's hyper-Stoic
Bartlebyparalyzed in front of a white wall. But, one does not need a Sternberg film for
that. The cinema spectator has always already been a Bartleby, at one time or another,
who opts for mere boredom and a place to sit in front of a white wall, immobilized in a
cinema seat in order to get sucked into a black hole if only for a moment and escape the
space of the home, the workplace, or the street. The cinema was initially was just a place
to pay for a seat outside of the confines of one's home without having to buy anything
additional or having to be seen by anyone else.
In a way, Sternberg's Stoic solution for the viewer is an attitude that every even-
slightly-critical visitor experiences at one time or another. "Everyone" is an "expert," as
Benjamin wrote, of the viewer's capabilities to understand the "artificial build-up of star
personality outside the studio." Thereby everyone gets bored. Everyone from time to time
passes through a disillusioned stoical detachment when faced with a barrage of equally
nonsensical and unpalatable choices on the "white wall" of the screen. Few spectators, if
any in history, were unfailing enthusiasts of the cinema as dedicated to a starlet as
Catherine's guard is to her. The sites of modern mass culture have often had the nearly
ambivalent status of being the lesser of so many evils, a place to escape when one has
been forced out of or bored by the rest of the modern landscape.
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The landscape and the face became abstract elements for the sake of the purported
authenticity of Sternberg's human-spiritual goal, which was to restore dignity and
discipline to the face and to the human individual that the vulgarity of mainstream cinema
had taken away. The forceshuman and inhumanethat underlie and create the
landscape within Morocco are patently ignored. The desert is pure abstraction like the
abstract image of the dredge that begins Sternberg's first film, The Salvation Hunters,
and like the country landscape that ends the film. The closing intertitles of The Salvation
Hunters proclaims.
It isn't conditions, nor is it environmentour faith controls our lives!
Watch them walk! Heads up, eyes shining with glorious confidence!
Nothing can stop them now or make them falter! Ready for happiness! ...
And like these three all of us can face the future unafraid!
Perhaps these intertitles were being merely hyperbolic to have claimed that
environment and conditions do not control our lives, but they certainly pronounce what
Deleuze described in Logic of Sense as the Stoic paradox. This Sternbergian faith affirms
destiny while denying the necessity of the impact of environment and conditions that
Sternberg himself suffered through and knew well.
In Fun in a Chinese Laundry, Sternberg has to recognize that it was fortunate
environmental conditions that gave him his chance at a career in the cinemabeginning
at a job polishing used filmstrips.
128
As much as he was later targeted by Siegfired
128
Sternberg's story begins,
One humid summer afternoon my somnambulistic search was interrupted.
I was strolling in a park, as indifferent to my fate and peaceful as I could
260
Kracauer as a hyper-formative and anti-realist studio filmmaker, Salvation Hunters,
seems to have been produced through highly aleatory encounters with the environment of
Los Angeles.
He describes his organization of the film in his meditations. He found what he
would later refer to as "the hero of the film" (202) by chance, and by wandering.
129
It was
the good fortune of an aleatory drive around Los Angeles that presented him with the sets
for The Salvation Hunters that made for his entrance into Hollywood. If the landscape
ever be, when a sudden downpour followed by the rumble of thunder
drove me to take shelter under a bridge. Two frightened girls came
running out of the rain, and one fainted as lightning struck a tree not far
from where we stood. As it turned out, this bolt had been hurled by
someone in charge of the cinema section above the clouds (19).
The girls bring him to a friend's shop containing a mechanism "to clean motion picture
film and coat it with a protective elastic substance" (19).
129
Sternberg planned the making of his first film through a series of accidents:
So I hopped in my car to search for an inexpensive location which might
provide the nucleus for a story to be contrived to fit the stringent
[financial] conditions. Water and harbors had always attracted me, and at
the Port of San Pedro I noticed a huge dredge engaged in clearing a
channel, and noted that each time its giant jaws dipped into the waters to
extract a load of mud an equal amount of earth crumbled from the
opposite shore and, sliding into the waters, made the work of the dredge
seem futile. It never occurred to me that at the time I would be ready to
use the dredge it might be towed away, and it actually was removed, but
only on the day when I had finished with the scenes I needed, the deity
that supervises films was at my side ... I had the best insurance on earth:
faith and confidence. I went to work to compound a story that would
feature this monstrous machinery.... Then, in the center of Chinatown I
discovered some brick hovels that must have at one time served as cribs
for prostitutes, judging by the scrawls on the boarded doors and windows.
I planned to conceal the camera in a crate on wheels so that I could with
impunity move it through the streets of Los Angeles without its being
noticed. In the San Fernando Valley I found a piece of land that featured a
real estate sign which read "Here Your Dreams Come True"and with
that my story was complete (Fun in a Chinese Laundry 200-1).
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and seascape of Anatahan is given more in depth treatment to the conditions that shape
human behavior, the film nonetheless verges on painting the trouble of Anatahan as an
instance of a pathogenic milieu treated with the humanistic concerns of an almost Fordian
nostalgia.
It is both the charm and the failure of Sternberg's films and his meditations that
they lack a real theory or a consistent exercise of what earlier Stoics called oikeiosis.
Oikeiosis is translated as "familiarization" by Julia Annas, but also as "appropriation" or
"making akin to." Hierocles's description of oikeiosis is very clear:
In general each of us is as it were circumscribed by many circles, some
smaller, others larger, some enclosing and others enclosed, depending on
their differing and unequal relations to one another. The first and nearest
circle is the one which a person has drawn around his own mind as around
a centre; in this circle is included the body and things got for the body's
sake.... Second, further from the centre and enclosing the first one, is the
one in which are placed parents, siblings, wife and children [etc.] When
this has been considered, it is for the person striving for the proper use of
each thing to draw the circles somehow towards the centre and to make
efforts to move people... into the included [circles] (Annas 267).
However, the clarity of such a formula, striving to make all people like family, is a
deceptive oversimplification. Annas shows that Hierocles's account is ultimately flawed.
Obviously, the aim is to think of all humans impartially, giving them all
equal concern; whereas my relation to my mother and father is a paradigm
262
of partial relation, where because of my commitment to particular people,
I favour and cherish them more than others in my relationship with them.
Increased partiality to others can never end up with impartiality; Hierocles
is producing the opposite of what is required (268-9).
To be free from the fluctuations of desire and to achieve "impartiality" would seem to
eliminate care for others. But, this definition of duty still ends up making "commitment to
particular people." Hierocles, like Cicero's description of the Stoic extension of family
bonds to all of humanity, defines Stoic duty as the extension of the "natural common
attachments" felt for one's family to the rest of humankind.
According to Foucault, in the late Hellenistic period of Sternberg's heroes
Epictetus and Aurelius, the Stoic self was an end in itself. The self is not a means towards
political action for the good of the community as in Plato's Alicibiades. The person who
is saved for the Stoicsaccording to Foucault's generalizationwas a city unto himself.
Just as a city is saved by building the necessary defenses, fortresses, and
fortifications around it... so we will say that a soul is saved, that someone
is saved, when he is suitably armed and equipped to be able to defend
himself effectively if necessary. The person saved is the person in a state
of alert, in a state of resistance of mastery and sovereignty over the self,
enabling him to repel every attack and assault.... In another respect the
term salvation refers to nothing else but life itself. There is no reference to
anything like death, immortality, or another world in the notion of
salvation found in the Hellenistic and Roman texts ... salvation renders
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you inaccessible to misfortune, disorders, and all that external accidents
may produce in the soul (184).
The goal is to confine one's concerns to only that which is under one's own
powerdefined by Epictetus as one's internal states only. It is then difficult to positively
define the constraints on how to serve duty, how to extend the circles that need to be
included in the consideration and care entailed by ethical action. This is the fatal dilemma
of Melville's Bartleby as much as it was for Sternberg's Stoicism.
The unresolved problem of oikeiosis in the late Stoics can be seen in Hadot's way
of explaining the connection from the metaphor of the universe as a good city to any real
state or human organization to which one happens to belong.
We now must engage our responsibilityour fellow creatureswho
provoke our passions precisely because they are our fellow creatures:
being whom we must love, although they are often hateful.
Here again, the norm will be found to be conformity with Nature:
not, this time, that universal Nature which we know in general to be
rational, but one of the more specific and determinate aspects of this
universal Nature: human Nature, the Nature of the human race, or that
Reason which all people have in common. This is a particular norm, which
is the basis of precise obligations: in so far as we are parts of the human
race, we must
(1) act in the service of the whole;
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(2) in our actions, respect the hierarchy of values which may exist between
different types of action
(3) love all human beings, since we are all the members of one single body
(Hadot The Inner Citadel, 183).
Hadot derives a connection between the universal logic of nature to the logic of a human
community from Aurelius, even if his inference is expressed in termslike those of
Hieroclesthat are too assured. Interrogating the oikeiosis of Sternberg's spiritual
exercises leads one to the same kind of difficulties that lead to a kind of Fordian nostalgia
for a general will. Hadotat whatever level of consciousnesspresents the movement
by which the Stoic selfeven though one's self ought to be shorn of all emotional
attachments that do not depend on one's own control over emotionsis nonetheless
forced into an oikeioisis that takes the form of an imperative to "love all human beings"
and to love them "although they are often hateful."
Hence Hadot's Stoicism does not belong in Deleuze's philosophy of difference
which specified that "the individual is above the species and precedes the species in
principle" {Difference and Repetition 250). A Stoicism that would take account of the
essential antagonism between the human individual and the species would run into
further complications that are barred by Hadot's guarantee that "Acting in accordance
with reason means preferring the common interestthat of humanityto one's own
interests" {The Inner Citadel 202).
Hadot's language of the shared body is completely like St. Paul's, Rousseau's, or
Plato's. It is a language of self-evident universality. The value of Stoicism for Deleuze
265
as will become clear in unpacking Deleuze's discussions of Melvilleis Stoicism's
means of dealing with our always imperfect knowledge of what is in our own interest at
any given moment in a way that refuses reference to a somehow generalized species
interest and, oftentimes, even to an individual's perception of his or her own self-interest.
Sternberg's Anatahan and his ideas for his films after Hollywood, converge with
Hadot's reading of Stoic ethics. The Stoic selffor lack of a better-defined context or
oikeiosis is conscribed to the service of the human community. The human milieu as it
is is assumed to be the natural condition where a self belongs. This difficulty of oikeiosis
may or may not be sourced to Marcus Aurelius. If so, a disconnect in determining how to
treat other human beings, or of how to perceive commonality with others, may have
precipitated the problematic moves made by Sternberg in Anatahan to relate control over
one's own emotions to a privileged object in the humanity of others.
When Sternberg's Stoicism is pressed into politics, there is no little nostalgia in it.
Hence, when the Cahiers du Cinema asked Sternberg what American directors he liked,
he cited Ford first.
130
When the self is elevated to the level of politics, the community of
Sternberg's "faith" lacks Ford's expressionist cunning. Even in Rousseau's social
contract, men still had to be convincedprobably by a state religionto will generally.
People have to be convinced to want unanimity and to want to see familiarity around
130
In the 1956 interview, "Le Montreur des Ombres," the interviewer asks, "What do
you think of contemporary American cinema?" After a lengthy protest at the
impossibility of answering such a question, Sternberg admits,
The French made many films, the Italians also. There are excellent
directors in every country, in Italy, in France, in my own country. John
Ford, Frank Capra, George Stevens, William Wyler, Billy Wilder are good
directors. But nearly all of those that I have mentioned are not from
America (23-4).
266
them. The reason for this is precisely because a society is defined by factions and not by
unity or general interest.
Stoic ethics was supposed to lead us to a will towards harmony with God and with
the universe. In Sternberg's spiritual exercises, this search for tranquility of mind sought
in harmony with the universe then very mysteriously leaves us with no alternative but to
will the betterment of mankind in general.
131
But, if one were confirmed to love all
human beings even in a small group, it seems inevitable that one would then end up
loving some who hate others, and so on, thereby being forced into difficult contradictions
in sentiment. This impasse should be clear enough.
An alternative yet remains for the reckoning between self and universal humanity
that might yield an authentic oikeiosis. This is the dangerous line of originality picked up
by Herman Melville's approach to the American problem. An ethics with an authentic
oikeiosis and without nostalgia must turn against universal humanity as an adversary.
131
As Patrick Riley demonstrates, it was through a great move of cunning that Rousseau
appropriated his idea of the general will. It was taken from the idea of the universality of
the call of salvation that came from St. Paul but also passed through Augustine's
argument with the Pelagians and Jansenism's standoff with the Jesuits.
In fact, the notion of "general will" was originally a theological one,
referring to the kind of will that God (supposedly) had in deciding who
would be granted grace sufficient for salvation and who would be
consigned to hell. The question at issue was: if "God wills that all men be
saved"as St. Paul asserts in a letter to his disciple Timothydoes he
have a general will that produces universal salvation? And if he does not,
why does he will particularly that some men not be saved?... From the
beginning, then, the notions of divine general will and particular will were
parts of a larger question about the justice of God; they were always
"political" notions, in the largest possible sense of the word "political"
in the sense that even theology is part of what Leibniz called "universal
jurisprudence" (Riley, 4-5).
267
The Originality of Herman Melville
4.0 The American Problem: Oikeiosis without Nostalgia
Lear:
How, nothing will come from nothing. Speak again.
Shakespeare King Lear (164:1.1)
Eager for thee thy City waits:
Return! with bays we dress your door.
But he, the Isle's loved guest, reposed,
And never for Corinth left the adopted shore.
Herman Melville Timoleon (15)
Bartleby, the Scrivener (1853) traces the outrageous consequences of the lack of
oikeiosis in the hyperbolic Stoicism of its titular character. Bartleby's tragic end and the
even-more-tragic misinterpretation of his life by the attorney who narrates the story
predict the failure of Sternberg's ethics in Hollywood.
In "Bartleby, or the Formula," Deleuze creates a name for the literary events that
Melville's novels were calculated to enact upon their reader. Translated in Essays
Critical and Clinical as "formulas," Deleuze uses formules to describe both Melville's
literary language events and those of his characters. To refer to Melville's novelistic
events, formules is better rendered as "procedures."
132
The work done by Melville's
novels, according to Deleuze, is not unlike the operations and remedies of a "medicine-
man" (81). Melville's novels are also like legal proceduresthey might be said to litigate
or negotiate. And what is at stake in these procedures is originality.
1 .
t t
This is the English rendering of Kafka's processus, described by Deleuze and Guattari
in their discussion of Kafka's mode of expression from Kafka Towards a Minor
Literature (15). This is the word that Deleuze used when he described The Confidence-
Man in Cinema 2.
268
In this, Melville's procedures to reconcile originality with universality confront
the same problem as that found at the convergence of Sternberg's exercises of the self
and Ford's strategies of unanimity. In the examples studied here, the two directors failed
to facilitate the creation of connections beyond the self without authorizing further
illusions about the normal, the good, or the human. They failed to find an oikeiosis
without nostalgia.
The philosophical source texts for Sternberg's and Ford's confrontations with the
American problem are dismantled by the critical procedures of Melville's novels. The
community that is imagined by Ford's strategies of unanimity is undone by the
procedures of Melville's posthumously published Billy Budd (1891/1926). Ford's
strategy relied on the submission of a pitiable objectusually a womanto wrongs done
by the law in order to elicit equitable judgments by the viewer of the fiction. However, in
Melville's final novel the law is cynically estranged from any basis in the good.
Besides, pity for Billy, the handsome sailor, is no ordinary pity. Pity for Billy is
inextricably connected to admiration of the strength within his infirmity: his occasional
stuttering. Furthermore, this object of our pity is himself sacrificed to the law. The
procedure of this novel completely undermines the kind of Socratic irony that marked
Ford's rapprochement between the law and the good "external to the film, but internal to
the cinema."
As in the monomaniac mission of the Pequod in Moby-Dick, these two director-
Ahabs tried to pierce through the white wall of the cinema screen and thereby to break
out of the Platonic-cinematic cave. They confronted the vulgar illusions of the cinema
269
and had aims to destroy the cinematic leviathan that had grown from the inscrutable and
malicious whims of the crowd.
The strategies of Ford and the exercises of Sternberg were designed to stave off
this chaos of the modern mass whose base nonsense had been harnessed by the cinema
for economic gain. They proposed ideals of community and of self that made claims to
authenticity. Like Ahab, they asked, "Who's over me?" and professed, "Truth hath no
confines" (140). But, their claims to authenticity were themselves equally unstable.
Melville demonstrated with Captain Ahab in Moby Dick (1851)but also with the
disastrous consequences of the rigid path to truth of the young novelist and moral
enthusiast in Pierre, or the Ambiguities (1852)that monomania makes for an
ineffective approach to anti-idolatry.
The singular moment of truth-telling must destroy familiarity rather than enforce
it. Nostalgia has no place in an ethics whose goal is a singular willingness to embrace the
reality of flux. It is the same savage pursuit that Deleuze describes as a modernism
presaged by the wild philosophy of the late Epicurean philosopher, Lucretius.
There is a vast difference between destroying in order to conserve and
perpetuate the established order of representations, models, and copies,
and destroying the models and copies in order to institute the chaos which
creates (Logic of Sense, 266).
Melville's procedures belong to what Deleuze called in Logic of Sense, a "critical
modernity" (265) whose problems nonetheless extended to the classical world. If as
Deleuze writes, Melville's community was to be a universe or federation "of people and
270
goods," where "alliance replaces filiation" then the most modern universality and
community must be constantly rediscovered without illusions of familiarity.
Deleuze finds evidence for Melville's Utopian vision for the novel in Melville's
anonymously-published essay "Hawthorne and his Mosses" (1851) and in the last novel
he published, The Confidence-Man (1857). By enacting procedures to reconcile
originality with universality, Melville's hope, according to Deleuze, was that the great
novelist might help to constitute an entirely new "universe, a society of brothers, a
federation of people and goods, a community of anarchist individuals" ("Bartleby" 85).
In the same spirit of the creative destruction of models and copies that
characterizes such a critical modernity, Deleuze's rendering of the Confidence-Man
needs to be destroyed in order to renew the chaos towards which Deleuze was gesturing.
Deleuze uses the tangent of Melville's narrator on "original characters," to define
Melville's American problem. But, he misses the role that this discussion plays as a clue
to the puzzle of the novel. The very idea of originality that Melville championed in
"Hawthorne and His Mosses" reappears in The Confidence-Man as a hint for situating the
reader within the complex and quite puzzle-like play of characters whose identities are
obscured by the novel's narration that fulfills Melville's imaginings of a book that is
"egregiously calculated to deceive the superficial skimmer of pages" ("Hawthorne and
His Mosses" 530).
A new gesture for originality's solution to the American problem emerges from
the ludic structures of the The Confidence-Man. The procedure of The Confidence-Man
a veritable media theoryis devastatingly calculated to undermine the easily
271
commodified ideals of authentic community or an authentic self. Moreover, the novel's
philosophical game of truth cuts through the web of co-promotions in morality and
marketing that, as Melville saw, had the power to transform American life into a vast
confidence game.
The unraveling of Melville's puzzle is some potent literary medicine. The novel
suggests that the aleatory connections that might make an oikeiosis possible without
nostalgia demand a Cynic's war against humanity for the sake of a universal fraternity.
But, we will not finish there. Something further will follow of this masquerade as the
lines of Melville's short stories are shown to converge with Foucault's pursuit of a
concept of truth and with Deleuze's own critique of marketing in a biopolitical society of
control. We can gesture towards a reformulated meaning of an education in artistic
resistance through an ethics and politics that does without community and without self.
4.1 Bartlebv. the Stoic
We cannot bear connection. That is our malady. We must break away, and
be isolate. We call that being free, being individual. Beyond a certain
point, which we have reached, it is suicide. Perhaps we have chosen
suicide. Well and good. The Apocalypse too chose suicide, with
subsequent self-glorification.
D.H. Lawrence ^Apocalypse 148)
There are echoes of Stoicism in the character of Bartleby as much as in
Sternberg's exercises. The story exhibits the paralysis that results from the hyperbolic
Stoicism of a character who has lost all means of oikeiosis. Without any positive relation
to others, without connection and concern with the outside world, he rapidly disintegrates
into a nothingness that the world which he ignores imposes upon him.
272
His withdrawal is facilitated by his repeated, "I prefer not to," that Deleuze uses
as his example of a formule in Melville. This linguistic procedure might very well
identify him as a transcendentalist like that described by Melville's contemporary Ralph
Waldo Emerson. Emerson cited the Stoics as great precursors to transcendentalism,
133
an
idealist ethical position in which
it is simpler to be self-dependent. The height, the deity of man is to be
self-sustained, to need no gift, no foreign force. Society is good when it
does not violate me; but best when it is likest to solitude ("The
Transcendentalist" 187).
Considering the value that Emerson's transcendentalism placed on solitude and
spiritual self-sufficiency, it is no surprise that Sternberg cited Emerson in the epigraph to
the Third Chapter of Fun in a Chinese Laundry.
134
However, Sternberg's Stoicism could
not have survived the procedure of this story of Melville's any more than Bartleby does.
Melville subjects the collision between this quasi-transcendentalist and the ordinary
133
wa
y
0
f thinking, falling on Roman times, made Stoic philosophers; falling on
despotic times, made patriot Catos and Brutuses; falling on superstitious times, made
prophets and apostles; on popish times, made protestants and ascetic monks, preachers of
Faith against the preachers of Works; on prelatical times, made Puritans and Quakers;
and falling on Unitarian and commercial times, makes the peculiar shades of Idealism
which we know" ("The Transcendentalist" 191).
134
This is the chapter in which Sternberg articulates his critique of the actor and the
audience in the most developed way, and the quotation is from Emerson's essay
beginning with his trip to the drawings of the Mammoth Cave in Kentucky entitled
"Illusions," first published in 1857.
The cloud is now as big as your hand, and now it covers a county. That
story of Thor, who was set to drain the drinking-horn in Asgard, and to
wrestle with the old woman, and to run with the runner Lok, and presently
found that he had been drinking up the sea, and wrestling with time, and
racing with thought, describes us who are contending amid these seeming
trifles, with the supreme energies of nature (Sternberg 54).
273
world to a riotous parody by inserting Bartleby into the urban, social, and commercial
milieu of Wall Street. This was just where Emerson claimed that the transcendentalist did
not belong.
Hired as a copyist by the Wall Street attorney who narrates the story, Bartleby
labors vigorously during his first days of work. The attorney describes the intensity of
Bartleby's work: "As if long famishing for something to copy, he appeared to gorge
himself on my documents" (10). But, Bartleby suddenly shifts in behavior after the
attorney requests that Bartleby help to proofread the copied documents. "I prefer not to,"
says Bartleby.
The attorney can interpret the apparent disobedience of this linguistic procedure
only in terms of its "passive resistance." The procedure is subtly, yet utterly, different
from an outright refusal. "You will not?" asks the attorney; "I prefer not," Bartleby
clarifies. This negative preference continues and expands to all the tasks of the office, to
the perplexity of Bartleby's supervisor.
Deleuze expresses his excitement over the perplexing effect of Bartleby's
procedure,
If Bartleby had refused, he could still be seen as a rebel or insurrectionary,
and as such would still have a social role. But the formula stymies all
speech acts, and at the same time, it makes Bartleby a pure outsider
[iexclu] to whom no social position can be attributed ("Bartleby" 73).
The effects of Bartleby's procedure divest him of the social role for which the attorney
thought he had hired Bartleby. The procedure withdraws Bartleby from the position of
274
being able to make ordinary speech-acts, in the sense that it neither situates him among
others nor in relation to himself. Bartleby's formule is a speech-event that has the effect
of neutralizing social hierarchy and disarming of the power of command held by his
superiors in the office.
Bartleby's social position of being nowhere and being no one was also described
by Emerson as the plight of the transcendentalist. Emerson considered transcendentalism
largely as an outsider position that was produced in the conflict between modern society
and a Stoic-esque attitude:
It is a sign of our times, conspicuous to the coarsest observer, that many
intelligent and religious persons withdraw themselves from the common
labors and competitions of the market and the caucus, and betake
themselves to a certain solitary and critical way of living, from which no
solid fruit has yet appeared to justify their separation. They hold
themselves aloof; they feel the disproportion between their faculties and
the work offered them, and they prefer to ramble in the country and perish
of ennui, to the degradation of such charities and such ambitions as the
city can propose to them (190).
Bartleby expresses the transcendentalists' sense of this "disproportion between
their faculties and the work offered them" with his "I prefer not to." Bartleby does
"perish of ennui," but he does not get the chance to while away his life out on an idyllic
"ramble in the country." Quite the contrary and Deleuze quotes Henry David Thoreau to
describe Bartleby's end:
275
And if he is prevented from making his voyage then the only place left for
him is prison, where he dies of "civil disobedience," as Thoreau says, "the
only place where a free man can stay with honor" (88).
Bartleby's death in the prison yard makes him a hero for Deleuze because of the passive
resistance that Bartleby has demonstrated for the reader, the effect of Bartleby's linguistic
procedure within Melville's literary procedure. More than anything else, the grim
outcome of the story's seemingly banal situation accuses the "logic of presuppositions
according to which an employer 'expects' to be obeyed" ("Bartleby" 73).
The ultimate effects of Bartleby's inscrutability are indexed in the attorney's
perplexed narration and the way that he describes his own reception of Bartleby's life and
actions. The attorney's absurd interpretations of the mystery posed by Bartleby's actions
are crucial to the story's procedure.
From the beginning, the attorney finds ways to fend off the destabilizing effects of
Bartleby's "negative preference" on the normal flow of daily office proceedings. The
attorney's counter-attack is a strategy of charitable indulgence, but this paternal charity
seeks only to reinforce the attorney's own position of power. The attorney explains his
initial sentiments towards Bartleby,
Poor fellow! thought I, he means no mischief; it is plain he intends no
insolence; his aspect sufficiently evinces that his eccentricities are
involuntary. He is useful to me. I can get along with him. If I turn him
away, the chances are he will fall in with some less indulgent employer,
and then he will be rudely treated, and perhaps driven forth miserably to
276
starve. Yes. Here I can cheaply purchase a delicious self-approval. To
befriend Bartleby; to humor him in his strange willfulness, will cost me
nothing, while I lay up in my soul what will eventually prove a sweet
morsel for my conscience (13-14).
The attorney frames his attempts to achieve a kind of noble aloofness with respect to the
spectacle of Bartleby in terms of a morality that imperfectly mirrors Bartleby's utter
uninterestedness in what life on Wall Street has to offer. Deleuze marks the relationship
from attorney to scrivener as a peculiar "identification" with Bartleby.
135
In the attorney's deformed copy of Bartleby's inimitable Stoicism, the attorney
does not limit his concerns to only those things that depend on his own power. Instead, he
invests his self-worth in the morsels for his conscience that he might gain through his
relationship to Bartleby. By supplying Bartleby with paternalistic charity, by charitably
viewing Bartleby's actions as merely involuntary "eccentricities," the attorney attempts
to neutralize Bartleby's effect on the attorney's own life. He attempts to convert
135
Deleuze describes the identification that the attorney attempts but that Melville's
novels refuse in this way:
Is there a relation of identification between the attorney and Bartleby? But
what is this relation? In what direction does it move? Most often, an
identification seems to bring into play three elements, which are able to
interchange or permutate: a form, image, or representation, a portrait, a
model; a subject (or at least a virtual subject); and the subject's efforts to
assume a form, to appropriate the image, to adapt itself to this image and
the image to itself. It is a complex operation that passes through all of the
adventures of resemblance, and that always risks falling into neurosis or
turning into narcissism. A "mimetic rivalry," as it is sometimes called. It
mobilizes a paternal function in general: an image of the father par
excellence, and the subject is a son even if the determinations are
interchangeable" (76).
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Bartleby's disruption of his world into a mere means to feed his own hungry conscience
and ego.
This technique of charity deployed by the attorney proves only intermittently
effective at counteracting the untoward social effects of Bartleby's Stoic-esque
techniques of the self. The attorney's expectations of Bartleby's approval of these
charitable indulgences go unfulfilled. The attorney recognizes, at times, that his attempts
to remain content with Bartleby's tranquil inactivity are inadequate. His successes at
achieving tranquility of mind through charity towards Bartleby amount only to an
inconsistent moodiness:
But this mood was not invariable with me. The passiveness of Bartleby
sometimes irritated me. I felt strangely goaded on to encounter him in new
opposition, to elicit some angry spark from him answerable to my own
(14).
Against the weak support of charity, only later vaguely linked to self-interest and self-
control, the attorney surrenders to an "evil impulse in me" (14). He tries to force
Bartleby to reciprocate and to "elicit the angry spark from Bartleby" (14).
136
The attorney shrugs off the "old Adam of resentment" towards Bartleby
simply by recalling the divine injunction: "A new commandment give I
unto you, that ye love one another." Yes this it was that saved me. Aside
from higher considerations, charity often operates as a vastly wise and
prudent principlea great safeguard to its possessor. Men have committed
murder for jealousy's sake, and anger's sake, and hatred's sake, and
selfishness' sake, and spiritual pride's sake; but no man that ever I heard
of, ever committed a diabolical murder for sweet charity's sake. Mere self-
interest, then, if no better motive can be enlisted, should, especially with
high-tempered men, prompt all beings to charity and philanthropy (25).
278
In other words, the attorney's reaction does bear out what Emerson wrote of the
transcendentalisms withdrawal from the world into himself:
Society, to be sure, does not like this very well; it saith, Whoso goes to
walk alone, accuses the whole world; he declareth all to be unfit to be his
companions; it is very uncivil, nay, insulting; Society will retaliate (191).
The attorney retaliates through a further demand that Bartleby compare documents, to
which Bartleby again expresses,
"I would prefer not to."
"How? Surely you do not mean to persist in that mulish vagary?"
No answer.
I threw open the folding-doors near by, and turning upon Turkey
and Nippers, exclaimed in an excited manner
"He says, a second time, he won't examine his papers. What do
you think of it, Turkey?" (14)
After the attorney retaliates to no avail with requests upon Bartleby, the attorney's
response to Bartleby's signature speech-event defers to the society of the other clerks.
This explicit link from the attorney's interaction with Bartleby and his immediate
turn to the opinion of the other clerks, Turkey and Nippers, exposes an unacknowledged
source of the attorney's evil impulses against Bartleby's passivity. The attorney's concern
with the opinion of any other people should be, of course, strictly outside the domain of
what truly concerns the Stoic.
279
This flaw in the attorney's ethics of charity will show itself to be the problem that
is most destructive to the moody peace through which the office initially accommodates
Bartleby. For a while, Bartleby continues to profess his negative preference, or else to
remain silent. As Deleuze catalogues with uncharacteristic precision, Bartleby has the
opportunity to use his formula in "ten principal circumstances, and in each case it may
appear several times, whether it is repeated verbatim or with minor variations"
("Bartleby" 69). Through it all, the attorney continues his struggle to identify with
Bartleby's tranquility. Even though Bartleby's preference against comparing copies
eventually extends to any and all office work as well as to any task that would take him
out of his protected alcove in the office, the attorney nevertheless succeeds enough to
become
considerably reconciled to Bartleby. His steadiness, his freedom from all
dissipation, his incessant industry (except when he chose to throw himself
into a standing revery behind his screen), his great stillness, his
unalterableness of demeanor under all circumstances, made him a valuable
acquisition. One prime thing was this,he was always there (15).
This charitable reconciliation based on the vacuous existential realization of the
attorney with regards to Bartlebythat "he was always there"infects the other clerks
Turkey and Nippers. The clerks "involuntarily" begin to adopt the use of the strange
word "prefer" (20-1). Further along, Bartleby begins to inhabit the office at all hours, and
the attorney finds himself taking lengthy vacations from the office to avoid his inert
employee. The office becomes a bizarre little enclave that accommodates Bartleby's utter
280
unwillingness to accommodate his employer. The attorney comes to feel such familiarity
with Bartleby that he thinks of Bartleby, "I never feel so private as when I know you are
here" (26).
Ultimately, it is the society beyond the little office that eventually retaliates and
intervenes to break this impossible reconciliation between the originality of Bartleby and
the office milieu. The interference of the disapproval of still others is too much for the
attorney to bear,
At last I was made aware that all through the circle of my professional
acquaintance, a whisper of wonder was running round, having reference to
the strange creature I kept at my office. This worried me very much (27).
The attorney moves his office to avoid the detrimental effects on his reputation
stemming from the idle presence of the clerk in his office who refuses to even admit that
he the attorney has attempted to fire him. When the new tenants of the old office come
looking for the attorney to ask him about the strange man still lingering in the old office
space, the attorney denies three times having any relationship to Bartleby. Bartleby is
forcibly removed to prison, where he will staynot held by force but remaining
according to his own inability to prefer going anywhere else.
Sternberg's early difficulties in Hollywood could be said to mirror Bartleby's.
Charlie Chaplin is the respectable gentleman who wouldnearly without references
make a personal project out of Sternberg's "cadaverously gentlemanly nonchalance''''
(Bartleby 16). Sternberg might have beenor might have wished that he could have
beendescribed like Bartleby, the Stoic, in the moment of his formula.
281
Not a wrinkle of agitation rippled him. Had there been the least
uneasiness, anger, impatience or impertinence in his manner; in other
words, had there been any thing ordinarily human about him, doubtless I
should have violently dismissed him from the premises. But as it was, I
should have as soon thought of turning my pale plaster-of-paris bust of
Cicero out of doors (Bartleby 11).
Was it Sternberg's fanatical concern for his own peace of mind, his
transcendentalist attitude, that led to charitable Chaplin's frustration with the film that he
hired Sternberg to make, The Woman of the Sea (1927)? Before it was seen by more than
a handful of people, Chaplin locked the film away and prevented its being scene in public
again. The film remains a "lost film" to this day. Regardless, in his meditations,
Sternberg attempts to appear imperturbable and "without a ripple of agitation" about the
whole affair, and yet only manages to come off as nonplussed. What little Sternberg
describes of the film verges on a proud disavowal of the person that he once was. He uses
John Grierson's words to describe this lost film in the manner of a confession.
It is not out of place to quote what John Griersonthe only critic who
ever saw this workwrote about [The Woman of the Sea]: "The irony of
this film is that it is the most beautiful picture ever produced in
Hollywood, and the least human" (163).
His younger days of inhuman Stoicism seem like an unspeakable excess of bad attitude
that he had since moderated. Sternberg may have been a cadaverously gentlemanly and
strikingly inhuman Bartleby in the good old days. But, in his later work and in Fun in a
282
Chinese Laundry Sternberg becomes the perplexed humanist attorney interpreter of his
earlier Stoic self.
Sternberg's earlier resistance to the Hollywood star system was a kind of
disobedient Bartleby-ism, but his critique of spectacle regresses to the frame of reference
of a kind of humanistic whole. Anatahan is his final cry against the undisciplined
caveman behaviors of the men of Anatahan. The film is Sternberg's cry equivalent to the
attorney's cry that concludes Bartleby: "Ah Bartleby! Ah, Humanity!" (Bartleby 33)
Initially, at least, Sternberg suffered a plight in relation to the attorney-Chaplin
not unlike the kind of artist's plight that Leo Marx saw allegorized in the character of
Bartleby. Writing in 1953, Marx interpreted Bartleby's plight as "a parable having to do
with Melville's own fate as a writer" (239) and saw the short story as Melville's
"mercilessly self-critical statement of his own dilemma" (240). Marx goes so far as to
attribute to Melville the attorney's final exasperated cry.
"Ah Bartleby! Ah, humanity!" are his (and Melville's) last words. They
contain the final revelation. Such deeply felt and spontaneous sympathy
are equivalent to the green of the grass within reach of man. It is an
expression of human brotherhood as persistent, as magical as the leaves of
grass. Charity is the force which may enable men to meet the challenge of
death, whose many manifestations, real and imagined, annihilated the
valiant Bartleby.... The lawyer can be saved. But the scrivener, like Ahab,
or one of Hawthorne's geniuses, has made the fatal error of turning his
back on mankind. He has failed to see that there were in fact no
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impenetrable walls between the lawyer and himself.... "Bartleby" is
exceptional in its sympathy and hope for the average man, and in the
severity of its treatment of the artist (256).
Marx's reading makes Melville into the attorney interpreting his earlier "fatal error of
turning his back on mankind." I think that the repentance to a post-Stoic humanism that
Marx wants to pin on Melville here sounds closer to the later humanist Sternberg
contemplating the young radically-Stoicor quasi-transcendentalistSternberg than to
Melville's meaning in the procedure of Bartleby, the Scrivener.
Marx's interpretation of the ending of Bartleby utterly conflicts with Deleuze's.
Nothing could be further from Deleuze's reading of Melville's procedure in Bartleby than
Marx's affirmation of "sympathy and hope for the average man" and salvation through
charity for mankind.
Deleuze mistrusts the final cry in the attorney's "need to rationalize, even if only
in the final pages ... psychology is no doubt the last form of rationalism: the Western
reader awaits the final word" ("Bartleby" 81). It would seem, for Deleuze, that this final
word is what Melville's narrators, as a rule, fail to reliably provide. The unreliability of
the narration of Melville's novels flaunts Melville's near-misanthropy towards the
humanist or psychological narrator's ordinary interpretation of events.
Deleuze contrasts the unreliable narrators to Melville's original characters. The
unreliable narrators, whom Deleuze refers to as "prophets" include the attorney, Moby-
Dick's Ishmael, Billy Budd's Vere, Benito Cere no's Delano ("Bartleby" 80). Deleuze
differentiates these flawed "prophets" from both types of Melville's originals: the utterly
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innocent "hypochondriac" originals (Bartleby, Budd, Benito Cereno, and maybe Pierre),
the "demonic" original characters (Ahab, Claggart, Babo, and the Confidence-man). The
attorney, like the other prophets, is
the one on the side of the Law, the guardian of the divine and human laws
of secondary nature: the prophet. ... They betray then, but in a different
manner than does Ahab or Claggart: the latter broke the law, whereas Vere
[from Billy Budd, Sailor] or the attorney, in the name of the law, break an
implicit and almost unavowable agreement... the final words of the
attorney's narrative will be, "Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!" which does
not indicate a connection, but rather an alternative in which he has had to
choose the all-too-human law over Bartleby (80-1).
The true nature of the attorney's sin, according to Deleuze, is not his lack of charity. The
attorney's sin is a betrayal of his accidental alliance with Bartleby. The attorney's
humanizing and paternalizing reaction betrays "the fraternal relation pure and simple"
("Bartleby" 84) in order to cater to the opinions of others. In the attorney's case this
means enforcing control upon the office space and recourse to the all-too-human law.
So, for Deleuze, Bartleby's problem is not, as Marx claimed, Bartleby's "fatal
error of turning his back on mankind" nor an inability to deal with "the challenge of
death" and its "manifestations." Instead, like an utterly true Stoic, Bartleby is completely
and tranquilly reconciled to death. Bartleby's problem is with other people and with the
commercial spaces of Wall Street. Perhaps Bartleby has a full justification for his
behavior, but he refuses or is unable to give an account of it. Nor can the attorney offer
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such an account. Melville's procedure forces the reader to reconstruct the justification
apart from psychological rationalism.
The final words of Deleuze's essay on Bartleby proclaim, "Bartleby is not the
patient, but the doctor of a sick America, the Medicine-Man, the new Christ or the brother
to us all" (90). The new Christ? Such a proclamation is not simple. The mistrust of
diagnosis that Deleuze expressed earlier in the essay, even the diagnosis that corrects a
patient into a doctor, should also be extended to Deleuze's final proclamation of Bartleby
as the new Christ.
The legacy of Christian charity that Deleuze positions as an antagonist with
respect to Melville's dream of fraternity is further developed in the work with Guattari.
Deleuze and Guattari consider the aims of writers "From Hardy to Lawrence, from
Melville to Miller" as great critics of the Christian worldview. They quote Henry Miller
to explain,
These English and American authors also know how hard it is to break
through the wall of the signifier. Many people have tried since Christ,
beginning with Christ. But Christ himself botched the crossing, the jump,
he bounced off the wall. "As if by a great recoil, this negative backwash
rolled up and stayed his death. The whole negative impulse of humanity
seemed to coil up into a monstrous inert mass to create the human integer,
the figure one, one and indivisible"the Face (A Thousand Plateaus 187).
Linking up A Thousand Plateaus with the postface to Bartleby, this wall of the signifier is
a figure for the kind of norm within a milieu that prevents a speech-event from becoming
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an original procedure. Like in their discussion of the "white wall" of the face, this strange
figure of the "wall of the signifier" forces individuals into an interpretable space, a space
where they can be made similar to what has gone before.
The attorney's interpretations of Bartleby interest Deleuze because it represents
this very kind of failure. The attorney attempts but fails to make Bartleby interpretable in
the same way that, for Deleuze and Guattari, Christianity has produced only
misinterpretations of Christ. The attorney's interpretations recapitulates the
transformation of Christ the philosopher-Stoic into Christ the shared love object of the
church's members who as in Freud's group psychology become identified with one
another. In a sense, it is also Sternberg's transformation into the attorney: "Ah!
Anatahan!"
According to Deleuze it is through the unreliability of Melville's narrators that
"Melville will never cease to elaborate on the radical opposition between fraternity and
Christian 'charity' or paternal 'philanthropy'" ("Bartleby" 84). The attorney's
interpretation of Bartleby de-radicalizes Bartleby by making him a mere signifier for
irremediable human suffering, one of so many "dead letters" that "speed to death"
however much the attorney has expectations of them to be "on errands of life" (34). The
attorney's flight from Bartleby and his attempts to simply interpret Bartleby away is
grounded in a sentiment of hopelessness.
Just in proportion as the forlornness of Bartleby grew and grew to my
imagination, did that same melancholy merge into fear, that pity into
repulsion. So true it is, and so terrible too, that up to a certain point the
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thought or sight of misery enlists our best affections; but, in certain special
cases, beyond that point it does not. They err who would assert that
invariably this is owing to the inherent selfishness of the human heart. It
rather proceeds from a certain hopelessness of remedying excessive and
organic ill. To a sensitive being, pity is not seldom pain (19).
But is not this hopelessness merely the attorney's misrecognition of his very own
complacency? This hopelessness is a product of the attorney's terrific inability to change
his own idea of the proper ordering of "errands of life."
This sense of a "certain hopelessness of remedying excessive and organic ill"
gives the attorney his cause to go on behavingwithout questioningas if it were
certain that Bartleby alone was ill, and not the attorney or his acquaintances on Wall
Street whose opinions concern him so much. If Bartleby will prove indigestible as a
morsel for the attorney's conscience and if Bartleby cuts into his idea of life among the
members of the one great body of mankind as he believes he knows them, thenthe
attorney begins to realize in this passageBartleby may be cut out of the body, if only
uneasily. Once Bartleby is safely in the "Tombs, or to speak more properly, the Halls of
Justice" (Bartleby 31), then Bartleby can be the attorney's signifier for ills that are
outside the concern of the everyday workings of civilization, and for pitiable-charitable
objects kept at the proper distance. The attorney's reaction to Bartleby generated by his
need for group-belongingthe problem of how to signify oneself as a member of his
Wall Street groupeclipses the attorney's evaluation of his own life.
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4.2 The Acinematic Billy Budd
Socrates:
And if you do this, we shall have been justly dealt with by you,
both I and my sons. And now it is time to go, I to die, and you to live; but
which of us goes to a better thing is unknown to all but God.
Plato (Apology 36)
The passage from Henry Miller's Tropic of Capricorn quoted by Deleuze and
Guattari above continues to critique the Christian mythological history of such a
viewpoint.
There was a resurrection which is inexplicable unless we accept the fact
that men have always been willing and ready to deny their own destiny.
The earth rolls on, the stars roll on, but men, the great body of men which
makes up the world, are caught in the image of the one and only one (63).
Melville is no less merciless than Miller on the political and religious incarnations of
"the one and only one" of a Pauline, Platonist, or Rousseauist general will. That to live
with humanity is to live in a kind of captivity is clear from Melville's narratives of travel
in the South Seas. In Typee (1845), the semi-autobiographical book that made Melville's
literary career, he had already claimed that members of so-called "savage" tribes should
be brought as missionaries to so-called "civilized" countries. The young Melville stated
simply that
it is needless to multiply the examples of civilized barbarity; they far
exceed in the amount of misery they cause the crimes which we regard
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with such abhorrence in our less enlightened fellow creatures ("Must
Christianizing Destroy the Heathen?" 369).
It may or may not be true, as Peter Wollen claimed, that Ford's work increasingly
equates "the Irish, Indians, and Polynesians, set in the past, counterposed to the march
forward to the American future" (101), but regardless Melville clearly went further than
that. He tried to destroy the very nostalgic desire to belong among familiars that can
make one imagine that the community one longs for in the present can be authentically
generated by the illusions of a fiction, no matter whether that fiction is set in the past that
can be easily romanticized as something "less enlightened."
In Billy Budd, Melville treats the same elements that structure Ford's strategy for
unanimity: the law and pity. However, the procedure of Billy Budd arranges these
features with effects opposite to Ford's strategy of encompassing a sentiment of
community. The story cuts across the strategic foundations that Ford constructed as an
American civil religion. Ford's opposition of the good to the law reinforced a nostalgic
sense of belonging to an equitable community "external to the film, but internal to the
cinema." The procedure of Billy Budd abolishes such a sentimental regression to the
imagination of sharing in approval with a community.
There is something specifically uncinematiceven supercinematicin the
character of Billy Budd, the handsome sailor. He is anti-photogenic, something cinema
never could have captured or producedalthough some have tried. Even with the help of
photographic flummery, the handsome sailor could never be properly rendered in the
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cinema. Billy Budd's impossibly-pitiful beauty is all the more absolute for not being
seen.
Consider the convenient fact for Socratic irony that Socrates was described as
being ugly. His sacrifice could be affirmed for the sake of the further beauty of the unity
of the republic. In Ford, who can deny that it is right when, in Fort Apache or in Wee
Willie Winkie (1937), the ugly Victor Mclaglen sacrifices for the military society that will
support the beautiful young Shirley Temple. Likewise, it seems right when Doc's
tubercular sacrifice is made to depend on the good of Clementine, the future school
marm.
But, Billywith his strength within beautymobilizes an entirely different
species of pity. True strength will emerge out of Billy's own stuttering infirmity that is
described early on in the book,
Though our Handsome Sailor had as much of masculine beauty as one can
expect anywhere to see; nevertheless, like the beautiful woman in one of
Hawthorne's minor tales, there was just one thing amiss in him. No visible
blemish indeed, as with the lady; no, but an occasional liability to a vocal
defect. Though in the hour of elemental uproar or peril he was everything
that a sailor should be, yet under sudden provocation of strong heart-
feeling his voice, otherwise singularly musical, as if expressive of the
harmony within, was apt to develop an organic hesitancy, in fact more or
less of a stutter or even worse. In this particular Billy was a striking
instance that the arch interferer, the envious marplot of Eden, still has
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more or less to do with every human consignment to this planet of Earth.
In every case, one way or another he is sure to slip in his little card, as
much as to remind usI too have a hand here.
The avowal of such an imperfection in the Handsome Sailor should be
evidence not alone that he is not presented as a conventional hero, but also
that the story in which he is the main figure is no romance (111:2).
Billy as a pitiable object cannot be distinguished from the primitive violence and
strength within. The extraordinary admiration of strength within infirmity will climax
when the mysteriously evil Claggart, with little or no justification, accuses Billy of a
mutinous plot. Captain Vere's recapitulation of Claggart's peijured libel brings out
Billy's infirmity. Pity for Billy comes to encompass, at the same time, the more ordinary
definition of pity, a pity for Billy as potential victim of circumstance and power.
Though at the time Captain Vere was quite ignorant of Billy's liability to
vocal impediment, he now immediately divined it... "There is no hurry,
my boy. Take your time, take your time." Contrary to the effect intended,
these words so fatherly in tone, doubtless touching Billy's heart to the
quick, prompted yet more violent efforts at utteranceefforts soon ending
for the time in confirming the paralysis, and bringing to his face an
expression which was as a crucifixion to behold. The next instant, quick as
the flame from a discharged cannon at night, his right arm shot out, and
Claggart fell to the deck (145: 19).
292
In the brutal moment, this first kind of pity that we feel for Billy radically shifts in nature.
From the moment when Claggart is struck, the strange pity mixed with admiration of
Billy's infirmity-strength is suffused with a new kind of pity. This is a pity at Billy's
confrontation with accident, chance, and the pitiless law that triumphs without contest.
William V. Spanos has recently linked the whole story in detail with Agamben's
State of Exception that was effective at points for disenchanting ourselves with Ford's
strategy for unanimity. Furthermore, what best fits Ford's strategy for unanimity is for
mothers/daughters to suffer the sacrificial loss of their sons/fathers. In Ford, we mourn
the son through pity/equity for the mother that reaffirms the aims of our own imagined
just community. She needs us to will for her. Through the androgynous condition of
Billyin contrast to Fordthe pitiful avoids being encompassed within femininity or
frailty. However, Ford's strategy of unanimity and Melville's Billy Budd, there is more
than just a representation of a certain historical conditionlike Agamben's "state of
exception." Instead, from Ford to Melville's tragedy one finds two very diametrically
opposed arrangements of the law and the perceived good. Both are rigorously calculated
to achieve a sentimental effect on the reader's sense of membership in a community. But
Ford's is designed to coerce a sense of authentic community where as Melville's
procedure in Billy Budd is to demonstrate such a community's impossibility.
Vere's own attempts at paternal philanthropy, expressing sympathy to comfort
the boy only incite Billy to "yet more violent attempts at utterance." Vere's paternal
sympathy induces Billy's convulsive violence. Claggart has been slain. Billy will be
sacrificed, and the good eclipsed, by the law's perpetuation of nothing but itself.
293
In Ford, the aimless pathogenic milieu is redeemed by opposition to the law. A
good action set on a sublime visual hierarchy founded on cinematic depth serves as the
illusory foundation for a renewed community. In Billy Budd, the law succeeds in keeping
the pathogenic milieu at bay. There can be no appeal to an equitable external community
to will against the legal pronouncement of Captain Vere's actions against Billy. Vere is
not evil or incompetent. He acts out of a concern for a threat that is real.
The narrator explains that there is mutiny in the air. Chapters 3 through 5 detail a
much-publicized insurrection in the British Navy in April 1797, and the "Great Mutiny"
on the Nore of the same year. In Chapter 14 Billy is approached by forecastlemen who
seem to be plotting an insurrection. They ask Billy if they can count on his participation.
They may just as well have been appointed by Claggart to trick Billy. In the context of
the intense homosexual subtext to the novel, they may very well have been
propositioning Billy for sex. The reader does not know.
But, there is enough reasonable evidence that Vere's push to the sentence of
death is not the work of a glory-mad martinet like Thursday in Ford's Fort Apache. The
narrator describes Vere's pious reasoning:
The case indeed was such that fain would the Bellipotenf s captain
have deferred taking any action whatever respecting it further than to keep
the foretopman a close prisoner till the ship rejoined the squadron and then
submitting the matter to the judgment of his admiral.
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But a true military officer is in one particular like a true monk. Not
with more of self-abnegation will the latter keep his vows of monastic
obedience than the former his vows of allegiance to martial duty.
Feeling that unless quick action was taken on it, the deed of the
foretopman, so soon as it should be known on the gun decks, would tend
to awaken any slumbering embers of the Nore among the crew, a sense of
the urgency of the case overruled in Captain Vere every other
consideration (148-9).
The sacrifice of Billy is a sacrifice of Vere as wellone that will haunt himbut the
urgency of the threat posed by the other men's potential interpretations of Billy's
accidental action is real. "Surely Budd purposed neither mutiny nor homicide," an officer
objects. However, Vere again sees that his hands are tied regardless of any personal
evaluation of Billy's goals:
We proceed under the law of the Mutiny Act. In feature no child can
resemble his father more than that Act resembles in spirit the thing from
which it derivesWar... in this ship, indeedthere are Englishmen
forced to fight for the King against their will.... War looks but to the
frontage, the appearance. And the Mutiny Act, War's child, takes after the
father. Budd's intent or non-intent is nothing to the purpose (154).
The reason that "Budd's intent or non-intent is nothing to the purpose" is that it is
only the appearance of force that matters most in a war against the very soldiers and
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sailors of the Bellipotent. Vere pronounces his prophetic interpretation of the incident
almost immediately: "Struck by an angel of God. Yet the angel must hang" (146).
By Vere's reasoning and his "monastic obedience" to "martial duty," the
undeniable good of Billy's generous innocence is ineluctably lost. This law and order is
still far from good because it carries out only the innate evil of the murdered Claggart
upon the unwitting innocence of Budd. Claggart's demonic antipathy is enacted by legal
authority upon the very object of pity in Billy himself.
Vere had no other way to act in order to avoid mutiny. His very political authority
is like Foucault's inversion of a phrase from Clausewitz. War is not a continuation of
politics by other means; politics is an extension of war by other means.
137
There is a deep
parallel between Foucault's reformulation of Clausewitz and Deleuze's corrosive notion
of modern irony described in opposition to the classical irony of Plato's Apology.
In classical irony, the lawhowever imperfectis made to depend on a higher
good. The ugly Socrates admits that it is good that he should loyally submit himself to
death for the good of the community, in spite of its laws' imperfect execution of higher
goods. In the modern irony of Billy Budd, the law is no longer based in the good. The law
dictates that the only good is the law's own perpetuation. Any and all potential goods are
at risk for the perpetuation of a rule of law that need not even be respected by the people
137
Beginning around the time of Clauzewitz's modern conception of warfare,
Political power is perpetually to use a sort of silent war to reinscribe that
relationship of force, and to reinscribe it in institutions, economic
inequalities, language, and even the bodies of individuals (Society Must Be
Defended 16).
296
to whom it applies. The law merely exists in and for itself. If the law would treat Billy
like that, might it just as well treat any one of us in the same way?
This modern irony of law also defies Aristotle's definition of the Equitable as an
accommodation of the law to particular circumstances as much as it defies the Platonic-
Paulist-Rousseauist community of one body. Whereas Ford's strategy produced a sense
of community that could be good, the law of Billy Budd acts with the permanent
irreparable force of death in a way that is completely irrespective of moral judgments of
good or ill. In Billy Budd, the law is not flawed by virtue of its universality or its
imperfect assimilation to God-given ideals. Instead, the law must cut down whatever is in
its path to preserve its order.
The sacrifice of beautiful Billy to this law decoupled from the good is all the more
horrific because of invisible and anti-photogenic perfection. Strength and beauty are both
personified and idealized in Billy in a way that cannot be given to perception. Hence,
with Billy Melville manages to conflate Kant and Burke's two aesthetic categories that
they were so assured were autonomous: the sublime and the beautiful. The coordinates of
the infinitely powerful sublime and the totally pitiable beauty are lost. Billy is a
paradoxical example of the sublimely beautiful.
This not-to-be-looked-at beauty, an ultimate good, is sacrificed to the functioning
of the law whose expedience preserves no good but itself. Melville's procedure does
away with the good of the law as the narrator remarks, "Innocence and guilt personified
in Claggart and Budd in effect changed places" (148).
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The disillusionment of reading Billy Budd derives from the fact that we do not
judge the faulty law of the past in contradistinction with the approval of our own illusions
of a community. There is no good unanimity feigning its own sovereignty as we judge a
legalistic exception for actions within the fiction as in Ford's strategy for unanimity. The
disconnect between the law and the good passes directly through our very present as
readers. No community is present for us to truly affirm, nor perhaps was there ever.
Yet, Billy Budd refuses the resistance to sentiment of Stoic detachment no less
than the sentiment of unanimity. We are called to a sentimenta very real inescapable
pity and mourning for Billy and for any ideals about justice itselfbut this sentiment
plunges to terrible depths rather than climbing to gothic heights. The final song that the
novel introduces as written by another foretopman is known to have been written by
Melville before the story.
138
The dirge sings as if from Billy's perspective:
But Donald he has promised to stand by the plank;
So I'll shake a friendly hand ere I sink.
Butno! It is dead then I'll be, come to think.
I remember Taff the Welshman when he sank.
And his cheek it was like the budding pink.
But me they'll lash in hammock, drop me deep.
Fathoms down, fathoms down, how I'll dream fast asleep.
I feel it stealing now. Sentry, are you there?
138
The story was only to be a short epigraph explaining the poem but extended into the
first fiction Melville had written in 30 years, and not be published for almost 40 years
(Bryant 212).
298
Just ease these darbies at the wrist,
And roll me over fair!
I am sleepy, and the oozy weeds about me twist (170).
This is a sentiment with its object dissolved that is "doubtlessly deepened by the
fact that he was gone, and in a measure mysteriously gone" (169). There is no clear
wrong that we might will to right as the milieu exterior to the novel, but internal to a
unified reading public.
The song replaces Billy's unimaginable face"the fresh young image of the
Handsome Sailor, that face never deformed by a sneer or subtler vile freak of the heart
within" (169)with an image more like what we find in Deleuze's idiosyncratic
appropriation of a Stoicism, so different from Hadot's. The sea, the hammock, the
darbies, and pink Billy are all just bodies. In the oozy weeds they mix indiscriminately as
a dark world made up of nothing but an indeterminate mixture of multiple
bodies ... but qualities are also bodies, breaths and souls are bodies,
actions and passions themselves are bodies. Everything is a compound of
bodiesbodies interpenetrate, force each other, poison each other,
insinuate themselves into each other, withdraw, reinforce or destroy each
other (Dialogues 62-3).
Billy Budd's form and that of the law of the Imperial British Navy both dissolve
into the formless foamy sea. Into this sea's shadowy depths of intermixing undetermined
bodies, the good has gone; the law plunged him to the depths. A seaman's ephemeral
song draws us into the mixtures of those same depths. One could never do this in cinema.
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After all, in the cinema the character may die, but the actor's careerif at all possible
will be made to live on.
4.3 The Classical American Cinema's Two Ahab Problem
Artists are stagemakers, even when they tear up their own posters. Of
course, from this standpoint art is not the privilege of human beings.
Deleuze and Guattari A Thousand Plateaus (316)
For Melville, truth dies with its telling. The Pequod in Moby-Dicklike Billy's
sacrifice on the Bellipotentis obliterated, plunged irretrievably into an unbridgeable
temporal vortex. The deaths that are enacted in Billy Budd, Bartleby, or Moby-Dick are
un-cinematic because they fly in the face of cinema's pretensions to preserve.
Cinema's apparent preservation of time is an obstacle to the momentary flash of
truth exploded by the human sacrifices of Melville's novels. Certain aspects of Melville's
formulas are, like Billy Budd's beauty, unfilmable. Moby-Dick is unfilmable becauseas
Deleuze and Guattari point out in A Thousand PlateausMoby Dick, the white whale, is
the white wall of the cinema screen itself. Melville's novel follows the failure of a
mission against this white wall, a mission to replace the play of false illusions with truth.
This was a mission taken up by Ford and Sternberg.
Melville's Ahab is the idol of anti-idolatry. The captain's name is taken from the
biblical character described in the Book of Kings. King Ahab tried to force his idol Baal
on the people of Israel by silencing the chaos of all the other prophets of Israel (1 Kings
17-19). Captain Ahab's mission to destroy the white whale is the seductive and radical
attempt to imprint onto social chaos by force a single emblem of truth and rationality.
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Sternberg and Ford likewise reasserted a higher truth upon cinema's flickering
illusions. For Sternberg, this meant putting Thought above the Body. For Ford, this meant
raising the chaos of the pictures and the mob to a higher unity through authentically
healthy illusions. However, their philosophies pretended too much to permanence.
The two became Ahabian failures in their war against cinematic illusions of
idolatry. Sternberg's and Ford's games of anti-idolatry are mere attempts to reinstate a
model. Like Ahab's monomaniac mission, they amount to an irretrievable plunge into the
vortex. Their formerly-lively truths have been immobilized within the hagiography of the
kind of cinema which they once opposed.
Consider Ahab's response in Chapter 36 to Starbuck's accusation that Ahab's
mission against the white whale is blasphemous. Ahab defends what Starbuck calls
"Vengeance on a dumb brute!" (139) in a fashion that can make one think that he
expects, in destroying the whale, to destroy the obscurity and illusions projected upon the
wall of Plato's cave.
139
All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event
in the living act, the undoubted deedthere, some unknown but still
reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the
unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can
the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me,
the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes, I think there's
naught beyond. But 'tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him
1
Michael E. Levin recognized the parallels of this description to Plato's cave in "Ahab
as Socratic Philosopher: The Myth of the Cave Inverted."
301
outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing in it. That
inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or
be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him (140).
Moby Dick's inscrutable malice and indefiniteness are the obscure forms that are
foisted upon the prisoners in the shadow play of Plato's cave. The Ahabian philosopher
must exit this world, achieve clarity and distinctness, and accede to truth. "Who's over
me? Truth hath no confines," claims Ahab (140). He believes that he might blast through
the cave by puncturing through the depths of white wall/white whale.
In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari have no little sympathy for the
radical mission of Ahab to abolish the cave of illusions itself:
Moby-Dick in its entirety is one of the greatest masterpieces of becoming;
Captain Ahab has an irresistible becoming-whale, but one that bypasses
the pack or the school, operating directly through a monstrous alliance
with the Unique, the Leviathan, Moby Dick.... It does seem as though
there is a contradiction: between the pack and the loner; between mass
contagion and preferential alliance; between pure multiplicity and the
exceptional individual; between the aleatory aggregate and predestined
choice. And the contradiction is real: Ahab chooses Moby Dick, in a
choosing that exceeds him and comes from elsewhere, and in so doing
breaks with the law of the whalers according to which one should first
pursue the pack (243-4).
302
Ahab wants to get beyond the mere illusion on the face of things, all of that which
concerns the false idolatry of "the pack or the school." He makes a strange bond with all
that he wants to destroy. However, Deleuze and Guattari seem to recognize that the
"contradiction" of Ahab's guerilla warfare upon the limited reality of group life fails by
the proposition of fixed truths.
Moby Dick is the White Wall bordering the pack; he is also the demonic
Term of the Alliance; finally, he is the terrible Fishing Line with nothing
on the other end, the line that crosses the wall and drags the
captain...where? Into the void... (250)
140
Ahab's originality, anomaly, and status as loner become the terrible "Fishing
Line" with nothing on the other end. In Ahab's radical opposition to the white wall, the
truth that he imagines on the other side, as an alternative to the cave of illusion, turns
what Deleuze and Guattari see as Ahab's path of original becoming into "a line of
abolition, annihilation, self-destruction, Ahab, Ahab...?" (250)
141
The brilliance as well as the ultimate failure of Ahab's mission is explainedand
then only inadvertentlyby the novel's faulty prophet, Ishmael, who interprets Ahab's
originality. Ishmael manages to verbalize the terrible indefiniteness of the white whale.
After rambling "in some dim, random way" through Chapter 42 on "The Whiteness of
the Whale", Ishmael describes how he, like Ahab, is vexed by the obscurity embodied in
the whiteness of the whale. He asks,
140
Ellipses and italics in original
141
Ellipses in original
303
Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and
immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the
thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the Milky
Way? (165: 42)
Ishmael admits that his reaction to the soft focus of the whale's inscrutable indefiniteness
is sheer sublime terror. In Ahab's response to Starbuck's protests, Ahab described the
indefiniteness of whiteness as reprehensibility. For Ahab, the "inscrutable thing" about
the whale provokes what his monomania can only recognize as hate.
Ishmael, a prophet, cannot be entirely relied upon to measure his own insights and
responses to Ahab's actions or to the reality of the white wall/white whale. It is rather
through the well-laid accidents in his prophetic interpretations that he gives Ahab's
mission over to its meaning. Ishmael's interpretation links Ahab's rage for truth to a fact
about whiteness that only slips out at the very beginning of the small treatise on "The
Whiteness of the Whale."
When Ishmael recounts the relationship whiteness has over all other colors, he
casually notes that a "preeminence in it applies to the human race itself, giving the white
man ideal mastership over every dusky tribe" (159: 42). The inscrutability of this
"mystery of iniquity" proper to the white man's ideal mastership is Ahab's target in his
pursuit of truth outside of illusions. The indefinite irrationality that whiteness physically
evokes at the end of the chapter must extend beyond the color itself to the nonsense of
whiteness when it is used to denote social or genealogical unity in a group of individuals.
A social order based on racial preeminence is based on nothing but an inscrutable malice
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and indefinite world of illusion. Gathered up within the Leviathan of the white crowd is a
sovereign power without reference to reason or science.
Ahab's allegorical mission is that the unreasoning pasteboard masks that have
ordered society according racial preeminence must be destroyed. To begin with, the
preeminence of whiteness, a nonsense category based on mere appearance rather than
essence, must be pierced if the truth that lies on the other side of the mask is to be
attained. The social power of whiteness based in the very illusion of an Anglo-Saxon race
emits not genealogical light but only obscure shadows and Ahab aims to strike through
this racialized Platonic encompasser.
D.H. Lawrence ventures such an explanation near the end of his study of Melville
and American literature, crucial to Deleuze and Guattari's discussions of Moby-Dick:
The terrible fatality.
Fatality.
Doom.
Doom! Doom! Doom! Something seems to whisper it in the very dark
trees of America. Doom!
Doom of what?
Doom of our white day. We are doomed, doomed. And the doom is in
America. The doom of our white day.
Ah, well, if my day is doomed, and I am doomed with my day, it is
something greater than I which dooms me, so I accept my doom as a sign
of the greatness which is more than I am.
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Melville knew. He knew his race was doomed. His white soul,
doomed. His great white epoch, doomed. Himself, doomed. The idealist,
doomed. The spirit, doomed.
The reversion. "Not so much bound to any haven ahead, as rushing
from all havens astern."
That great horror of ours! It is our civilization rushing from all havens
astern.
The last ghastly hunt. The White Whale.
What then is Moby Dick? He is our deepest blood-being of the white
race; he is our deepest blood-nature.
And he is hunted, hunted, hunted by the maniacal fanaticism of our
white mental consciousness. We want to hunt him down. To subject him
to our will. And in this maniacal conscious hunt of ourselves we get dark
races and pale to help us, red, yellow, and black, east and west, Quaker
and fire-worshipper, we get them all to help us in this ghastly maniacal
hunt which is our doom and our suicide.
The last phallic being of the white man. Hunted into the death of
upper consciousness and the ideal will. Our blood subjected to our will.
Our blood-consciousness sapped by a parasitic mental or ideal
consciousness (Studies in Classical American Literature 152).
Ahab wants to refound hierarchy on his own higher order of truth without the
inscrutable order of whiteness, the "preeminence" that it stands for over "every dusky
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tribe." As Lawrence suggests, "red, yellow, and black, east and west" can come in to help
in the hunt. But, the hunt leads only further into "ideal consciousness." Behind the white
wall, there is only a further void.
Eisenstein claimed to have been left "bouche bee" (Spark 495) by the pages of
Lawrence's study of Melville. Eisenstein read them in 1946, interested in the affinity
between Moby-Dick and his own Alexander Nevsky (1938) that had been pointed out to
Eisenstein by Melville/Eisenstein scholar, Jay Leyda. As Eisenstein described the
affinity, "I used white, contrary to tradition, to denote villainy" (Spark 494). But if Leyda
did not see Moby-Dick as a story of how opposition to an idea of evil indeterminacy in
favor of clear higher truths and ideals fails, Eisenstein certainly did develop similar
themes in the monomania of Ivan in the second part of Ivan the Terrible (1946/1958)
Ahab-Sternberg-Ford may align reason against the "villainy" of what Lawrence
calls the "deepest blood-being of the white race." Nevertheless, says Ishmael, from "that
proud sad, king ... only will the old State-secret come" (157: 41). The result of Ahab's
anti-idolatry and his anti-whiteness only founds a higher idolatry surrounding the new
king-captain of monomaniac truth himself.
Is it an exaggeration to say that the cinema, like Ahab's vision of the white whale,
was most of all a product of the illogic of the American mob's fury for emblems of white
power and the utter illusion of a pure white genealogy? Admittedly, not every film was
D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation (1917). But, the white whale is the great white
American mob as much as he is the American cinema screen. The competition of
personalitiesemblems of humanity and its false perfection in whitenessall
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concentrated into the cinematic face, Ishmael seems to describe all this: "The gilded
velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtile
deceits" {Moby-Dick 165). They are the cinematic emblems that mask the terrible white
walls at the borders of the pack.
Whether this leviathan-cinema-mass was racialized as white in a manner that was
absolute or even semi-permeable, for Sternberg and Ford, the mass needed to be
reformed. The nonsense of personality was an irrationality equal to that which lay at the
heart of the very idea of the American Anglo-Saxon race. This nonsense had, by
Sternberg and Ford's time, magnified racial ideology in order to motivate Jim Crow with
an intellectual violence that Melville's Moby-Dick could not have registered from
Melville's experience.
142
The idea of visually displaying the quality inherent to a person
for group judgment, a particular false spell of uniqueness or personality, the phony spell
of a commoditythey were all just the resounding echoes that called out to summon a
great white herd.
Both Sternberg and Ford are Ahabs caught up in their attempts to destroy the
white whale of cinema by piercing the depth of its white screen. This whale-screen,
targeted by Ahab-Sternberg-Ford, is the monster of the crowd reflected back to itself.
Sternberg and Ford confronted the cinematic crowd, the mob reconstituted in the base
illusions of the cinema screen. But, their attempts to destroy the very social irrationality
and nonsense that lay at the heart of the cult of personality of cinematic idols
142
For an incisive and readable portrayal of the unprecedented viciousness by which
white supremacy reasserted itself in the years intervening between the end of Melville's
main period of fiction writing and the beginning of the film careers of Ford and
Sternberg, see Jackson Lears' Rebirth of a Nation.
308
misapprehended the core nature of the problem. They only "monomaniacally" relocated
the essence of the idol of noble whiteness that mythically founded the American cinema
in Birth of a Nation in a search for truths that were to be unshakeable. They proposed a
higher truth and reason to conquer the irrational flux of cinema by installing a
philosophical permanence. But, these truths would only reinstate a face, a universal, or a
self. These are just revisions of a paternal face on a mission to subdue the flux of natural
indefiniteness.
Indefiniteness, as Ishmael realizes belongs just as much to perception of the
natural world as to that of the social world. It is when indefiniteness masquerades as
definition that it becomes a problem. Like Ahab, Sternberg and Ford failed, because in
seeking a permanent rational basis they sought only new foundations for the same power
structure: humanity, the independent self, America. Melville sacrificed just such a
mission when he sacrificed Ahab.
Ahab mirrors the failings of Sternberg's Stoicism from a perspective different
than the one burlesqued by Melville's through the character of Bartleby. Rather than the
mortification of all desires, Ahab's will is reduced to a single chosen aim: a truth that is
not signified, denoted, nor manifested, but that can come only through an investigative
act of confrontation with the white whale. He must pursue his truth of self in the
destruction of the white whale at all costs.
Sternberg lost films to the studios just as Ahab lost a leg to Moby Dick. He
needed revenge. Deleuze says of Sternberg's work in Cinema 1, that it was "light's
adventure with white" (94). Sternberg's Ahab-ism was an attempt to obliterate the
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wanton white force of the cinematic status quo by breaking it down with body
positioning, clutter, and the play of light and shade in order to initiate a search for true
values that would bring the viewer into his or her own ultimate solitude: a Stoic
"monomaniac" who would also become fanatical about nothing but his or her own
tranquility of mind.
The Ahabism of Ford's strategy for unanimity lies in the organization of
cinematic depth stemming upwards into a sublime cathedral escalating the cinematic
white wall's conflicts between a two-dimensional white wall of illusions and three-
dimensional perception of reality. Likewise, the descriptions of the ship and the whale in
Moby-Dick constitute a massive gothic structure with Ahab, the rebel, raised above its
depths. But, in Moby-Dick, Ahab is finally plunged to the depth. He does not ride off
above the horizon like Nathan Brittles in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon.
I43
The Pequod, in its mastery by Ahab, is a Rousseauist-Hobbesian unanimity that
collapses the distinction between revolutionary community and the social order united
around the will of a Leviathan sovereign. Meanwhile, the outlandish masculinity of the
Pequod, its homosociality, doubles Rousseau's reordering of the leviathan into the
organized revolutionary community of the general will. Ahab's defiance of his legal
commitments to the Pequod's owners and the aims of the business of whaling for the
143
This was a sort-of-sequel to Ford's Fort Apache. It is like Nathan Brittles, also played
by Wayne, is Captain York rendered by make-up into an old widower. He finally has a
chance to make up for the kind of situation that transpired with Custer/Thursday. The
voice-over that serves as a prologue to the film actually begins after the Custer massacre,
as if to pick up after the events of Fort Apache. Later, Brittles races against the law that
commands his own retirement into order to scatter Native American horses and avoid a
violent conflict.
310
sake of a higher heroic goal parallels Ford's strategic emphasis of conflicts between the
law internal to the film and the illusory equitable community "external to the film, but
internal to the cinema."
The contradictions of the Rousseauist fraternal ideals of the French Revolution
are visually invoked in Moby-Dick in a way that mirrors Ford's strategy for unanimity.
The men of the Pequod assume the pose of Jean Louis David's "Oath of the Horatii,"
pledging their spears to the sovereignty of Ahab's leadership in their drunken revelry on
the quarter deck in Chapter 36 (141 ).
144
In Ford's deployment of cinematic depth to place
the rebel at a depth, the "lines of flight"like the diagonals of the swords in "Oath of the
Horatii"are subordinated to "faces"the bodies of the men who are in front of these
radiating depth cues.
The men oppose the laws and convention of whaling for what Ahab imagines as a
higher good. But, for the sake of this higher good of the Pequod's "general will," the men
must sacrifice any ability to reevalute or redetermine their own idea of the good. The
drunken pledge of the men around Ahab still has no content but monomania. The white
whale becomes a target that is proposed over and above the chaos of ordinary commerce
in the industry. But, this target turns into a suicidal general will as all individual wills are
subordinated to the disastrous mission of the ship.
In Ford, the good amounts to a new foundation for the universality of an
American community that despite its having been based on nonsensical whiteness and
racial exclusion can be made to embrace even non-whites and non Anglo-Saxons
144
This visual reference is noted by the Norton Critical Edition of Moby-Dick
311
provided that they all accept the monomaniacal conditions of unanimity. However much
Ford's Ahabist genius was "threading a maze of currents and eddies, with a view to the
more certain accomplishment of that monomaniac thought of his soul" {Moby-Dick 167:
44), this great originality of Ford's cinematic stylization of the melting pot, the dream of
a higher American community only begins to "rally ... with blind rage" (174: 45) in a
manner that resembles closer and closer the nonsense and terror of the great white
leviathan-crowd that his strategy was supposed to have annihilated with the healthy
illusions of grand unanimity.
Sternberg's classical truth locates the nobility of whiteness within oneself as a
pure abstract nobility of life, regardless of one's conditions. Any one can find the pure,
immanent spiritual light of whiteness within one's self. But, Sternberg's quasi-
transcendentalist flight into ethics only takes what Deleuze called the Stoic paradox to a
dead end. That is, Sternberg's films affirm destiny but deny necessity in order to
discipline the self to be perfectly content to sit in front of the very white wall that Ahab
failed to destroy. But did this really take us to a new place where all our dreams could
come true? As Sternberg's attempt in Anatahan to accommodate his philosophy of the
self to an almost Fordian humanism shows, developing a Stoic self is no way to escape a
self-rationalizing melting pot monomania.
Both of these two Ahabs embarked on what Lawrence described as the anti-white
"maniacal conscious hunt of ourselves" in an America that had not yet thrown off "the
last phallic being of the white man." In any case, the ironies of such a hunt should
resound clearly enough in one of Sternberg's philosophical rants from Fun in a Chinese
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Laundry if it is reread more like a lazy shrug: "An actual slave, in physical bondage, can
become an Epictetus" (161).
4.4 Pierre's "Crack-Up" and The Aleatory Point
Are we to become the professionals who give talks on these topics? Are
we to wish only that those who have been struck down do not abuse
themselves too much? Are we to take up collections and create special
journal issues? Or should we go a short way further to see for ourselves,
be a little alcoholic, a little crazy, a little suicidal, a little of a guerilla
just enough to extend the crack, but not enough to deepen it irremediably?
Wherever we turn, everything seems dismal. Indeed, how are we to stay at
the surface without staying on the shore? How do we save ourselves by
saving the surface and every organization, including language and life?
How is this politics, this full guerilla warfare to be attained? (How much
we have yet to learn from Stoicism...)
Gilles Deleuze (Logic of Sense 157-8)
l4S
Consider the plight of the titular moral enthusiast of Melville's Pierre, or the
Ambiguities. He pursues virtue by fleeing the hypocrisies he sees in the portrait of his
father and in order to become the great novelist that he dreams of becoming. But, Pierre
nonetheless finds himself forced into the role of becoming a modelpositive or negative.
In fleeing identification with a model, he engages in an "enthusiastic" search for a
route to virtue comprised of fixed principleswhat Sternberg might have called,
"standards"for both art and for life. But, the search leads him to discover that even
behind his principles are more models. There are only models and cliches everywhere as
Deleuze writes about the American cinema. There is only "a whole organization of
misery" (Cinema 1 209) that makes cliches circulate.
In the area surrounding his ancestral home in western Massachusetts, Pierre
encounters a young woman purporting to be his half-sister. He marries her to protect her
145
Ellipses in original.
313
in an attempt to make up for what he imagines as the sins of his dead father. On the basis
of a portrait, the enchanting Isabel resembles his father. But, he only slips through the
cracks of his own enthusiasm into a matricidal, fratricidal, and suicidal endin that
order. Pierre consigns his own attempt at a novelistic masterpiece into the flames of his
fireplace even as he receives letters from so many obsessed fans who would make of him
a moral modelor a villain. Either way, he becomes the very kind of thing from which
he was fleeing as he moralistically broke from his imaginations of the portrait of his
father.
In Chapter 14, during Pierre's flight from the placid Berkshires to the city of New
York, he finds a philosophical pamphlet written by Plotinus Plinlimmon. But, then he
loses it. The narrator tells us it has only slipped into the lining of his jacket. Pierre
unknowingly has it with him for the remainder of the novel.
This pamphlet does point the way to the work of Melville's procedure. However,
the problem of the young man's passage into the disasters of spectacular virtue detailed in
Pierre is too easily reduced to the ideas presented with unreliable clarity in the
philosophical pamphlet.
Plinlimmon's pamphlet argues that most rules of virtue are too perfect to be
adhered to in ordinary life. This is exemplified, for instance, in the way that the
miraculously virtuous behaviors of Christ are never followed by men on earth. Such
"chronometrical" virtues need to be tempered with "horological" life on earth because
in an artificial world like ours, the soul of man is further removed from its
God and the Heavenly Truth, than the chronometer carried to China, is
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from Greenwich.... so the chronometrical soul, if in this world true to its
great Greenwich in the other, will always, in its so-called intuitions of
right and wrong, be contradicting the mere local standards and
watchmaker's brains of this earth (294).
But, Pierre's problem is not exactly one of reconciling divine revelation with human
reality. Pierre's problem is not that "the heavenly wisdom of God [is] an earthly folly to
man" (295). Instead, Pierre's problem is the Melvillean American problem that is
common to Sternberg and Ford: reconciling originality with universality by developing
an oikeiosis that is not nostalgic.
As Pierre rides into the city with Isabel in defiance of his mother, he resents that
he has no milieu to refer to in order to dispel his self-doubt,
But Pierrewhere could he find the Church, the monument, the Bible,
which unequivocally said to him"Go on; thou art in the Right; I endorse
thee all over; go on." ...With Pierre it was a question whether certain vital
acts of his were right or wrong. In this little nut lie germ-like the possible
solution of some puzzling problems; and also the discovery of additional,
and still more profound problems ensuing upon the solution of the former.
For so true is this last, that some men refuse to solve any present problem,
for fear of making still more work for themselves in that way (286).
Pierre had found it incumbent upon himself to break with the bad example of his
fatherknown to him primarily through a portrait with a disturbingly wicked smile. But,
he discovers that his own private pursuit of virtue is based on nothing but a play of
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examples and copies. Just as Ahab becomes the idol of anti-idolatry, Pierre winds up
nostalgically longing for a church or an example by which to fix his path.
In New York, Pierre takes up residence in a church converted into a kind of
commune peopled by "mostly artists of various sorts; painters, or sculptors, or indigent
students, or teachers of languages, or poets, or fugitive French politicians, or German
philosophers" (372). This "Church of the Apostles" could be an urban Owenite Brook
Farm, or the Concord or Roxbury of Melville's day, or in some ways, the Hollywood of
Sternberg's, or the empty and temporary bohemianism that, today, is available from a
week at the Burning Man Festival. The author of the pamphlet, Plotinus Plinlimmon, also
happens to live at "The Apostles" as something of a guru, but Pierre never manages to
meet him.
Deleuze in his postface to Bartleby celebrates Pierre's initial choice to run away
with Isabel much like he and Guattari celebrate Ahab's becoming-whale. Initially Pierre's
accidental break is a break towards the new community that Deleuze claims is Melville's
American dream. It is a key example of how "alliance replaces filiation and the blood
pact replaces consanguinity" (84) Deleuze emphasizes that this new fraternity of originals
is composed of relationships that extend familial bonds in something like an oikeiosis that
is not a matter of marking and extending circles as in Heirocles', Cicero's, and Hadot's
accounts of Stoicism. Instead, what is at stake are experimental chance connections with
A brother, a sister, all the more true for no longer being "his" or "hers,"
since all "property," all "proprietorship," has disappeared. A burning
passion deeper than love, since it no longer has either substance or
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qualities, but traces a zone of indiscernibility in which it passes through all
intensities in every direction, extending all the way to the homosexual
relation between brothers, and passing through the incestuous relation
between brother and sister. This is the most mysterious relation, the one in
which Pierre and Isabelle are swept up ("Bartleby" 84-5).
Pierre's initial move liberates him from a humanity caught up in the image of the one and
only one and from any imitation of the portrait of his father.
So in championing Pierre's initial bond with Isabel, Deleuze is quite far from the
reading that Dennis Berthold glosses in assimilating Plotinus Plinlimmon's pamphlet to
the teachings of Machiavelli.
Pierre sacrifices himself and others for an unattainable and hypothetical
ethical purity that is nothing more than his own erotic projections on
Isabel, the beautiful young woman whom he embraces as sister, lover, and
self-destructive medusa (Berthold, 135).
According to Berthold, Pierre believes that he is rejecting Machiavellian "ethical systems
that rest on the premise of human evil and justify actions by its consequences, not by its
methods or intentions" (135). According to Berthold, this rejection of relativism is a
psychological trick that Pierre plays on himself so that he cannot enact his own lascivious
desires.
The relativism/ethical purity opposition does seem to be at issue in Pierre. The
very idea that Pierre has the Plinlimmon pamphlet advocating moral relativism with him
all the time in the lining of his coat seems to indicate that even absolute moralities carry
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with them secretly and in a manner unknown to those who propound them, an element of
relativism. Yet, the way that Berthold smoothes Pierre's entire story into one
homogeneous descent that begins as soon as Pierre meets Isabel is perhaps too simple.
Instead of Berthold's homogeneously anti-Machiavellian yet inadvertently
relativistic descent, it seems as if Deleuze would posit a double aspect to Pierre's
trajectory like that which Deleuze and Guattari elliptically gesture towards in the mission
of Captain Ahab. First of all, there is the initial break where Pierre affirms chance and
undifferentiated fraternity-sorority. But, then Pierre reaches the point when he starts to
again look for "a church, a monument, a Bible" to approve his actions. This is where
Pierre fails to become adequate to further aleatory potentials of a kind like the encounter
with Isabel that motivated his initial break. Upon entering into the hardships of poverty,
he neglects the openness to fortune that was so important in Machiavelli's discussions of
virtue and that first swept Isabel into his life.
In his inflexibility, Pierre cannot recognize as Machiavelli recognized of fortune
and change that
two men, working in opposite ways, can produce the same outcome; and
of two men working in the same fashion one achieves his goal and the
other does not. On this also depends the variation of what is good; for, if a
man governs himself with caution and patience, and the times and
conditions are turning in such a way that his policy is a good one, he will
prosper; but if the times and conditions change, he will be ruined because
he does not change his method of procedure. Nor is there to be found a
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man so prudent that he knows how to adapt himself to this, both because
he cannot deviate from that to which he is by nature inclined and also
because he cannot be persuaded to depart from a path, having always
prospered by following it (Machiavelli 160-1).
Pierre fails to reevaluate his own position in the manner that Machiavelli indicates is
required in order to change one's attitude as fortune changes. Though he chooses a path
that seems opposite the path of his father, he ends up doing as bad or worse for himself and
for Isabel, his former fiancee Lucy, etc. The willingness to reconsider decisions and habits
made with past knowledge is important because, if the man of action is paying attention,
then he is always building new knowledge by altering and developing his perspective on
unfolding events. Machiavellian virtue hinged on the willingness to boldly recognize and
accept accidents as advantages.
Pierre admits new possibilities into his life only once, when he rejects his family
and takes Isabel into his life. After that Pierre begins looking to external circumstances to
validate the path that he has already chosen and defined for himself and for Isabel. He
finds nothing can provide such assurances and, as such, he cannot react. Ahab also thought
he had found a well-chosen path of truth and keeps convincing himself of it until the end,
he has his crew to endorse him all over.
Ahab describes this path in his monologue of Chapter 37. He speaks his
indiscriminate defiance to all who might challenge him:
Come, Ahab's compliments to ye; come and see if ye can swerve me.
Swerve me? ye cannot swerve me, else ye swerve yourselves! Man has ye
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there. Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails,
whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the
rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents' beds, unerringly I rush!
Naught's an obstacle, naught's an angle to the iron way! (143)
Ahab and Pierre both place themselves on an iron rail. They both get stuck on a
perspective that will not "swerve"in what must be a reference to the Epicurean
philosopher Lucretius who was as dear to Machiavelli as to Deleuze.
This Epicurean idea of the swerve is the inevitable deviation of atoms and events
from the path that we predict for them. The swerve or clinamen is a movement or change
that is smaller or faster than our smallest possible unit of measurement. Althusser
describes the idea well in his late formulation of "aleatory materialism."
The clinamen is an infinitesimal swerve, 'as small as possible'; no one
knows where, or when, or how it occurs, or what causes an atom to
'swerve' from its vertical fall in the void, and, breaking the parallelism [of
flowing atoms] in an almost negligible way at one point, [and to] induce
an encounter with the atom next to it, and from encounter to encounter, a
pile-up and the birth of a worldthat is to say, of the agglomeration of
atoms induced, in a chain reaction, by the initial swerve and encounter
(169).
This swerve necessitates that there is an aspect of the future which we cannot predict by
breaking reality into measured pieces or cinematic frameswhat Deleuze following
Bergson refered to as "immobile sections" (Cinema 1 1-5) Some flow of reality always
escapes our best measurements.
Deleuze used Bergson's highly Lucretian ideas from Matter and Memory to
critique cinema's apparent mastery of change, its illusionary reconstitution of movement
by immobile sections. Deleuze even extended Bergson's skepticism about the cinema to
all of perception. Perception always remains a little too slow, its units of measurement a
little too imprecise, to perceive the fastest and smallest elements of movement. In the face
of such a failure, and in the face of flux, we always have to act on incomplete information
and be constantly ready to make a "swerve." This is just what a monomaniac like Ahab
will not and cannot do.
With an absurdity comparable to Ahab's over-fixed path into the vortex, Pierre's
path also becomes a line of death when his path of virtuous sacrifice leads him to the wild
murder of his cousin Glen. He longs for a moral context, for the example of his old
heroes like the sublime Titan, Enceladus, of whom he dreams just before his final flight
into a murderous and suicidal rage. Upon waking, the face of Enceladus disintegrates and
is replaced with his own face.
In the way he ambiguously-comes to occupy the position of his unstable heroes,
Pierre is not a little like the viewer in Foucault's description of Velasquez's Las Meninas
in the Order of Things. Foucault described how the painting is structured so that the
viewer assumes the position of the royal family who is being painted. The ordinary
viewer thereby assumes the place of the sovereign. But, in this newly imagined position
of sovereignty, the viewer nonetheless finds himself the object of classification and
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tabulation that freeze the liberty he would have expected himself to have attained in
assuming the status of sovereign.
146
Michael Paul Rogin brilliantly linked the revolutionary failure of Pierre to Karl
Marx's interpretation of the popular surrender to Louis Napoleon's coup (Rogin 169) that
took place in the years just prior to Melville's writing of Pierre.
As in the Eighteenth Brumaire, active, revolutionary participants do not
reclaim power. Instead they drive the source of oppression deeper. Faced
with the threat from below, in Marx's and Tocqueville's analyses, the self-
conscious, bourgeois aristocracy abdicates power to a king. Louis
Napoleon rules over, and in apparent alliance with, the democratic mass.
Pierre, exposing the sexual threat from below, charts that failed revolution
in the family (Rogin 183).
But, Rogin misses the Lucretian Machiavelli within Marx's readings of these events that
hinges on the mechanics of an opportunity missed.
In Deleuze's restatement of Marx's problem of the 18
th
Brumaire, it was the
inability of the popular revolution to deal with the unforeseen consequences of its actions,
the inability to see itself in any terms other than as a "comic or grotesque repetition [that]
necessarily comes after the tragic, evolutive and creative repetition" (Difference and
146
"The light, by flooding the scene (I mean the room as well as the canvas, the room
represented on the canvas, and the room in which the canvas stands), envelops the figures
and the spectators and carries them with it, under the painter's gaze, towards the place
where his brush will represent them. But that place is concealed from us. We are
observing ourselves being observed by the painter, and made visible to his eyes by the
same light that enables us to see him. And just as we are about to apprehend ourselves,
transcribed by his hand as though in a mirror, we find that we can in fact apprehend
nothing of that mirror but its lusterless back. The other side of a psyche" (6).
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Repetition 92). As Pierre longs in vain for the true church that would affirm his actions as
righteous, his creative evolution becomes stifled and the revolutionary young writer and
sovereign citizen comically completes the tragic movement initiated by the king/father
when he chose the legitimate son, Pierre, over a daughter.
Pierre's accession to sovereign artist only puts him in relation to a public with a
positioning analogous to the model-status which his father's portrait held for him. The
model of sovereignty that Pierre imposes on himself was only ever for-a-public and not
for-itself, like the sovereignty imposed on the viewer in Las Meninas, was only ever for-
its-subjects and never the sovereignty of a subject-in-itself. Pierre, who is described in
Chapter 17 as a representative of "Young America in Literature" becomes the hero and
the villain, the potential shared ego-idealthrough approval or disapprovalfor some
other people's nostalgia. Pierre's virtuous pursuit makes him just another pretending
father, good or failed, but either way false.
Ultimately, Pierre fails as the attorney of Bartleby fails. He fails to persist in
making unprecedented ethical judgments. He fails to undertake mature actions without
reference to illusions about his milieu that he expects to take the form of defined
standards for belonging to a certain group. In Pierre's pretensions to virtue, he can be
nothing but an exampleno longer an inimitable original. He becomes interpretable,
pinned to the "wall of the signifier" as Deleuze and Guattari describe, so that he might
serve as a ground for group formation united around a common ideal. Whether that be an
ideal good, or an ideal evil, virtue fails to connect with the world. He finds no oikeiosis
without nostalgia.
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Oikeiosis is not a term that Foucault's Hermeneutics of the Subject lectures use.
However, Foucault's rendering of the sovereign self of Stoic virtue does seem rather
unsure as to how to achieve the good relationship to the world and to others. Foucault
describes that the link from the care of the self to the care of others in Epictetus evolves
according to a "providential bond" (195). But, the bond is established "at a reflexive
level" (196). As Foucault describes
the person who takes care of himself properlythat is to say, the person
who has in fact analyzed what things depend on him and what things do
not depend on himwhen he has taken care of himself so that when
something appears in his representations he knows what he should and
should not do, he will at the same time know how to fulfill his duties as
part of the human community (197).
The priority of the self is clearly established. Only afterwards does a self find its way into
the human community. The same is true for what Foucault describes of Aurelius. As a
disciple of Epictetus,
the target to which he must always strive, is not to be emperor, but to be
himself.. .What do you always remember? That you must be a good
emperor? No. That you must save humanity? No. That you must dedicate
yourself to the public good? No. You should always remember that you
must be an honest man and you should remember what nature demands.
Moral candor, which in the case of the emperor is not defined by his
specific task and privileges but by nature, by a human nature shared with
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no matter who, must form the very foundation of his conduct as emperor
and, consequently, must define how he must care for others... The
emperor will not only produce his own good but also the good of others in
this care of the self, in this relationship of the self to self as a relationship
of the self striving towards its self (201-2).
The emperor discovers his good with others not as a specific task, not by conformity to a
law or a model of virtuous human nature. Human nature is evolved only secondarily from
the good for the self and the self s reconciliation with wider nature. The confinement of
concern and attention to the self ought to produce unique and momentary virtuous
relationships to others. Foucault qualifies these as relationships to "no matter who" else.
This should already begin to recall Deleuze's use of the idea in the Cinema books of an
"any-space-whatever."
The self s connection, in Foucault, to "a human nature shared with no matter
who"like in Deleuze's discussion of Pierre, something that is shared with "a brother, a
sister"condenses the importance of what cannot be foreseen in this morality without
ideals. One cannot foresee with whom one will end up sharing in nature. Isabel was just
such a "no matter who" for Pierre. The almost inadvertent connection to "no matter who"
to "a brother, a sister" that is merely nascent in this passage from Foucault's lectures on
Stoicism was further elaborated by Deleuze's explanation of Stoicism in Logic of Sense.
Deleuze did not much love the idea of the self or of truth that Foucault began to
focus on so insistently in the early 1980s. Francis Dosse quotes a letter from Deleuze to
Jacques Donzelot that comments on Foucault's foray into Stoicism and the self. "The
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danger is: is Michel returning to an analog of the 'constituting subject' and why does he
feel the need to resuscitate the truth even if he does make it into a new concept?" (318) In
Logic of Sense, Deleuze admits that there is a danger that what remains of the texts and
principles of Stoicism may at times fall back into a "moral metaphor of intention" (146).
This brief phrase from Plutarch's description of Stoicism would imply that Stoicism
creates models for virtuous individuals in the world. Such metaphors are not what is
essential for Deleuze about Stoicism. That is why Deleuze avoids the idea of the self.
What Deleuze was trying to salvage from Stoicism in Logic of Sense emerges as if
accidentally from the Stoic sage's way of temporally reducing and focusing his
awareness within "any-space-whatever" and with regard to "no matter whom." In
Deleuze's Stoicism, "Divination grounds ethics" (143). Yet, Deleuze writes "Stoic ethics
was unable (and had no desire) to trust in physical methods of divination" (144).
Even though in Stoicism, the goal is to isolate the core or kernel of the self that is
"under one's control" this necessarily means opening up potentials at the outside of the
self due to a relinquishing of control. As one reduces one's idea of the event to the
smallest possible present, as one resolves to will the event as it occurs, cracks appear in
the way that one had previously framed the world. As William S. Burroughs wrote of his
cut-up method, when one cuts into the present, the future leaks out. Thereby, divination
grounds ethics.
When Deleuze explains the Stoic's positioning of himself on the line of time, he
writes that "The Stoic sage 'identifies' with the quasi-cause, sets up shop at the surface,
on the straight line which traverses it, or at the aleatory point which traces or travels this
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line" (146). It may seem a redundant phrasing, but it seems that for Deleuze, the Stoic
sage accidentally discovers the aleatory.
The engagement with an "aleatory point" is something that Deleuze's Marcus
Aurelius discovers but not because his Stoicism is necessarily looking for it. Of course,
the definition of an aleatory point is that one is not looking for it. But Stoicism is not
looking for what it is not looking for, yet it manages to find unanticipated possibilities
anyway. The Stoic sage, by limiting his own conception of the present, according concern
only to what he believes is under his controlaffection and internal reaction to external
circumstanceshe discovers truths that he would not otherwise have seen. He stumbles
through virtue onto capabilities that he otherwise would have missed.
Stoicism finds aleatory points by looking for the causes of a universal reason
outside of one's own immediate desires. Swerved from the ordinary path by ethics,
Stoicism discovers new truths about the future which, save for the pursuit of ethics, it
would not have discovered. Divination grounds ethics by inadvertently submitting the life
of the intellect to chance. By inadvertently welcoming chance events as if they were
products of universal reason, the Stoic accidentally relies on divination.
More often than notand this is what interests the Deleuze of Logic of Sense
what the sage is looking for is obscure or missing. Deleuze writes that "the sage can
'identify' with the quasi-cause, although the quasi-cause itself is missing from its own
identity" (168). By way of this forced mistaken identity, or submission to a causality that
does not insist on an absolute knowledge of cause and effect, the Stoic sage breaks off of
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the rails and accidentally refocuses on something different, a "no matter what" or an
"any-space-whatever" in the present moment.
Aleatory knowledge is provoked by the sage's shifts in attention within the
present and the future. Through relinquishment of control at the margins of the self,
through the sacrifices of virtue, new potentials are revealedat least initially. Universal
reason, or universal human nature need not in fact exist or be knowable in order for
aleatory effects to be produced by Stoic virtue.
Like in Stoic virtue, Pierre makes an initial move to welcome the strange,
beautiful womana sister, or a "no matter who"who has truly or falselyit does not
matterpurported to be his half-sister. This leads him to an aleatory point as he pursues a
new definition of virtue that breaks him out of his filial complacency. It is not the moral
metaphor of intention that matters in this Deleuzean/Melvillean/Machiavellian ethics of
the aleatory. Instead, divination grounds ethics. All the benefits come from the openness
to fortune. Conversely, tragedy is the product of the closing off one's receptivity to
fortune.
Melville demonstrates the same principle of the accidental benefits of virtue in
Benito Cereno where Amasa Delano does not benefit directly from the intended effects of
his charitable treatment of the bizarre captain Don Benito. He indulges Don Benito's
eccentricities and gets no friendly treatment in return. He verges, at times, upon
resentment of Don Benito's stilted responses to his generous gifts of melons, water, and
other supplies to Don Benito's ship.
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But, Don Benito is, in fact, a hostage to the slaves that have mutinied on his ship
and murdered their master, Don Benito's friend Don Alexandro Aranda. Aranda's
skeleton has been mounted on the front of the ship but, the mutineers have covered over
the skeleton to hide it from Captain Delano as they plan to attack Delano's ship. The tiny
Babo, one of the heads of the mutiny, is only masquerading as Don Benito's loyal servant
physically supporting Don Benito whenever he faints from congenital weakness. In fact
Babo is acting as a vigilant guard whose constant threats and insinuations to the violence
of the mutiny constantly induce Benito to faint out of terror.
Delano and Benito only escape from the mutinied slaves who are really in control
of Benito's ship through the strictly fortunate, rather than strictly morally good,
consequences of his actions. This is like the little bit of degraded prophetic truth that the
attorney realizes in Bartleby, the Scrivener when he says that no one has ever committed
diabolical murder out of charity. This is the attorney's proof that charity is self-interested
because "charity often operates as a vastly wise and prudent principle" (25). The
misrecognitions of the attorney's moody ethics helplessly gives Bartleby over to starve in
the tombs. In Benito Cereno, Babo is executed and "three months after being dismissed
by the court, Benito Cereno ... did, indeed, follow his leader" (102). These brief
prophetic flashes only hint at truth of time and chance at the core of Melville's literature
of flux.
Likewise, Melville's brilliance in Moby-Dick and Pierre is to further detail when
virtue or truth itself returns the subject to a rail, a path, or a model after the original
break. Pierre and Ahab do make a break with the ordinary world. They become original.
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But, they stop short on their path to originality. They fail to limit the range of their
original truth to its initial telling. Instead, they persist in their initial chosen path believing
that "truth hath no confines."
As the book progresses, we find that Pierre's and Ahab's paths that hadonly a
moment beforeconsisted of virtue on a rail no longer have any reality or value. The
path has swerved from the one that appeared in the revolutionary breaks made by Ahab
or Pierre. The initial aims were only real as the novel was beginning. When Ahab and
Pierre remain stuck on their rails, their lines of flight become lines of "abolition,
annihilation, self-destruction, Ahab, Ahab...?" (A Thousand Plateaus 250). Holding tight
to the vague outcomes that they initially descried for their actions, Ahab and Pierre start
to believe that they can cross the same river twice, or even more monomaniacally, again
and again and again...
The ambiguity that Deleuze recognizes in Sternberg' work is the same that
Melville places in the return to fixation of these heroes. In Cinema 1, Deleuze cited
Oilier's analysis of Sternberg's Anatahan as an example of how, "the more white space is
closed and exiguous, the more precarious and open to the virtualities of the outside it is"
(94). In Cinema 2 the question of Sternberg's greatness all hinges upon the question of
whether compression of the idea of a character's self gives rise to an entrance into
another space.
147
Virtuous reduction to the smallest possible present, the most compact
sense of self, has the unintended consequence of opening up unintended possibilities.
147
"If Sternberg's film [Blue Angel] is a great work of talking cinema, it is because the
two separate places, the school and the club, respectively pass through the ordeal of
silence and sound, and enter all the more into interaction because the cock-a-doodle doo
330
Aleatory methods were not entirely unfamiliar to Sternberg. His meditations
observe of his own life story that, "Here is encountered a curious demonstration of how a
series of disconnected patterns can produce a design far more nearly perfect than any
intentional procedure" (Fun in a Chinese Laundry 275). The Salvation Hunters was
produced by Sternberg's aleatory drive looking for sets. The sets would become the
"stars" of a film produced with the semi-arbitrary structure of what might be described as
a proto-neo-realism. Divination grounded ethics, but only initially.
In Sternberg's extension of his ethics to group psychology, he seems to miss this
aleatory potential by opposing a self to the emotions in order to control the emotions. An
oikeiosis that relies on the human self and human beings to limit one's moral universe,
where humanity is not just a secondary principle, can, in fact, have the effect of closing
down the possibilities opened by virtue's initial aleatory stroll. Occasional surrender to
the emotions might bring this stroll towards new possibilities just as well as perpetually
vigilant attempts to control the emotions.
148
goes from the first to the second, then from the second to the first, in two different times,
in consequence of interactions internal to the teacher himself' (229).
148
Nowhere is the aleatory potential of the cinema and its importance for thought stated
more clearly by Deleuze than in his reconfiguration of the discussion of the brain in
Cinema 2 that hearkens back to the channeling of impulses through consciousness from
Matter and Memory as if through a grand telephonic exchange. But here the conduction
of impulses in the brain, what Bergson saw as consciousness itself, is only the
proliferation of noisy accidents. Thought itself is just a series of accidents and breaks
rather than the continuous registration of truth.
Scientific knowledge of the brain has evolved, and carried out a general
rearrangement. The situation is so complicated that we should not speak of
a break, but rather of new orientations which only produce an effect of a
break with the classical image at the limit the process of association
increasingly came up against cuts in the continuous network of the brain;
everywhere there were micro-fissures which were not simply voids to be
331
The value that Deleuze saw in Stoicism's use of representations was only its ever
renewed confrontation with what the world offers.
In the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, the alternative frequently resounds:
is this the good or the bad mixture? This question finds an answer only
when the two terms end up being indifferent, that is, when the status of
virtue (or of health) has to be sought elsewhere, in another direction, in
another elementAion versus Chronos (Logic of Sense 163).
In Marcus Aurelius's process of vigilance whereby values are constantly subjected to
reevaluation in new mixtures, it becomes difficult to judge whether the intermixture of
bodies, "possess enough unity, do their mixtures possess enough justice and perfection"
(Logic of Sense 163). But, the question is often unanswerable. It is the confrontation with
such unanswerables that brings one to the aleatory point. The sage must surrender to
chance and then reevaluate. So what Deleuze means when he describes the Stoic's
somewhat inadvertentsubstitution of the idea of time as "Aion" for the measured
moments of the pulsed time of "Chronos" is that in the idea of time as Aion, from
moment to moment we will no doubt encounter an unknowable amount of "swerve" that
cannot be accounted for by our best laid plans. At any given moment we should be ready
to roll the dice and reevaluate our position.
crossed, but random mechanisms introducing themselves at each moment
between the sending and receiving of an association message: this was the
discovery of a probabilistic or semi-fortuitous cerebral space, 'an
uncertain system'... We are not copying Artaud but, Artaud lived and said
something about the brain that concerns all of us: that 'its antennae turned
towards the invisible', that it has a capacity to 'resume a resurrection from
death' (Cinema 2 211).
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It is not entirely clear if it is a good or bad mixture when Deleuze mixes F. Scott
Fitzgerald with Aurelius in Deleuze's first foray into American literature in the 22
nd
series of "Porcelain and the Volcano" of Logic of Sense. Here, Deleuze is already dealing
with an American problem where the aleatory is key. He is addressing Fitzgerald's text,
"The Crack-up," the story of an alcoholic hitting rock bottom. Deleuze sees this alcoholic
writer's breakdown as an approach to the discovery of new possibilities with a value as
great as Aurelius's control over the self.
But all these noisy accidents already have their outright effects; and they
would not be sufficient in themselves had they not dug their way down to
something of a wholly different nature which, on the contrary, they reveal
only at a distance and when it is too latethe silent crack (155).
The same good consequences can come from Fitzgerald's reinterpretation of his own
alcoholic breakdown as from the noble austerity of Aurelius. The crucial thing about the
experience of the crack [felure] in Fitzgerald's crack-up is that it is the product of "noisy
accidents."
Everything noisy happens at the edge of the crack and would be nothing
without it. Conversely, the crack pursues its silent course, changes
direction following the lines of least resistance, and extends its web only
under the immediate influence of what happens (Logic of Sense 155).
Ford, as much as Fitzgerald, had certainly confronted the dangers of alcoholism,
not only in his life, but in his more expressionist films such as The Informer or The Long
Voyage Home. Yet the pathogenic milieu detailed in these films is opposed by Ford to the
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idealized community centered around heroic action. In the resolution "external to the
film, but internal to the cinema" we are saved from the pathogenic milieu. To the
contrary, for the self in the midst of Fitzgerald's alcoholic breakdown, there are no
"healthy illusions." The community itself is cracked.
149
The risky but necessary approach to personal and social chaos that a Stoic
philosopher or a Machiavellian man of action is supposed to bring to life is exemplified
not in "healthy illusions" but in the very risky idea of the "Great Health" that Deleuze
describes in Fitzgerald, but also in Nietzsche,
Nietzsche exhorts us to live health and sickness in such a manner that
health be a living perspective on sickness and sickness a living perspective
on health ... The procedure which makes of health an evaluation of
sickness and sickness an evaluation of healthis this not the Great Health
(or the Gay Science)? Is it not this which permits Nietzsche to experience
a superior health at the very moment that he is sick? (.Logic of Sense, 173)
Deleuze claims that health, the Great Health, consists of variation rather than in an ideal
or fixation upon an illusion. Virtue consists in the "swerve" and not in the "fixed rail."
The idea of a self or of a community to which one belongs as an ideal would only block
the play of perspectives that makes possible still further evolutions in perspective, that
kind of swerve towards a greater health that could not have been foreseen.
Both Ahab and Pierre come to deny such a play of perspectives. But, Deleuze saw
Fitzgerald's crack-up as a process that engages with the initial destructiveness of the
149
This refrain of "the Crack" is also recycled into Cinema 2 (167).
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"noisy accidents" of the crack by adding movement that furthers variation, what Deleuze
calls a "counter-actualization." Deleuze says the same thing about Nietzsche's frequent
bouts with digestive troubles and madness. But, in Nietzsche's final years, according to
Deleuze, Nietzsche indulged sickness too much and lost his perspective on health.
We are on our way to an ethics without community and without self. But, how do
weas Ranciere contends that we must do with Deleuzean aestheticsrestore the "order
of political mediations" to this aesthetics of aleatory ethics? How might the aleatory
Great Health of Deleuze's Fitzgerald or Aurelius be scaled up to the political level?
When Deleuze returns to Ford's classicism in Cinema 2, it is the presence or absence of a
people that marks
the first big difference between classical and modern cinema. For in
classical cinema, the people are there, even though they are oppressed,
tricked, subject, even though blind or unconscious...the people are already
there, real before being actual, ideal without being abstract (216).
Deleuze more than once reworks a passage from Paul Klee to describe that in the modern
cinema, "The people are missing" ("What is the Creative Act?" 324). Such a politics has
to be an oikeiosis without a community, without "a people." An aleatory Great Health is
directly opposed to this classical idea of a people and to the idea of healthy illusions.
How can we describe a politics or an authentic oikeiosis that does without this missing
people?
Deleuze seems to suddenly swerve away from hope at the end of his postface to
Bartleby. Deleuze refers to the "failure of the two revolutions, the American and the
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Soviet, the pragmatic and the dialectical." Melville's society of brotherssuddenly
shifted into the past tensewas only capable of leading us to a masquerade where
"because there are so few authors in America, and because its people are so indifferent,
the writer is not in a position to succeed as a recognized master" (89). All the writer can
hope to achieve is a "collective enunciation, which no longer forms part of literary
history and preserves the rights of a people to come, or of a human becoming" (90).
Does the anthemic tone of the new universe or a federation of people and goods
ultimately spiral into some sanctimonious treatment of a writer's essential self-pity? Does
Deleuze's identification with Melville's revolutionary optimism cave to the tendency
described by Clare L. Spark in her exacting history of the sprawl of twentieth century
Melville criticism in Hunting Captain AhaW.
Could it be that Melville's supposed failure, nonresistance, and dropping
out are all too resonant with the fate of the tongue-tied American
intelligentsia in established institutions, so that academic Melville critics
are both peddling and hoarding a compensatory dream image of
themselves as they wish they were: deep diving, bold, outspoken, and
controversial (however doomed); manly in the face of an encroaching,
clutching, feminized, consumerist, tyrannical mass urban societywhere
they and their rural chimneys, rooted and erect (and securely masked) will
never surrender? Could it be that, like Melville, these suffering but stoical
inmates dream of a lovely family? (412)
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Had the universal fraternity of people and goods dreamed of by Deleuze in his late essay
on Bartleby already slipped through the felure of this cracked up American dream back in
the Logic of Sense?
Deleuze's sympathy with Bartleby's "schizophrenic or catatonic state" is not
necessarily Melville's. Deleuze's sympathy with Bartleby as the "new Christ" may take
Bartleby too far outside of Melville's literary procedure to the point where the medicine
becomes poison. There was more hope when in Logic of Sense, Deleuze insisted that
even though we may be sick, mad, alienated alcoholics on the verge of a breakdown, yet
"we must take risks and endure the longest possible time, we must not lose sight of grand
health" (Logic of Sense 161).
The truth of great health is originality. Restoring the order of political mediations
to Deleuze's great health means deferring to Melville, the medicine-man, and to
Melville's greatest treatment of originality as a media theorist avant la lettre.
4.5 QUITE AN ORIGINAL Cvnic Game of Truth:
How Melville's The Confidence-Man Duped Deleuze
In Giving Caesar power over men's bodies, Jesus gave him the power to
compel men to make the act of worship to Caesar.... Jesus made it
inevitable, when he said that the money belonged to Caesar. It was a
mistake. Money means bread, and the bread of men belongs to no man.
Money means also power, and it is monstrous to give power to the virtual
enemy.
D.H. Lawrence 7937(Apocalypse 145-6)
I saw the Horatio Alger hero, the dream of a sick America, mounting
higher and higher, first messenger, then operator, then manager, then
chief, then superintendent, then vice-president, then president, then trust
magnate, then beer baron, then Lord of all the Americas, the money god,
the god of gods, the clay of clay, nullity on high, zero with ninety-seven
thousand decimals fore and aft. You shits, I said to myself, I will give you
the picture of twelve little men, zeros without decimals, ciphers, digits, the
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twelve uncrushable worms who are hollowing out the base of your rotten
edifice. I will give you Horatio Alger as he looks the day after the
Apocalypse, when all the stink has cleared away.
Henry Miller 1939 (Tropic of Cancer 31)
The relationship linking Christianity and the Bourgeoisie was no accident.
Deleuze "From Christ to the Bourgeoisie" 1946 (Dosse 93)
To the cursory scan, The Confidence-Man (1857) will seem like nothing more
than a shifting array of characters on the decks of a Mississippi steam-ship, the Fidele,
engaging in a disconnected series of moralistically tortuous dialogues on the subject of
"confidence." There is surely a great deal of mystery as to what the novel has to do
with Melville's other work even if we do as many critics have and go beyond the mere
conceptual subject matter of these dialogues by recognizing that beneath the
convoluted surface content of these conversations Melville is engaging the reader in a
further game.
Careful readers of The Confidence-Man have acknowledged the experience of
something quite like the confusion that some of the passengers on board the fictional
Fidele experience in the novel itself. Early on in the book, several attempt to
determine the true identity of the character referred to as the Black Guinea. The Black
Guinea is a beggar who crawls about the deck of the ship catching pennies in his
mouth in Chapter 3. But, the authenticity of the Black Guinea, the question of whether
or not his appearance is the result of a disguise, becomes an issue for a number of the
passengers who try to decide whether the apparently disadvantaged passenger calling
for aid is truly worthy of their confidence and of their money.
338
By Chapter 4, amidst the controversy, the Black Guinea has slinked away and
the Man in Grey appears to argue for the authenticity of the Black Guinea against the
protests of another Cripple, skeptical of the authenticity of the Black Guinea's
identity. The Man in Gray speaks as the advocate for the Black Guinea. He bases his
argument on a call for confidence in mankind,
"Now, I am not unaware that there are some persons in this world,
who, unable to give better proof of being wise, take a strange delight in
showing what they think they have sagaciously read in mankind by
uncharitable suspicions of them. I hope you are none of these. In short,
would you tell me now, whether you were not merely joking in the notion
you threw out about the negro? Would you be so kind?"
"No, I won't be so kind, I'll be so cruel."
"As you please about that."
"Well, he's just what I said he was."
"A white masquerading as a black?"
"Exactly"
... "if a white, how could he look the negro so?"
... "How do other hypocritical beggars twist theirs? Easy enough
to see how they are hoisted up."
"The sham is evident, then?"
"To the discerning eye," with a horrible screw of his gimlet one
(40-1:6)
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The position of the reader of The Confidence-Man becomes rather like that of the
Cripple in that the book presents, one after another, a series of characters pleading for
confidence and for moneyincluding both the Black guinea and the Man in Gray. Each
successive interlocutor in this chain of confidence-seekers is given a distinct name by the
narrator, but the difference in the names given to these successive characters is a sham.
We slowly become suspicious that these supposedly distinct characters are in fact
disguises or avatars of a single character: the titular Confidence-Man.
The nature of the game only really begins to become evident as it grows in
complexity and hilarity. Consider for example, in Chapter 9, the fifth disguise of the
Confidence-Man that is described as the Ruddy-Cheeked Man in a Traveling Cap. The
Ruddy-Cheeked Man strikes up a conversation with a Youth and asks the Youth to
confirm the location of a Gentleman with a Weed in his Hat. This Gentleman with the
Weed referred to by the Ruddy-Cheeked Man was the third disguise of the Confidence-
Man that had spoken with the Youth back in Chapter 5. The Ruddy-Cheeked Man further
alleges that he was told of the Man with the Weed by the aforementioned Man in the
Gray Coatthe third disguise of the Confidence-Man who had appeared in Chapters 6
through 8.
By citing his relationships to his previous avatars, the Ruddy-Cheeked Man more
easily gains entry into the Youth's confidence, since the Youth had been conversing with
the Gentleman with the Weed four chapters earlier. Back in Chapter 5, the Man with the
Weed encouraged the youth to cease his reading and to "discard Tacitus" because Tacitus
"destroys confidence, fraternal confidence" (36: 5). Thereby, the youth's confidence is
340
primed by the Man with the Weed and consequently, the Ruddy-Cheeked Man succeeds
in selling the Youth stocks for the Black Rapids Coal Companypresumably imaginary.
The game continues in Chapter 10, when the Ruddy-Cheeked Man succeeds in selling
more Black Rapids Coal Company stock to the Merchant, only after having
recommended them as the Man with the Weed to the same Merchant back in Chapter 5
(30).
The reader comes to understand, then, that multiple characters referred to by
distinct descriptions or names have actually been "performed" by one single unnamed
character. Yet at the same time, the reader may not be entirely sure which of the
characters are played by this single original genius behind it all. The importance of this
mysterious aspect of the book is illustrated by considering the difficulties that a
filmmaker would have in producing the same effect in a narrative film. In a film, if we
were allowed to distinguish the same actor's face behind each one of the Confidence-
Man's masks, then the shared identity of each avatar would very likely appear
immediately. A film where all of the avatars were played by a single recognizable actor
would very likely allow the viewer to recognize the voice or appearance of the same actor
in disguise.The viewer would too easily be clued in to which others were not the titular
Confidence-Man. It would be difficult for a film with a single actor playing all of the
avatars to leave the viewer unsure of which ones were the Confidence-Man and which
ones were not, a tactic that Melville's novel has succeeded at almost too brilliantly. On
the other hand, if the avatars were disguised to look and sound entirely different or were
played by different actors, then the viewer could very likely miss the central problem of
341
this mysterious aspect of the book: discovering who is and who is not a disguise of the
Confidence-Man.
My argument about the book hinges on this problem of who is and who is not the
single titular Confidence-Man. I want to argue that this ludic search initiated by the
structure of the novel goes further than has been previously recognized. What the novel
demands of the reader is not only to distinguish the existence of a chain of forged
characters in the novel, but to distinguish a new imposture, distinct from the previous
chain of forged identities: the Cosmopolitan. The arrival of the Cosmopolitan is
calculated to mislead the reader into believing that he is just another disguise of the
Confidence-Man. Thereby, Melville leaves it up to the reader to crack open an incisive
and savage play between Cynic philosophy and Cosmopolitan Christianity. By isolating
the point of fracture in the novel, where Melvillethe clever chevalier-authorslips out
a chain of disguises and slips in an entirely new imposture who only at first seems
similar, we find that this Cosmopolitan is not the diabolical center of the bookat least
not in the way that many critics have asserted that he is. This Cosmopolitan, or Frank
Goodman, the Philanthropist, is in fact the greatest dupe of the entire book. But,
understanding his place in The Confidence-Man requires that we carefully reread the text
of the novel looking for clues and furthermore that we isolate a key reference to Diogenes
the Cynic that clarifies the first appearance of Goodman. By unwinding these
components in Melville's procedure, we can refine a statement the gesture that Melville
has assembled for us. In this, the truly Diogenic work of The Confidence-Man enacts a
diabolically ironic and humiliating assault on the inconsistencies within humanist ideas of
342
good and evil which have been, not incidentally, the same set of ideas that have
dominated the reception of the book.
It will then appear even more appropriate that in his 1985 Cinema 2, Gilles
Deleuze ranked Melville's The Confidence-Man alongside Nietzsche's Thus Spake
Zarathustra (1883/1891) as one of the two great studies of forgery in literature and
philosophy, respectively (Cinema 2 134). The Confidence-Man traces a tradition of Cynic
thinking and speaking that Deleuze was right to recognize as Nietzsche-esque in that
Melville was targeting and ridiculing slavish stupidity that masquerades as a morality of
the good.
It is instructive to note that Deleuze's take on The Confidence-Man in his 1989
postface to the Garnier-Flammarion edition of Melville's Bartleby, the Scrivener (1853)
shows a nearly 180 degree shift of emphasis from what he had written in Cinema 2. In the
later text, what is at issue is no longer forgery, but "originals" and "originality."
Originals are those of Melville's characters who, according to Deleuze are,
beings of Primary Nature, but they are inseparable from the world or from
secondary nature, where they exert their effect: they reveal its emptiness,
the imperfection of its laws, the mediocrity of particular creatures ... the
world as masquerade (83).
By presenting the very uniqueness of certain of his charactersthe originalsDeleuze
has it that Melville is generating evidence against the unity of a human milieu conceived
of as a collection of similar individuals. The uniqueness of these originals, their conflict
343
with other human beings is too great for them to be included in the mediocrity of a group
assembled on the basis of similar features.
Deleuze has no problem distinguishing Moby Dick's Ahab, Billy Budd, Claggart,
or Bartleby as the Original Character of the novels where they appear. But, the work of
forged identity in The Confidence-Man makes it more difficult to figure out who the
original in the novel really is. We will see that Deleuze, like many other commentators on
The Confidence-Man, did not articulate the extent of Melville's Cynic gesture in the
book.
In the 1989 postface to Bartleby, Deleuze concerned himself for the most part
with the narrator's discussions of the art of novel writing from Chapters 14, 33, and 44 of
The Confidence-Man. Deleuze used these short chaptersespecially Chapter 44's
discussion of original charactersto elaborate a Melvillean critical theory of the novel.
But, Deleuze mistakes the voice of the narrator for Melville's voice. In fact, the
discussions that Deleuze takes as an earnest theory of the novel are clues to the novel's
puzzle that the narrator "accidentally" leaves for the careful reader. The consequence is
that Deleuze does not follow Melville's game to its logical conclusions. Yet, Deleuze's
insight into the way in which Melville's study of forgery was close to Nietzsche's will
only be further affirmed by putting these three digressions together with the puzzle of The
Confidence-Man.
These three chapter-long digressions by the narrator are exceptions within the
bulk of the book. Thirty-eight of The Confidence-Man's 45 chapters are composed
344
entirely of dialogue.
150
In the three chapters that are so important to Deleuze, the narrator
predicts complaints that the reader might have about the book in order to address them in
advance (14, 33, 44). In Chapter 14, the narrator anticipates complaints about character
inconsistencies; in Chapter 33, lack of realism in a character; and finally Chapter 44
explains that the main character in the bookFrank Goodman, the Cosmopolitan, and the
Philanthropistis not an original character.
Goodman, the Cosmopolitan or the Philanthropist, appears about halfway through
the book at the end of Chapter 23. He remains until the novel's conclusion, making his
presence on the novel's stage the longest of all of the characters in the book's chain of
talkative river travelers. The presence of Goodman, the Cosmopolitan Philanthropist
looms large in the book, but is Goodman the titular Confidence-Man? In so far as Chapter
44 tells us that he is not an original character, no, the Cosmopolitan is not the
Confidence-Man.
When Deleuze refers to The Confidence-Man in Cinema 2 in 1985, he seems sure
that the string of forgers does end with the Cosmopolitan. At this point, Deleuze had very
likely missed Melville's narrator's all too obvious hint in Chapter 44 that the
Cosmopolitan was not an original. Deleuze compares Melville to the proliferation of
untraceable forgeries in the modern cinema and media. "It is in [F for Fake] that [Orson]
Welles constructs a series of forgers as extensive and perfect as that in Melville's The
Confidence-Man, Welles scrupulously playing the role of the cosmopolitan-hypnotist"
(iCinema 2 145). Yet 4 years later in the postface to Bartleby, Deleuze articulates a further
150
This also excepts four Chapters (12, 26, 34, and 40) which present stories as told by a
single character in addition to those three narrator's digressions (14, 33, 44).
345
mystery inherent in the reading of The Confidence-Man where the link between the
Cosmopolitan and the near-hypnotic tricks of the chain of other disguises is not so
certain.
The Confidence-Man, in which Melville's critique of charity and
philanthropy culminates, brings into play a series of devious characters
who seem to emanate from a "great Cosmopolitan" in patchwork clothing,
and who ask for no more than... a little human confidence, in order to pull
off a multiple and rebounding confidence game.
Are these false brothers sent by a diabolical father to restore his
power over overly credulous Americans? ("Bartleby" 89).
So in Deleuze's later treatment of Melville's originality, he is no longer explicitly
discussing forgeries and he recognizes that the impostures of the Confidence-Man may
only seem to emanate from the Cosmopolitan, Frank Goodman. In 1989, all that is certain
is that Melville is playing some kind of trick on us. Deleuze does not go much further,
though, continuing only to admit that
the novel is so complex that one could just as easily say the opposite: this
long procession [theorie] of con men would be a comic version of
authentic brothers, such as overly suspicious Americans see them, or
rather have already become incapable of seeing them. This cohort of
characters, including the mysterious child at the end, is perhaps the society
of Philanthropists who dissimulate their demonic project, but perhaps it is
also the community of brothers that the Misanthropes are no longer able to
346
recognize in passing. For even in the midst of its failure, the American
revolution continues to send out its fragments. ("Bartleby" 89).
Melville scholars similarly recognize the alternative that either Goodman is a
further avatar in the chain of disguises of the titular Confidence-Man that begins at the
opening of the novel or the book is an indeterminate joke and even a rather confused one.
The consensus leans heavily towards identifying the Cosmopolitan as Original
Confidence-Man. In Satirical Apocalypse, Jonathan A. Cook argues that the book's
symbolism reinforces the Cosmopolitan's status as Confidence-Man.
The key to the transformation of the Confidence-Man into the Dionysus-
like cosmopolitan is the passage of the Fidele into a night-time world at
the town of Cairo, a domain associated with disease and death. ...as
previously noted, the cosmopolitan also exhibits the same ambiguous
blend of Christie and demonic traits that characterize the Confidence-
Man's appearances in the first half of the novel (Satirical Apocalypse 70-
1).
To further situate such claims, however, while it is essential to note that Goodman does
exhort confidence from his very first dialogue in Chapter 24, but the outcome of his calls
for confidence move in a totally different direction
Prior to Goodman's arrival, the Confidence-Man's avatars never fail to pick up on
the work of the previous disguises and turn their talk on confidence into a successful con
that turns a profit. By contrast, after Goodman appears at the end of Chapter 23, he
immediately "fails" to "convert a misanthrope" (136-44: 24). Then, in Chapters 29 and
347
30, Goodman consistently fails to get his new "Boon Companion," Charlie Noble, to
drink some of the carafe of wine that they have ordered in the ship's cafe. Goodman ends
up drinking most of the carafe himself, no doubt becoming rather intoxicatedif not
drugged, as the conversation seems to imply could very well be happening. Meanwhile,
the Cosmopolitan then "strikingly evinces the artlessness of his nature" (189: 35) after he
fails to get a friendly loan from Charlie Noble (184: 31). Noble, in spite of his willingness
to roll with the rhetoric of confidence, ultimately proves himself viciously and almost
demonically parsimonious.
After being stiffed by his so-called friend, Noble, Goodman reflects upon the
relationship between business and friendship with the Mystic, Mark Winsome, who
arrives almost immediately. Winsome insists that friendship and business must adhere to
different moralities. Goodman's earlier drunken request for a loan from a friend is then
"hypothetically" repeated when Winsome's assistant, Egbert, suddenly appears. In this
little role-play, Goodman again fails to get confidence (201-223:38-41). He ends up
throwing down a shilling and telling Egbert, "at the first wood-landing buy yourself a few
chips to warm the frozen natures of you and your philosopher by" (224: 41). Goodman
loses money on the game. If Goodman is that trickster of quite an original genius from
the preceding chapters whose avatars never fail to turn a profit, why should this chain of
brilliant disguises suddenly shift into the caviling of an artless dupe?
Melville offers us some help in Chapter 44's discussion of original characters
where Melville's narrator bunglingly lets it slip that Goodman is not the original
Confidence-Man. But, the narrator only reveals this foolishly and indirectly to a reader
348
who goes back and searches through the book for the earlier component of this clue that
appears on page one.
On the first page of the novel, the narrator explicitly alerts us to be on the lookout
for "a mysterious impostor" who is "quite an original genius in his vocation" (9:1). The
narrator's brief report of a wanted poster located outside of the captain's office is the first
clue as to why the title of the novel is marked with a singular definite article, that is, THE
Confidence-Man, and NOT A SERIES OF Confidence-Men. It is not overly difficult for
an attentive reader to go on and piece together that many of the apparently distinct
characters passing through the Fidele's stage-like milieu are very likely disguises or
avatars in the masquerade of this titular character who is described by the narrator on the
first page of the novel as quite an original genius.
151
But, the reader needs more help than that, and the text of Chapter 44, rather than
the entirely earnest theory of the novel for which Deleuze and others have mistaken it,
was a means for the narrator to convey something important. But, the chapter conveys it
151
The first page of the novel describes a placard outside the captain's office that offers
a reward for the capture of a mysterious impostor, supposed to have
recently arrived from the East; quite an original genius in his vocation, as
would appear, though wherein his originality consisted was not clearly
given; but what purported to be a careful description of his person
followed (10).
The Confidence Man's very masquerade begins in juxtaposition with this placard and
with the placard outside the boat's barber shop reading, "No Trust." It is also on page one
that the Confidence Man's first imposture sallies onto the boat described as a "stranger"
in a "cream-colored suit ... neither soiled nor slovenly" (10) who carries around a slate
on which he writes a series of brief statements on the wonders of "Charity."
The dumb manpretending to be deafstands with his slate reading "Charity
thinketh no evil." He stands immediately next to a placard that indirectly identifies him.
Of course, Melville's narrator does not explain that the dumb man is the original genius
any more than describe the costume changes intervening between the appearances of the
different impostures.
349
in a way that would remain rather hidden within what appears as just another distracting
tangent. The chapter is fabulously entitled,
In which the last three words of the last chapter are made the text of a
discourse, which will be sure of receiving more or less attention from
those readers who do not skip it (326: 44).
The "last three words" of Chapter 43 are "QUITE AN ORIGINAL." Those are the words
that the friends of the ship's Barber will later use when "in after days" the Barber tells of
his encounter with the Cosmopolitan Goodman, that occurs after Goodman departs from
The Confidence-Man in the avatars of Noble/Winsome/Egbert.
152
Chapter 44, then, is the
narrator's attempt to show the impropriety of describing the strange Cosmopolitan
Philanthropist, Frank Goodman as "QUITE AN ORIGINAL," a phrase that is capitalized
in the text at the end of Chapter 43. Why else should the narrator have included such a
discourse and warned us "not to skip" it but to "accidentally" correct us if were reading
Goodman as the original genius referred to on page one?
The end of Chapter 44 makes even more explicit that the "discourse" of the
chapter is "the endeavor to show, if possible, the impropriety of the phrase, Quite an
Original, as applied by the barber's friends" (238: 44) to the Cosmopolitan. Of course, all
152
After Goodman loses his little philosophical game with Egbert, he finally succeeds in
getting somewhere with his pleas for confidence. He earns himself a free shave from the
boat's Barber. But this comes only with great difficultyincluding a contract in which he
"agrees to make good to the last any loss that may come from [the Barber's] trusting
mankind" (234). Chapter 43 ends by noting that the charming antics of Goodman
entertain the barber so much that
in after days, telling the night's adventure to his friends, the worthy barber
always spoke of his queer customer as the man-charmeras certain East
Indians are called snake-charmersand all his friends united in thinking
him QUITE AN ORIGINAL (236).
350
that the narrator can manage in this regard is "a dissertation bordering upon the prosy,
perhaps upon the smoky" (238: 44). But, the "smoky" hint provided by the narrator in
Chapter 44, then, pushes the reader to disconnect Goodman from the chain of disguises
perpetrated by the original Confidence-Man, the titular character who is explicitly
described as "quite an original" on page one. And Chapter 44 is insistent that there can be
only one original in a novel.
For much the same reason that there is but one planet to one orbit, so can
there be but one such original character to one work of invention. Two
would conflict to chaos. In this view, to say that there are more than one to
a book, is good presumption there is none at all ...to produce but one
original character, [an author] must have had much luck (238: 44).
Deleuze seizes upon the narrator's certainty that there can only be one Original in
a novel in order to provide evidence to his theory of originals in Melville.
153
Hence,
Deleuze sees the mystery but puts off plying any further into the crack between the
original Confidence-Man and the Cosmopolitan, Frank Goodman. He takes Chapters 13,
33, and 44 as statements that are earnestly Melville rather than clues to the bizarre game
that The Confidence-Man plays with its reader.
Deleuze was not working on a full-blown study of The Confidence-Man. But, we
can diagnose Deleuze's reading a little further by considering that if Deleuze was relying
153
Deleuze writes,
Mediocre novels have never been able to create the slightest original
character. But how could even the greatest novel create more than one at a
time? Ahab or Bartleby...It is like the great Figures of the painter Francis
Bacon, who admits that he has not yet found a way of bringing together
two figures in a single painting (83).
351
primarily on the Henri Thomas translation of The Confidence-Man, published in 1955 as
Le Grand Escroc, he would very likely not have been alerted to the curious refrain-clue
that Melville has inserted into the discursive arrangement of the novel. First of all, there
is no uppercase in the final three words of Chapter 43, translated as "u veritable
originar in Thomas's translation (388). More importantly, however, when Chapter 44
attempts to demonstrate "/ 'impropriate de I 'expression: un veritable original, comme elle
fut applique par les amis du barbier" (391) to the Cosmopolitan, the expression cannot
be directly linked in its improper correspondence with the opening paragraphs of the
novel. Thomas rendered Chapter One's description of the wanted poster as to refer to,
"un bien singulier genie dans son genre, ainsi qu 'on s 'en apercevrait, encore que I 'avis
n'indiquat pas clairement en quoi consistait son originalite" (18). The refrain directly
linking the two passages is obscured by Thomas's rendering of "original" as "singulier
Thomas's translation interchanges terms that Melville's narrator in Chapter 44
warns not to confuse: the original and the merely singular. The original character,
Chapter 44 tells us, is specifically not "novel, or singular, or striking, or captivating, or all
four at once" (The Confidence-Man 237). Deleuze's theory of originals correspondingly
takes up the line that "we must above all avoid confusing true Originals with characters
that are simply remarkable or singular, particular" (82). Deleuze clearly paid detailed
attention to the narrator's discussions and "did not skip," the hint linking Chapters 43 and
44 to the introduction of the original Confidence-Man in the novel's opening paragraph.
But, the hint that is all too obvious in the English remains highly obscured in the French
edition.
352
The appearance of this refrain, "quite an originalin Chapters 1 and 43-4 has
been recognized by American Melville criticism since at least 1965. Lawrence
Grauman's "Suggestions for the Future of the Confidence-Manstates it simply.
The barber is swindled by the cosmopolitan, who is ruefully judged
"QUITE AN ORIGINAL." Surely this phrase reminds us of the
mysterious imposter ... "quite an original genius" of whom we were
ambiguously informed in the first chapter (113).
However, Grauman goes on to sidestep the all too obvious consequence of this refrain
that Goodman is not the original Confidence-Manby exhibiting a fatal equivocation
over what this refrain could mean. The obscure writing that allowed Grauman to deal all
too easily with the capitalized repetition of the phrase, "QUITE AN ORIGINAL," is
peculiar to the style of an academic article.
Not content with this upper-case hint, Melville makes it the text of the
next chapter (44), "in the course of which the word 'original' is referred to
its origin, with the implication that it must be applied to nothing this side
of the first cause itself' (113).
The passage cited in quotes by Grauman to describe Chapter 44 is not from Melville,
though it is integrated into the text of Grauman's article just as if it could have come
straight out of The Confidence-Man. Grauman avoids the narrator's insistence on the
"impropriety" of "QUITE AN ORIGINAL" as applied to the Cosmopolitan by inserting
another scholar's gloss of the chapter where one would expect to see Melville's narrator's
gloss of his own chapter. But by forging this quote for Melville's narrator, Grauman
353
avoids the implication that Goodman, the Cosmopolitan, is not one of the avatars of the
Confidence-Man.
In place of Melville's narrator's very direct statement of his intent in his
"dissertation" of Chapter 44, Grauman has forged text from Merlin Bowen's book length
study of Melville. The "original" footnote in Bowen's The Long Encounter from 1960
asserts that the phrase "quite an original genius" from Chapter One, page One, refers to
the "Christ-like" masquerade of the Man in Cream Colors, the first avatar of the
Confidence-Man. According to Bowen, then, the meaning of Chapter 44's insistence on
the impropriety of referring to the Cosmopolitan as an original character of the kind that
only comes one to a novel is that
the Cosmopolitan, last in the chain of maskers, makes his appeal chiefly, it
is true, on humanitarian grounds; but we are not allowed to forget that he
is simply one in a succession of avatars of the one Confidence-Man. There
are a number of hints that his nature is more than human, more even than
Satanic ... [In Chapter 44,] the word "original" is referred to its origin
[God], with the implication that it must be applied to nothing this side of
the first cause itself ... when all is said, the narrator remains not quite
certain that he is right in denying the Cosmopolitan the title of "original"
(117-118262).
So Bowen displaces any readerly uncertainty over the Cosmopolitan's identity as
"masker" onto the narrator who "remains not quite certain" in painting the Cosmopolitan
354
to be avatar of Satan, God, and Christ, all at once.
154
In Bowen's later article on The
Confidence-Man from 1969, he attempted to further his hypothesis by describing the
"Confidence-Man as God."
155
The cross-talk between Grauman and Bowen could be discounted as academic
apocrypha if there existed a thoroughgoing study of what it would mean if the reader who
"did not skip" Chapter 44 was to understand that Goodman were not the Confidence-
Man. A fascinating document from 1980 in the Melville Society Extracts assembled by
Mary K. Madison, tabulates a list of 101 books and articles on Melville from 1922 to
1980 on the basis of whether the critic claims that the Confidence-Man is "unknowable,
ambiguous," "Devil," "Christ," "God," "Trickster/God," "God and the Devil," "Man," or
if the critic simply "Does Not Discuss" this issue (11). The space for further
"Other/Qualification" on her chart is limited to about 10 words, but nowhere in the chart
is there mentioned the possibility that Goodman is specifically not the Confidence-Man, a
possibility that would certainly seem worth at least a note. In the rest of this study, I hope
154
For a synopsis of other key texts that see the Confidence-Man as God or Satan see
Dillingham (306-729).
155
Bowen describes Chapter 44.
There, under the cover of a pointless admission that the characters of this
book are not really "original in the sense that Hamlet is, or Don Quixote,
or Milton's Satan," we are encouraged to imagine a truly "original
character" who is beyond place and time, who is central, originating and
characterizing, without rival or counterpart, and who was not "born in the
author's imagination." Not Hamlet nor Don Quixote nor Milton's Satan is
original in this sense, but the confidence man as God is. Taken together,
the three chapters on criticism form a progressive revelation of his identity
(139).
Bowen cross-references this idea to Melville's narrator's claim in Pierre that "there was
never yet an original man ...the original author being God."
355
to unfold the implications that are more pragmatically ironic than wickedly satanic by
reading the Cosmopolitan as a mere imposture of a mask of the original Confidence-Man.
Nonetheless, American Melville scholarship can certainly be marshaled for the
ludic interpretation of the book that 1 have tried to break open. For instance, there is John
A. Cook's argument that there is a crucial misprint on the first page of the novel. Cook
claims that page one should have included a description of pickpockets, "chevaliers ...
with their fingers shrouded in mystery" and not "shrouded in myth" as the published text
now reads ("From Myth to Mystery"). It is acknowledged that the 1857 printed version
shows a "host of typographical errors and incongruities" (Cook "From Myth to Mystery"
74). However, no handwritten page proofs of the document exist because Melville left for
his travels in Europe and the Levant just as the book was going to press.
The only handwritten textual evidence that remains are rather early draft
fragments from Chapter 14 where the narrator addresses "the prejudice against
inconsistent characters in books." These fragments, presented in the Northwestern
Newberry edition of The Confidence-Man, also exhibit how Melville was walking an
uncertain line between earnestness and sheer satire in these clues about the bizarre trick
he was playing on his readers. From the earlier fragments of Chapter 14, it is clear that
Melville in the final fair copy did consider explaining the possibility that a "puzzle"
might be an important part of a novel. This earlier draft, like the final one, satirically
presents the argument of those who protest against inconsistent or incongruous
characters.
356
Human nature is no such puzzle, they maintain, and if painted at all it
should be painted as transparent.... But though there is a prejudice against
the drawing of puzzling characters in fiction the prejudice is the other way
when by the skill of the writer their obscurity can be enlightened [and]
what was at first their obscurity afterwards turns out to be masterly
management of the novelist. The masterly novelists excel in nothing so
much as in this very point. They fill you with wonder at the intricacy of a
character and then fill you with still more wonder at their easy
reconciliation of it. In this way, they open even to the understandings of
school boys the last windings in the most winding mysteries of the soul, of
a spirit declared by its Creator to be fearfully and wonderfully made
(456).
156
But, unlike in the final version of the chapter, in this deleted passage, Melville seems to
have verged too close to describing the kind of handsome literary bullies that he imagined
for the category of writer that years earlier in "Hawthorne and His Mosses" (1851) had
included only Hawthorne and perhaps himself: a class of writers who were friendly to
school boys but not to critics.
157
156
I have worked through the printed typographical transcription with symbols indicating
the amendations and deletions on the handwritten page in order to produce this mid-stage
hybrid of the text in process. The symbolic transcription is of course available in the
Northwestern-Newberry The Confidence-Man. All other citations refer to the Norton
Critical Edition of The Confidence-Man.
157
"There are hardly five critics in America; and several of them are asleep" (Melville
"Hawthorne and His Mosses" 526).
357
The final version of Chapter 14 is thoroughly disambiguated in that it omits the
points where the earlier discussion veers into speaking of literary masters who defy the
call to transparency of character in order to more cogently explore "the last windings in
the most winding mysteries of the soul." This vision outlined in the early draft of a
literary masterwith whom Melville clearly identifiedis, in the final version,
transformed into an unwavering satirical portrait of mere "psychological novelists" and
their readers who fervently demand psychological explanation of characters. The final
version of Chapter 14 contains only further invective against psychological incitement of
the reader to "astonishment at the tangled web of some character." In the published
version, the "tangled web" of the "psychological novelist" is certainly not the kind of
masterful work that throws open understanding to "school boys." The psychological
novelist merely conjures apparitions that seem to reveal to "the understanding of school
misses, the last complications of that spirit" (The Confidence-Man 76: 14). The
paternalism of the psychological novelist falsely recognized by critics as the work of a
master extends its domain even over "school misses" and fails to reach towards the souls
of universal fraternity and sorority of the Melvillean American dream. The psychological
novelprecisely what The Confidence-Man seeks not to bedoes not offer the
wonderfully-made unwindings that only a brilliant puzzle-maker could produce but
instead proffers an effigy that is something akin to "palmistry, physiognomy, phrenology,
psychology" (76: 14).
In his 1989 text, Deleuze does take up Melville's banner against psychological
explanation by the novelist when he presents his idea of the foils to Melville's great
358
"originals." According to Deleuze, Melville's novels often include characters who
accentuate the originals through their own inadequacy as interpreters of the true meaning
of the original character. Those false "prophets " like Ishmael in Moby Dick, the attorney
in Bartleby, Captain Vere in Billy Budd, or Amasa Delano in Benito Cereno, try but fail
to explain the original characters in those novels of Ahab, Bartleby, Budd/Claggart, and
Babo/Cereno, respectively. But, in Deleuze's use of the narrator's digressions from The
Confidence-Man to elaborate on Melville's theory of the novel, Deleuze had to do a little
forgery to make the narrator's own satirically bumbling prophecies into stand-alone
explanations of Melville's approach to character. The Confidence-Man's narrator is a
little unreliable, but as we will see it is the Cosmopolitan who should really occupy the
position of the Delano-Attorney type of prophet, the self-deceived bearer of faulty
paternal philanthropy.
Deleuze was most of all concerned with reconciling the narrator's discussions
from The Confidence-Man with the critical theory of the novel expounded in "Hawthorne
and his Mosses" (1851). There, Melvillealso writing under a pseudonymchampioned
originality in a pseudo-nationalistic fashion,
Let us boldly contemn all imitation, though it comes to us graceful and
fragrant as the morning; and foster all originality, though, at first, it be
crabbed and ugly as our own pine knots. And if any of our authors fail, or
seem to fail, then, in the words of my enthusiastic Carolina cousin, let us
clap him on the shoulder, and back him against all Europe for his second
round (527).
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Literary genius was so important that Americans "must turn bullies" (527) for the sake of
a superior literature.
In large part, Deleuze turns to the narrator's discussions in Chapters 14, 33, and
44 of The Confidence-Man in order to provide more substantial definition to this earlier
idea of originality. Deleuze willingly passes off Chapters 44 The Confidence-Man, as
another version of the Melville' spolemic for the originality of authors from "Hawthorne
and His Mosses." He connects this up with the nationalistic proclamations of the narrator
of Melville's even earlier Redburn (1849) which again should not have been taken in
earnest. Deleuze's typological treatment of Melville has trouble, ultimately,
distinguishing Melville's original characters from the words of the unreliable narrator-
prophets. In fact, the Confidence-Man as a whole is better referred to another passage
from Melville's portrait of Hawthorne where Melville dreams of a genius who "takes
great delight in hoodwinking the world" (529). The Confidence-Man is a book that is
"directly calculated to deceiveegregiously deceive, the superficial skimmer of pages"
("Hawthorne and His Mosses" 530).
What "windings of the soul" remain to be revealed if The Confidence-Man can be
read as a smoky game that hinges on the narrator's admission to readers "who do not
skip" Chapter 44 that the Cosmopolitan is not the Confidence-Man? Even if one accepts
Jonathan A. Cook's picture of The Confidence-Man as a Joycean catalogue of allusions
drawing on a vast reading of western literature, the Bible, and the intellectuals of
Melville's own present, there remains the nagging question that Merlin Bowen mused
upon in 1969.
360
Why?For what purpose has this ingenious machine been contrived?
Why all the evasion and concealment? What dark truth lies hidden at the
center of this web of insinuations? It must be dark and shocking indeed to
justify such elaborate subterfuge (137).
Working from the clue of the refrain "QUITE AN ORIGINAL" to disambiguate the
Cosmopolitan from the original Confidence-Man does not necessarily undermine
William V. Spanos's recent claim for the book as a "vertiginous, polyvalent, and
decisively devastating parody of American optimism, what ... [Melville] takes, after the
publication of Pierre, to be the essential characteristic of the American national identity"
(168). Furthering the ludic approach to Melville's confidence game does, however, bring
out some further important details of what is at stake in the complex of interactions
amongst many different characters in the novel.
The key is not exactly given in the text of The Confidence-Man itself. The novel
can be called a puzzle only if we consider that not all the pieces of the puzzle are given in
full.
158
The book relies on some required outside reading. More specifically,
understanding the novel requires drawing up new relations amongst the various works
and philosophical personages that it references. The book's ludic structure can be
extended through a series of links and references that are not set in any one period but
trace a series of seismic cracks and connections through Western history.
The key place to begin in the novel itself is the crack in the novel where Melville
slips out the Confidence-Man's clever exploitations that masquerade as philanthropy and
|CO
A discussion with Philip Wagner yielded this clever formulation of the discursive
structure of the novel.
361
slips in the Cosmopolitan's earnestmore or less earnestcalls for confidence. It is also
here where we find the book's key philosophical reference in a very subtle reference to
Diogenes the Cynic. The foil to this clever maneuver is the character, Pitch, who is also
referred to as the Missourian, the Misanthrope, and Coonskins. It is crucial to note that it
is a hilarious Cynic Misanthrope who misleads us in the first interaction in the book from
which the Confidence-Man absents himself.
In Chapter 23, when the Cosmopolitan arrives, the previous disguise of the
Confidence-Man, the Man from the Philosophical Intelligence Office (P.I.O.), has just
taken leave of Pitch. Pitch has just suffered being duped by the Confidence-Man when he
is greeted by Goodman at this crucial crack in the novel. But, the confrontation between
Pitch and the Cosmopolitan of Chapter 24 is no longer merely the introduction of another
avatar of the original Confidence-Man. It is instead the appearance of an imposture that
we are duped into believing is just another avatar of the Confidence-Man.
The Man from the Philosophical Intelligence Office leaves Pitch not long before
Goodman arrives at the end of Chapter 23. And earlier in Chapter 21, the Confidence-
Man had visited Pitch as the avatar of the Herb-Doctor. The Herb-Doctor does not try
very hard to sell the joyfully malevolent Pitch any herbs. But, he does ply Pitch enough to
gain the information that Pitch has had trouble with the boys he has had working on his
farm and that Pitch wants to get machines to replace them (113, 117:21). This clever
marketing research technique succeeds once the Confidence-Man returns as the Man
from the Philosophical Intelligence Office (P.I.O.) almost immediately. The P.I.O. Man
uses the information discovered as the Herb-Doctor to set to work on Pitch with the
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promise to send him a boy "that never needed reform ... a good one ... a very likely
fellow indeed" (132: 22).
The P.I.O. Man convinces Pitch to put aside the suspicious implications of St.
Augustine's doctrine of original sin (128: 22) and to instead show confidence enough to
put up three dollars in P.I.O. fees plus the cost of the boy's passage to Pitch's farm. In
proffering his promises of child labor to Pitch, the P.I.O. man offers the kind of evidence
that Melville's narrator has mocked earlier as the deceptive work of psychological
novelists in Chapter 14. The P.I.O. Man attests to the boy's virtue on the basis of "the
marginal observations on the phrenological chart of his head, submitted to [the P.I.O.] by
the mother" (132: 22). Immediately after the P.I.O. man departs, having successfully
duped Pitch, Pitch "relapses" into Misanthropy, loses his "confidence," and becomes
certain that he has been tricked. The relapsed misanthrope spends the rest of Chapter 23
in "A Return of His Chilly Fit."
159
Pitch is in no mood to grant anyone confidence when in the last sentences of the
narrator's description of Pitch the Misanthrope's chilly fit, Goodmanmerely the
imposture of a disguise of the Confidence-Manarrives exhorting confidence through "a
cordial slap on the shoulder, accompanied by a spicy volume of tobacco smoke, out of
which came a voice, sweet as a seraph's" (135: 23). Goodman's calls for confidence
159
The "Philosophical Intelligence Office," which is in fact a mail order boy's
employment agencythat is perhaps an allusion to the boy-love accepted by many Greek
philosophers. Pitch holds firm for several pages that he wants a machine and not a boy.
He has had too many negative experiences of boys on his farm, "fifteen years experience
; five and thirty boys... All rascals, sir, every soul of them" (122). But as the "Tusculan
disputations" referred to in the title of the chapter continue, it will be to no avail that the
Missourian insists that "polite boys or saucy boys, white boys, smart boys or lazy boys,
Caucasian boys or Mongol boysall are rascals" (123).
363
inadvertently lead Pitch to identify this Cosmopolitan to the reader as "another of them"
(138:24) and "Jeremy Diddler No. 3" (141: 24).
But, since we know that Goodman is not "QUITE AN ORIGINAL," Pitch is
mistaken. Goodman has no real scheme other than toas he claimsoffer his vacuously
"fraternal arm" to Pitch and to walk through the crowds of the boat rejoining the rest of
humanity. However, Pitch's accusation of Goodman as "Diddler" falls upon the reader's
own nascent suspicions about the novel's game. Thus, we are all too easily hooked
having been baited with a red herring of Pitch's suspicions that the Cosmopolitan is the
Confidence-Man.
The dialogue between philanthropist and misanthrope that ensues has interest
beyond its role in the mechanics of Melville's puzzle, however. The nature of the
interaction is only unreliably glossed by the chapter title: "A philanthropist undertakes to
convert a misanthrope, but does not get beyond confuting him" (135: 24). This title is
misleading in that Goodman does not only fail due to Pitch's rejection of Goodman's
imperfect pleas for fraternity. It is Goodman, in his weak cosmopolitanism, who
ultimately rejects fraternity with the Misanthrope even after it has been achieved. But,
one has to follow the dialogue very carefully in order to comprehend how this happens.
Goodman succeeds in winning Pitch's confidencebut only through his cheery
reference to Diogenes the Cynic, often thought of as a philosophical misanthrope. The
philanthropist inadvertently resorts to identifying himself as a partial misanthrope as if
doing so might make an exhaustive philanthropist out of Pitch. Goodman pleads
364
For tell mesince you will not be a disciple to the lulltell me, was not
that humor, of Diogenes, which led him to live, a merry-andrew, in the
flower market, better than that of the less wise Athenian, which made him
a skulking scare-crow in the pine barrens? An injudicious gentleman, Lord
Timon (143: 24).
Goodman recognizes the existence of different qualities of misanthropy by ranking
Diogenes of Synope, the Cynic philosopher described most famously in Diogenes
Laertius's Lives of Eminent Philosophers, over Timon of Athens, the reclusive
misanthrope treated most famously by Shakespeare's play, Timon of Athens, and
described at length in Plutarch's Lives. The Philanthropist mistakenly sympathizes with a
misanthrope in pursuit of his cause. In this pivotal moment of irony, Goodman only
succeeds in confuting the misanthrope by at the same time confuting himself and
temporarily converting to a restricted form of misanthropy.
Pitch gladly sympathizes with this inadvertent masquerade as a misanthrope. At
the mere mention of Diogenes, Pitch does the Philanthropist one better than taking the
fraternal arm that was offered. Instead Pitch exclaims,
"Your hand!" seizing it.
"Bless me, how cordial a squeeze. It is agreed we shall be brothers,
then?"
"As much so as a brace of misanthropes can be," with another and
terrific squeeze. "I had thought that the moderns had degenerated beneath
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the capacity of misanthropy. Rejoiced, though but in one instance, and that
disguised, to be undeceived" (143-4:24)
Pitch's enthusiastic misanthropy, however fraternal, is a wicked turn-off to the
Cosmopolitan, who is aghast at the fraternity he has inadvertently initiated. Goodman can
only stare "back in blank amaze" (144: 24). Pitch quickly observes Goodman's reticence
in responding to this warm welcome into a "brace of misanthropes." Pitch then goes even
further in turning the Cosmopolitan's own idea of misanthropy on its head. Pitch reverses
the Cosmopolitan's disingenuously cheery reference to Diogenes back upon the
Cosmopolitan himself. If the Cosmopolitan will not rejoin this warm welcome into a
brotherhood of misanthropy, then Pitch declares,
"Won't do. You are Diogenes. Diogenes in disguise. I say
Diogenes masquerading as a cosmopolitan."
With ruefully altered mien, the stranger [Goodman] still stood
mute awhile. At length, in a pained tone, spoke: "How hard the lot of that
pleader who, in his zeal conceding too much, is taken to belong to a side
which he but labors ineffectually, to convert!" (144: 24)
160
After this initial expression of disgust over the new position that Pitch's Cynic reversal
has assigned him, it still takes another moment for the Cosmopolitan to realize reorient
himself. With the tables incontrovertibly turned, the Cosmopolitan chooses to refuse
160
This important passage seems ripe for an analysis of potential corruption of the
published text in the form of faulty punctuations or missing words. "At length, in a
pained tone, spoke" has no subject. Such a fragment is uncharacteristic of the novel's
style. Again it is well known that Melville did not check the final page proofs of the
novel before they went to print.
366
fraternity with the misanthrope whom he has confuted only by confuting himself. The
Cosmopolitan speaks again
with another change of air: "To you, an Ishmael, disguising in
sportiveness my intent, I came ambassador from the human race, charged
with the assurance that for your mislike they bore no answering grudge,
but sought to conciliate accord between you and them. Yet you take me
not for the honest envoy, but I know not what sort of unheard-of spy. Sir,"
he less lowly added, "this mistaking of your man should teach you how
you may mistake all men. For God's sake," laying both hands upon him,
"get you confidence. See how distrust has duped you. I, Diogenes? I he
who, going a step beyond misanthropy, was less a man-hater than a man-
hooter? Better were I stark and stiff!"
With which the philanthropist moved away less lightsome than he
had come, leaving the discomfited misanthrope to the solitude he held so
sapient (144: 24).
Goodman takes his earliest opportunity to quit the "brace of misanthropes" and mosies on
off to flirt with the Confidence-Man in the disguise of Charlie Noble.
The cunning technique used here by Pitch cleverly reverses the accusation of
being a "Diogenes" onto Goodman. Such a technique was described by Foucault as the
acceptance of dishonor and humiliation that was characteristic of a number of the
anecdotes about Cynic philosophers like Diogenes of Synope.
367
Within the accepted humiliation, one is able to turn the situation around,
as it were, and take back control of it... the Cynic, at the very point when
he plays the most disgraceful role, brings out his pride and supremacy"
(Foucault The Courage of Truth 260-2).
For the Cosmopolitan and the rhetoric he deploys against Pitch's misanthropy, the
highest dishonor is being called a Cynic and a misanthrope. Correspondingly, Pitch's
game at the end of Chapter 24 brings out Pitch's pride and supremacy by a kind of
aggressive reversal of the Cosmopolitan's own aggressive paternal philanthropy. An
embrace is converted into a virtual weapon in the name of "a brace of misanthropes."
By calling the Cosmopolitan "a Diogenes in disguise," Pitch's reciprocal insult
says no more of the Cosmopolitan than what the Cosmopolitan has already said of Pitch.
However, Pitch happily identifies with Diogenes and, like Diogeneswho when called a
dog embraced the positive characteristics of dogs while showing how his own accusers
embodied the worst characteristics of dogsPitch also has no problem giving back what
has been leveled at him as patronizing condescension. Having transformed the same
signifier that the Cosmopolitan applied to Pitch, Pitch turns the figure of Diogenes into a
stunning insult that leaves the Cosmopolitan tongue-tied.
Hennig Cohen recognized that the basic argument that Goodman produces in the
distinction between Diogenes and Timon must have been taken from Michel de
Montaigne's "Of Democritus and Heraclitus." Montaigne makes the same distinction
between differences in kinds of misanthropes.
368
Thus, Diogenes, who pottered about by himself, rolling his tub and turning
up his nose at the great Alexander, considering us as flies or bags of wind,
was really a sharper and more stinging judge, and consequently juster, to
my taste, than Timon, who was surnamed the hater of men. For what we
hate we take seriously. Timon wished us ill, passionately desired our ruin,
and shunned association with us as dangerous, as with wicked men
depraved by nature. Diogenes esteemed us so little that contact with us
could neither disturb him nor affect him, and avoided our company, not
through fear of association with us, but through disdain of it; he
considered us incapable of doing either good or evil (268).
The Cosmopolitan certainly does accidentally deploy a philosophically inept and very
much condensed version of this discussion.
Furthermore, however, Melville likely had in mind Montaigne's observations on
human nature that lead his essay to this very comparison between Diogenes and Timon
that is clumsily deployed by the Cosmopolitan. Just above his juxtaposition of Diogenes
and Timmon, Montaigne muses that "I do not think there is as much unhappiness in us as
vanity, nor as much malice as stupidity. We are not so full of evil as of inanity; we are
not as wretched as we are worthless" (268).
161
161
In French, the text reads:
Je ne pense point qu 'il y ait tant de Malheur en nous comme il y a de
vanite, ni tant de malice comme de sottise : nous ne sommes pas si pleins
de mal, comme d'inanitenous ne sommes pas si miserables, comme nous
sommes vils. ("De Democritus " 477)
369
Montaigne's clever reformulation of human problems that have been
misrecognized as evil as problems of stupidity is core to the problem of the human soul
that Melville's vision of the masterful writer must unwind. In order to reveal the last
windings of a soul that is wonderfully made and "incapable of doing either good or evil"
as Montaigne wrote of Diogenes's comic vision of humanity's stupidity, one must engage
in a battle against stupidity and inanity rather than against evil.
It is precisely towards the end of unwinding the complications that stupidity has
created for itself through the problem of evil and towards revealing the fearful wonders
and potential ingenuity in humanity that, as Foucault explained, the Cynic philosopher
engages in "a battle against customs, conventions, institutions, laws, and a whole
condition of humanity" (The Courage of Truth 280). The Cynicism of The Confidence-
Man thereby plays on the difference between two key philosophical threads. One is the
cosmopolitanism exemplified by Goodman who in his eagerness to verify his own
goodness and distance himself from all evil, in fact, becomes the noble dupe of a small
'c' cynical Confidence-Man. The other thread which is merely implied by the ludic
puzzle of Melville's book is a Cynic philosophy that takes any questions of good or evil
and refers them instead to the practical problems of vanity, stupidity, inanity and
worthlessness of humankind.
Hence, the problem of Goodman's calls for confidence is not their diabolical evil,
but their worthless stupidity. As in Matthew 24:43, "But know this, that if the goodman
of the house had known in what watch the thief would come, he would have watched, and
would not have suffered his house to be broken up" (King James Bible). The
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Philanthropist-Cosmopolitan-Goodman is not bright enough to remain on watch for all
the unforeseen dangers nor the opportunities offered to the able appreciation of change,
flux, and fortune that is the goal of the philosophically informed life. He instead looks for
coordinates of human community and human self that transcend practical circumstances.
Thus, he plays right into the Confidence-Man's hands and he goes on to do just as the
Confidence-Man does.
Goodman is vain enough to reject the jocular hand of the lively and clever Pitch.
Goodman is inane enough to pine away for the companionship of the Confidence-Man in
the guise of the penny-pinching Charlie Noble. When the silly Goodman asked to borrow
some money from his "boon companion," Charlie Noble, Noble reacts almost
demonically with "A Metamorphosis more surprising than any in Ovid" (184: 31) in
which "speaking or rather hissing" (185: 32) he tells Goodman to "go to the devil, sir"
(184: 31). After Goodman pulls out some coin to imply that he was only joking, and lays
them around him in a circle in an almost ritualistic fashion, Noble calms down (185: 32).
When Goodman is quite drunkperhaps druggedand seeing double, the
Confidence-Man momentarily splits into the forms of Mark Winsome and the assistant
Egbert.
162
These further avatars of Winsome and Egbert have come along to affirm
Noble's friendly parsimony with their doctrines of world-hardened "pragmatism"
preaching the autonomy of business and friendship. Then, Goodman is worthless enough
1A9
"In the master's presence the disciple had stood as one not ignorant of this place;
modesty was his expression, with a sort of reverential depression. Bu the presence of the
superior withdrawn, he seemed lithely to shoot up erect from beneath it, like one of those
wire men from a toy snuffbox" (201: 38).
371
to throw some change to Egbert just to prove his own charity: the Confidence-Man wins
again.
This doctrine of Winsome does not seem strictly Emersonian, as critics have
previously agreed. It seems even more like the doctrine that Hershel Parker and Mark
Niemeyer's notes to the Norton Critical Edition compare to the words of the earlier avatar
of Charlie Noble: that of the Due de la Rochefoucauld (1677). Like Bernard Mandeville,
in his "Fable of the Bees," or even Adam Smith in his doctrine of the invisible hand as it
is expressed in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, these not exactly Emersonian doctrines
insist that virtue in the commercial world ought to be considered as separate,
autonomous, and requiring far less attention than the highest religious and ethical virtues
to which the refined soul should aspire when one is not tied up in avaricious pursuits.
Winsome's capitalistic ethic is very close to what Albert Hirschman pointed to as a very
Senecan tendency in modern commercial ethos that reduces ethics to
the rationally conducted acquisition of wealth ... categorized and
implicitly endorsed as a calm passion that would at the same time be
strong and able to triumph over a variety of turbulent (yet weak) passions
(65-6).
Hirschman traced how easily arguments for Stoic-esque or even Transcendentalist-esque
doctrines of self-sufficiency could be appropriated for the sake of commercial expansion.
The disguise of a Stoic ethos is certainly helpful in converting the energies of unruly
intemperance, sensual incontinence, or communitarian radicalism towards a pure and
disciplined life of austere financial accumulation. Of course, this requires that the
372
practices employed towards the ends of accumulation be considered as, in themselves,
outside the sphere of ethic and separate from religious faith (Hirschman 108-9).
The Confidence-Man subjects to Cynic ridicule this modern morality of
accumulation as it takes an indirect hold of Goodman. Goodman, while constantly
maintaining his firm belief in his own morality, constantly caters to and apes the
deceptive calls to confidence of the Confidence-Man by which all kinds of fellow-feeling
are eventually subordinated to the steady, unwavering passion for financial gain
expressed in the brand name of "confidence." At the expense of more subtle passions and
virtues, only the stupidest passion remains: greed. The fact that Goodman's code of
morality has been formulated by a trickster who always stands to gain from his not-so-
critical theory of mankind that he bandies about so blithely is a problem of Goodman's
own inanity.
The Cosmopolitan shows himself well on the path to becoming a proudbut still
quite weakexploiter in his confrontation with the barber in Chapter 43. But, Goodman
just becomes more and more of a noble dupe as the story goes on . Even when he pulls
his little scam on the barber, he only becomes the butt of a joke with Melville, the Barber
and the Barber's friends.
A misconstrued ethics that functions as an excuse for economic expansion is not
new to the ethics of industrial modernity described by Hirschman, however. The fact that
after Goodman's initial conflict with Pitch, the narrator changes from referring to
Goodman as "Philanthropist" to referring to Goodman as "Cosmopolitan" indicates that
Melville likely recognized the kind of disconnect between two different versions of
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cosmopolitanism that would be recognized in twentieth century classical scholarship.
One of these versions of Cosmopolitanism was described W.W. Tarn in his "Alexander
the Great and the Brotherhood of Man" as the Christian status quo descended from
Alexander's imperialism. The othermore originalversion belonged to the Cynics.
The cosmopolitanism of Diogenes does seem to have been a new
phenomenon.... But the cosmopolitanism of Diogenes was not the well-
travelled man's interest in alien cultures, like that of Herodotus, but rather
a reaction against every kind of coercion imposed by the community on
the individual.... For us "cosmopolitanism" as a conception carries an
emotional color which is the legacy of Alexander, transmitted through the
Roman Empire and the Catholic Church. But as Tarn says, the phrase as
used by Diogenes was one of negation, meaning, "I am not a citizen of any
of your Greek cities." ... Alexander's systemthe Brotherhood of Man
and the King as Living Law ... in all probability originated with
Alexander, and is in direct contrast with the 'cosmopolitanism' of the
Cynics and the early Stoics (Dudley 34-5).
The difference between, on the one hand, the friendly misanthropy that Pitch hits upon
momentarily in conflict with the Cosmopolitan's stupid philanthropy and, on the other
hand, the inane philanthropy of Goodman can very likely be sourced to this disjunction
between Diogenes the Cynic and Alexander/the Catholic Church of St. Paul. In
Diogenes's rejection of citizenship within any Greek city, we can recognize a most direct
374
incarnation of what Deleuze and Felix Guattari would term in A Thousand Plateaus,
"absolute deterritorialization."
Diogenes's rejection of the association of himself with any human milieu was
converted by Alexander/Paul into a false unity that can be used for the (weak)
philosophical legitimization that an existing order of economic domination will always
require to authorize the enforcement of unequal distribution of wealth and resources in a
society. Jonathan A. Cook does not mention this precise aspect of Melville's use of
Diogenes when, in his 2006 essay for the Norton-Critical Edition of The Confidence-
Man, Cook deals with the presence of the scandalous Diogenes who had been omitted
from his earlier and otherwise scrupulous picture of The Confidence-Man as a massive
network of literary references in Satirical Apocalypse. For Cook, in his 2006 essay, the
Cosmopolitan is still an avatar of the original Confidence-Man and the disjunction
between the militant non-citizenship of Diogenes's cosmopolitanism and Goodman's
vacuous Cosmopolitanism remains a non-issue.
163
163
Cook's essay describes
Pitch's ... debate with the cosmopolitan, the next guise of the confidence
man, hinges on the backwoodsman's climactic attempt to identify his
interlocutor as a type of misanthropic Diogenes, alluding to the fourth-
century B.C.E. Cynic philosopher famous for living in a tub in the
Athenian market, conducting a fruitless search for an honest man, and
telling Alexander the Great to get out of his sunlight when the emperor
was talking to him.... Diogenes characterized himself using the original
Greek term cosmopolites, or "citizen of the world"; hence Pitch's
association of the cosmopolitan with Diogenes is in one sense accurate
enough, even though the cosmopolitan indignantly denies the connection.
The allusion to the famous Cynic is, in any case, appropriate for a literary
work grounded in the discursive world of Menippean satire ("Melville, the
Classics" 348-9).
375
One can pull at this Diogenes reference a little further. In The Confidence-Man's
assault on novelistic form, Melville follows in the footprints of Diogenes's turn to
philosophy as described in an anecdote told by Dio Chrysostom that Michel Foucault
explained with great interest.
Just as Socrates had received from the god of Delphi the prophecy, the
indication, the role assignment that he was the wisest man, so, in the same
way, Diogenes, going to Delphi and asking the god how things stood with
himself, gets this answer: "change, alter (alterer) the value of currency."
[parakharattein to nomisma] ...We can sometimes find the important
sense of "defacing" {alterer)" a coin so that it loses its value, but here the
verb essentially and especially signifies: starting from a certain coin which
carries a certain effigy, erase that effigy and replace it with another which
will enable this coin to circulate with its true value. That the coin is not
misleading about its true value, that its own value is restored to it by
stamping it with another, better, and more adequate effigy, is what is
defined by this important Cynic principle of altering and changing the
value of the currency (226-7).
Formally, The Confidence-Man is an attempt to revalue the "customs, conventions,
institutions, laws" of the novel which provoke a search for the psychological truth about a
character's evil or good nature in order to pretend to solve it.
For Melville, it seems, personality of characters was the currency proffered by
ordinary psychological novelists. The kind of narrative opacity that is generated in the
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world of The Confidence-Manas the narrator quietly changes out disguised versions of
the same character one for anotherdefies the kind of readerly enjoyment defined by
immersion in a world that would rationally affirm the consistency of the self in the
ordinary human milieu. In lieu of immersion in a world of psychologically realistic
characters, the novel arranges for the reader a ludic search for the true value of novelistic
currency. The reader is lead beyond the effigy of any realistic character, the device that
has been proffered by mere "psychological novelists" to enforce their own mastery and
authority.
Furthermore, however, the search initiated by The Confidence-Man leads to
conclusions that corrode the humanistic foundations, not of the novel, but of Western
culture itself. The book does this in an even more fundamental way than by merely
attacking the form of the psychological novel. It is as if the explicit critique of the novel
in the narrators' digressions masks a deeper critique of cosmopolitan Christianity.
Melville's intimation may very well be that the most original character of the most
original of novels may also not be as original as orthodoxy had assumed. In this vein, The
Confidence-Man's defacement of the very currency of the novel, personality or character,
hints at a truth that would deface another great forgery. However, the Diogenes the Cynic
situated at the crack of the novel would only laugh at what Bowen called a "dark truth
[that] lies hidden at the center of this web of insinuations" ("Tactics" 137). In this
distinction between the Cynical cosmopolitan turn against humanity and imperial
cosmopolitan humanism, the truth of Deleuze's attempt to link Melville to Nietzsche
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becomes terribly and hilariously resonant: cosmopolitan Christianity has masked the
deeper Cynicism of Jesus of Nazareth himself.
Foucault recognized in his final lectures that almost as strong as the legacy of
Platonist concepts in Christianity were ritual themes that had been misappropriated from
Cynicism.
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Foucault described that the Cynic philosopher's means of turning a
disgraceful situation around consisted in accepting blows or insults without returning
blows and by returning merely the same insult back in return. But, this very Cynic ritual
of accepting blows in order to turn the tables should appear as nothing less than the
original negative image of the most charitable Christian principle of turning the other
cheek and doing good to your enemies (Matthew 5:38-42; Luke 6:27-31). However, the
goal of turning the other cheek in Cynicism was the utter public humiliation of the
aggressor not an idealized demonstration of impracticable universal charity and
philanthropy.
164
In The Courage of Truth Foucault writes,
You see that this Cynic game of humiliation is interesting and [may] be
compared with something which, up to a point, derives from it but changes
its values, meaning, and forms: Christian humility. From Cynic
humiliation to Christian humility there is an entire history of the humble,
of disgrace, shame, and scandal through shame, which is very important
historically and, once again, quite foreign to the standard morality of the
Greeks and Romans. And I think we should distinguish the future
Christian humility, which is a state, a mental attitude manifesting itself
and testing itself in the humiliations one suffers, from this Cynic dishonor,
which is a game with conventions of honor and dishonor in which the
Cynic, at the very point when he plays the most disgraceful role, brings
out his pride and supremacy (262).
These comparisons and shifts are further drawn out in the last two lectures of Foucault's
life.
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Melville, likewise, demonstrated the same malapropism of Cynic performance
within Christian charity in the encounter between misanthrope and philanthropist. Pitch
turns the tables on the philanthropist's patronizing reference to Diogenes by showing the
cosmopolitan to be a confusedly inverted Diogenes who moralistically hoots when it
comes to fraternizing with Cynics. In Pitch's technique of dishonoring the aggressor by
accepting dishonor without escalating violence, Pitch instead escalated fraternity, taking
hold of Goodman's hand in a fraternal squeeze when Goodman had only offered his arm.
Melville subjects the very cunning origin of the Christian doctrine of turning the other
cheek to a curious mutation that is so subtle as to easily evade the attention of readers
uninterested in the very subversive reference to Diogenes the Cynic.
Of course, the idea of turning the other cheek as it was taken up in a cosmopolitan
Christian morality of charity is easily discounted as an impracticable mystery of Christ's
love for humanity. Turning the other cheek is a key example in the pamphlet of Plotinus
Plinlimmon in Book 14 of Melville's Pierre, or the Ambiguities where Plinlimmon
argues that virtue is something too perfect for man. Likewise, turning the other cheek
for the Philanthropic Cosmopolitanis only a hyperbolical higher good of which many a
good man may be excused if he comes up a little bit short. For the imperfect
philanthropist, the dictum to turn the other cheek is just a polyvalent mystery of God's
irreducible love for mankind embodied in the figure of Christ.
By contrast, the rather wicked but utterly pragmatist implication that emerges
from the Cynic crack in Melville's The Confidence-Man is that Jesus of Nazareth was
more like a Cynic and even a misanthrope than he was a philanthropist like Frank
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Goodman, the Cosmopolitan. If this seems perverse, consider that the idea of a
potentially verifiable genealogical connection from Jesus of Nazareth to Cynicism did
gain enough currency in New Testament studies to be dubbed the "Cynic Jesus Thesis" in
a series of exchanges in the Journal of Biblical Literature from 1996 through 1998
(Rhodes Eddy, Seeley, Downing "Deeper Reflections").
New Testament and classical scholar Hans Dieter Betz had, in 1994, already
responded to the claims made by F. Gerald Downing's Christ and the Cynics (1988) that
are echoed in John Dominic Crossan's The Historical Jesus (1989) as well as in Burton
Mack's A Myth of Innocence (1988). Betz writes that
even if in the final analysis the slogan of "Jesus the Cynic" should turn out
to be a contradiction in terms, many of Jesus's sayings would appear in a
different light, as would those of Cynics, and historians and exegetes
would learn an immense amount in the process (474).
Again, Foucault's lectures delivered in the final months of his life in 1984 also touched
upon the comparison between Cynic tactics of accepting and returning disgrace in public
and Christian rituals of humiliation before the authority of the church. Foucault was
interested in the broken connections that might be recovered between Christian thought
and Cynic scandal and humiliation. Foucault was primarily tracking the kind of
provocative speech-events proper to the somewhat mythical lives of Cynic philosophers.
It was then that Foucault came upon Peter Sloterdijk's 1983 Critique of Cynical
Reason where Sloterdijk describes modernity as a phenomenon of debased cynicism with
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a small 'c.' Sloterdijk managed a rather brilliantly phrased link from Jesus of Nazareth to
Diogenes when he explained that in the philosophy of Diogenes,
the wise man is not, like the modern intellectual, an accomplice of the
powerful, but [instead, the wise man] turns his back on the subjective
principle of power, ambition, and the urge to be recognized. He is the first
one who is uninhibited enough to say the truth to the prince.... Socialized
human beings lost their freedom when their educators succeeded in
instilling wishes, projects, and ambitions in them.... Diogenes and Jesus
are united in their irony directed at social labor that exceeds the necessary
measure and merely serves to extend power. What for Jesus was taught by
the birds was for Diogenes taught by a mouse; it became his model for
self-sufficiency (161-2).
Thus, Sloterdijk quickly gestures towards the animalistic scandal of a Cynic Jesus-
Diogenes.
The idea appears in what Jesus says in Matthew 6: 26: "Behold the fowls of the
air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father
feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?" (King James Bible). The Cynic
reinterpretation, as in the reversion to animality of Diogenes in his admiration of mice as
superior to humans,
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would not have answered this translation of the final rhetorical
165
The Confidence-Man makes repeated references to dogs. For instance, the second
imposture of the Confidence-Man, the Black Guinea of Chapter 2, acts like a dog as part
of his begging from the passengers of the Fidele as he crawls around catching coins in his
mouth. This is a demonstration that may be different in spirit but not entirely different in
meaning from Diogenes.
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question in the affirmative. The Cynic Jesus's parable of the birds does not end by
confirming the superiority of humans over animals in the eyes of God. The Cynic Jesus
would have ended as in Diogenes's evaluation of the mouse: by asserting how superior
most animals are to humans in both attitude and proportionate physical strength. Foucault
condensed the importance of this principle of Cynicism very clearly. "In order not to be
inferior to the animal, one must be capable of taking on that animality as [a] reduced but
prescriptive form of life. Animality is not a given; it is a duty" (Foucault The Courage of
Truth 265).
This rather more original and more savage value of animality for philosophy is
not always apparent in Deleuze and Guattari's discussions of "becoming-animal" or
"devenir-animalThe idea of the willful rejection of human behavioral norms is
The modern words 'cynic', 'cynical', and 'cynicism'... to be kynikos
means literally to be like a dog, to behave like a dog, or to have
characteristics reminiscent of dogs.... As we consider the circumstances in
which Diogenes became known as a dog, we encounter [two ways, the
former way when he was called a dog by]... those who were reminded by
him of a dog and the latter on Diogenes' own part. For him, despising as
he did the customs and behavior of his contemporaries, animals were
preferable to human beings. He could have said what Schopenhauer once
said: the life of one dog may be worth more than the lives of many human
beings (Navia 63-4).
In other anecdotes Diogenes directly asserted the superiority of other animals to
humans. For instance, mice
are not encumbered by artificial and atavistic conventions, nor are they
concerned about the past or the future, living always in the present
moment and for the present moment. Thus, Diogenes thought, mice live in
a natural way and are, therefore, happier than human beings, for which
reason they deserve to be imitated. Accordingly, mice and other animals
should be our models, for they are invariably better and more authentic
than the embarrassing specimens of humanity found everywhere, who
have chosen to distance themselves from nature and who have succeeded
in constructing for themselves a world in which neither rest nor happiness
can be found (Navia 65).
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somewhat softened by the almost magical connotations of the term becoming-animal.
Quite to the contrary, the assault on human stupidity common to Diogenes, the Cynic
interpretation of Jesus of Nazareth, and that is gestured to by Melville's defacement of
the psychological novelonce one locates the crack in The Confidence-Manis direct,
pragmatic, and brutal.
Of further interest for bringing the implications of The Confidence-Man back in
touch with Deleuze's late but sustained interest in Melville, Betz's article from 1994
traces the apparently recent Cynic Jesus hypothesis described by NT historians Downing,
Crossan, and Mack in the late 1980s to a point further back in modernity. Betz writes that
it originates with Nietzsche, Deleuze's other great scholar of forgeries. According to
Betz, Nietzsche's early studies of Diogenes Laertius's accounts of Diogenes the Cynic
were attempts to reconstruct Cynicism according to a form that
means critique of civilization: coming from the lower social stations or
even from slavery [that] gives the Cynics the perspective "from below"
that enables them to despise the culture of a society based on pretentious
systems of honor and wealth (Betz 467).
So according to Betz, Nietzsche's very modern "Anti-Christ" finds its model in a Cynic
Jesus. Deleuze never seems to make such a claim in his larger studies of Nietzsche. The
one place we would look in Deleuze's work is the article on "Nietzsche and St. Paul,
Lawrence and John of Patmos." This was Deleuze's and his wife, Fanny's, introduction
to Fanny's 1978 translation of D.H. Lawrence's Apocalypse where Deleuze deals quite
explicitly with the masks that Pauline Christianity has contrived for Jesus of Nazareth.
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Here John of Patmos and St. Paul are the two maskers who have inserted themselves
between the modem church and the true Jesus of Nazareth.
John of Patmos does not even assume the mask of the evangelist, nor that
of Christ; he invents another mask, he fabricates another mask that
unmasks Christ, or, if you prefer, that is superimposed on Christ's mask.
John of Patmos deals with cosmic terror and death, whereas the gospel and
Christ dealt with human and spiritual love. Christ invented a religion of
love (a practice, a way of living and not a belief), whereas the Apocalypse
brings a religion of Power [Pouvoir]a belief, a terrible manner of
judging. Instead of the gift of Christ, an infinite debt (36).
Likewise, Deleuze's Melville and Deleuze's Neitzsche seem to converge in a very
Diogenic critique of the Christian idea of cosmopolitanism based on the self-evidence of
God's love for the human community that only confusedly reduces the functioning of
morality to a wolfish gain-driven imperialism that masquerades in the sheep's clothing of
imperfect universal charity that enables the power of the arbitrary judgments of church
and political authority.
Foucault must have had Nietzsche a little on his mind in his search for the
conception of truth-telling, or parrhesia, in the Cynicism of antiquity. On the one hand,
Deleuze was not happy with Foucault's investigations of truth. According to Jacques
Donzelot's recollections, Deleuze protested, "Michel is completely nuts, what's this old
idea about truth? He's taking us back to that old idea, veridiction" (Dosse 318). However,
when Deleuze suggests that the modern cinema exhibited new "powers of the false," and
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cites Melville's The Confidence-Man as a forerunner to Orson Welles's F for Fake
(Cinema 2 126-55), these powers of the false are not easily placed in opposition to what
Foucault was talking about with regard to the truth exhibited by the Cynics' techniques of
scandal and reproach. Instead, Deleuze's idea of the powers of the false is better seen as a
symptom of what remains when, "it is the very possibility of judging which is called into
question" (Cinema 2 138). Without any human community to affirm and without a self
assured by rights or duties to a given community to provide transcendent coordinates to
moral and political decisions, one can onlyto recall Montaigne avoid false problems
of "judgment" and self-evident good and evil by pragmatically reclassifying problems of
evil as problems of the vanity, stupidity, inanity, and worthlessness of human beings.
This is the task that the work of a religion of love takes up against the stupidity of
judgment that gains its power by purporting to know good and evil. For the Melville of
The Confidence-Man, this work of love certainly entailed diagnosing and demonstrating
the hypocrisies of the Christian interpretation of gestures and teachings of Jesus of
Nazareth in a way that undermines the absolute originality of the historical Jesus.
Clare L. Spark points out that inside the front and back covers of his New
Testament, Melville had copied passages from Carlysle's translation of Book 6 of
Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship. The passage describes true philosophical
duty as a search that is specifically "not like [that of] advocates of the wicked spirit." The
passage from Goethe refers the "manner" of "a true Philosopher" who "exalts the lower
to himself, while he makes the poor, the rich, partakers of his wisdom, of his riches, of
his strength" (Spark 164) that is much like the duty to resist the elevation of vanity,
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stupidity, and worthlessness to the level of an obfuscatory discourse on good and evil.
Spark explains further that for Melville,
the orthodox Christian focuses on the death and resurrection of Jesus, not
his life. Shielded by godlike Goethe, front and back, Melville is aligned
with the Hebrew prophets, Lucretius, the Pelagians, the most radical
puritans, and the empirical tradition in philosophy (164).
But, as is testified in existing studies of Melville's copy of the New Testament (Spark;
Yothers), someonea Melville descendent, an early researcher, or perhaps Melville
himselfcut out many pieces of side matter from the most marked up New Testament
edition in Melville's library. It is likely, then, that the most revealing and direct evidence
of Melville's reading of Jesus of Nazareth has already been lost.
166
Yet, by imagining one of the most important New Testament crowd events as a
Cynic ritual, one can further advance some concluding analysis of the nascent critique of
modern commercial society descendant from Alexandrine imperialism and Pauline
cosmopolitanism thatMelville hid within the folds of the puzzle he created in The
Confidence-Man. The potency of the literary procedure of rereading Jesus of Nazareth as
Cynic or at least Cynic-esque could probably be best distilled by reclassifying the feeding
of the 5000 (Matthew 14:13-21; Mark 6:31-44; Luke 9:10-17; John 6:5-15) and the
feeding of the 4000 (Mark 8:1-9; Matthew 15:32-39). Make them not miracles. Make
them instead Cynic-esque rituals of disgracing the crowd.
166
For further evidence in this vein, one will be able to look to Melville's complete
marginalia that are soon to be available online.
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As Cynic-esque rituals, the feedings of the multitudes would not demonstrate the
power of God to inexplicably intervene in the world in order tothrough divine sleight
of handshow his love for humanity by transforming several loaves of bread into
hundreds. Noras in a charitably secularized version of the mythdoes the event
demonstrate the power of a philanthropic Christ or God to momentarily soften the hearts
of men, eliciting the inherent loving charity of all those who decided to share food once
Jesus and the disciples have been seen to share.
Instead, the feeding of the multitude demonstrates the stupidity and inanity of
those who would initially go hungry and risk letting their hidden food go to spoil rather
than to reveal to others the information that they had food. Ironically, the Stoic virtue of
austerity is activated for them only by the fear that they might have to be the first to share
what they have with the other strangers present. Hence, Stoic austerity is in this case not a
virtue but the product of the passion of inane greed. At the same time, this crowd is
thoroughly without the unity imagined by a Platonic or Rousseauist republicanism, or a
Pauline belief in the human church as one body. There is no unity to the crowd and these
selves act out of fear and confusion in their flummoxed interactions with other humans
rather than out of any Godlike compassion that is innate to the human species. Without
community and without the classical self, Jesus of Nazareth was doing all that a true
philosopher can do: humiliate and assault the vicious norms by which humanity lives.
Jesus the Cynic and his disciples willingly shared what they had as a form of
knowing harassment to turn the tables on the greedy Stoicism of the crowd. All the
people are fed because, in spite of the fears of the hoarders, there was plenty of food
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present. However, the ultimate excess of food does not demonstrate the contagious
nature of charity but the fear of each member of the crowd that they might appear poorer
than the others who have already shared. What the ritual demonstrates is that the people's
fear of humiliationtheir vanity and worthlessnessoutstrips even their stupid and
inane greed. The fact that the event is traditionally retold as a miracle rather than a tale of
utterly brilliant disgrace is a reminder of the worthlessness of the human groups who
ultimately managed to rewrite the event in a way that was more charitable to their milieu.
Melville's marginalia are soon to appear online and I would be willing to wager that
these passages will demonstrate either interesting comments by Melville or that their side
matter has been excised.
Such an exercise in rereading the gospels indicates the important direction in
which we are led as The Confidence-Man takes the image of Diogenes's Cynic
misanthropywhose attitude towards all other human beings was not one of love but one
of a war against the mindlessly received custom that motivate humans' behaviorsand
hides this image within the folds of the novel's game so as to set it up as the preferable
alternative to the ideal good marketed by the confidence game of Pauline Christianity and
Alexandrine imperial philanthropy. The target of Melville's dark insinuationsa line that
he shares with Nietzsche, Foucault, Deleuze and othersis the numbing effect of
unquestioned orthodoxy.
In this, the character of Pitch is not Diogenes, nor Christ, nor the exact
mouthpiece for the Cynic Melville himself, any more than the Confidence-Man or
Goodman is God, the Devil, or Christ. Pitch, the Missourian with his sharp-witted
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frontier pragmatism, is a key foil to the unoriginal Cosmopolitan Goodman. The novel is
a Diogenic assault on Pauline universalism whichfollowing on the heels of
Alexander's Brotherhood of Man and Plato's city where all members are believed to join
into one human bodyhad recycled the cache of a jagged-edged performance artist with
a misanthropic penchant for humiliating hypocrites in public view in order to replace him
with a forgery that has more in common with the deceptive marketing techniques of the
"original genius" of the Confidence-Man.
Cosmopolitan Christ, the apparition that appears before the foggy-eyed man who
wants to be recognized as good, has thereby been reduced from a brutally effective man-
hooter to a ruthless parasite pushing an ideology wherein faith is a never-to-be-perfected
process of self-victimization that is infinitely easier to push on others than ever actually
to achieve. This is the trap of Christian charity and paternal philanthropy that Deleuze
isolated so clearly as a determined target that persists throughout Melville's work just as
he isolated Nietzsche's critique of Paul and Lawrence's critique of John of Patmos.
Also copied inside the cover of Melville's New Testament is a passage from
Chapter 11 of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Travels that explains the life of "a true
Philosopher" as a life that "shows to all men, who are aiming at a certain elevation in
doctrine and life, what they have to look for from the world" (Spark 164). Is this not the
same sentiment that Deleuze expresses about the potential of modern cinema in Cinema
21 "The cinema must film, not the world, but belief in this world, our only link.... we
need reasons to believe in this world''' (Cinema 2 172). Deleuze exposed a difficult
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modern line that was shared by Melville, Nietzsche, D.H. Lawrence, and Foucault.
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Critical modernity's encounter with Christianity challenges us, then, to open our
awareness to the absolute break that true belief in this world must make with any
misguided attachment to the good of one's own kind.
It will require a little more work to finish a reading of Melville's work forward in
time as a film theory avant la lettre after having read Melville back in time as New
Testament and Classical Historian. I must confess that in all this I feel a bit like Ishmael.
I almost despair of putting ... in a comprehensible form [a description of
that which] above all things appalled me. But how can I hope to explain
myself here; and yet, in some dim, random way, explain myself I must,
else all these chapters might be naught" (Moby Dick 159).
I hope that it is not too late to push this classically modern critique of modern
classicism a little further. Will these "American writers" who "know how hard it is to
break through the wall of the signifier" (A Thousand Plateaus 187) succeed in their line
of flight or do they bounce off the white wall? I would like to offer some concluding
remarks on this question and yet I can only offer something to which well applies just
what Melville said about all of his own work in a letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne of June
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In 1988, Deleuze explicitly placed only Melville and Michel Foucault in a category of
"great thinkers," who
are somewhat seismic; they do not evolve but proceed by means of crisis,
in fits and starts. Thinking in terms of moving lines was the process put
forward by Herman Melville, and this involved fishing lines and lines of
descent which could be dangerous, even fatal ("What is a Dispositifl"
159).
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1851 while bringing Moby-Dick to publication: "The product is a final hash, and all my
books are botches" (Barbour 25).
4.6 The Logic of Originality: Melville's (Neo-)Liberal Helping
For this is a very true proposition: that men are in agreement about
nothing, I mean even the most gifted and ablest scholars, not even that the
sky is over our head. For those who doubt everything also doubt that; and
those who deny that we can understand anything say that we have not
understood that the sky is over our head; and these two views are
incomparably the strongest in number.
Michel de Montaigne C'Apology for Raymond Sebond" 514)
Heracles:
I'll take these little ships in tow. 1 never find
Children a trouble. All men are the same at heart
Towards children. Some are of high birth, some of low;
some rich,
Some poor; but all love childrenevery human soul.
They all go into the palace.
Chorus:
Youth is what I love.
Age weighs on my head like a burden
Heavier than the rocks of Etna;
It draws a curtain of darkness before my eyes.
Not the wealth of an Eastern throne,
Not a palace full of gold
Would I take in exchange for youth.
Euripedes (Heracles 173: 631-645)
There is never a moment when children are not already plunged into an
actual milieu in which they are moving about, and in which the parents as
persons simply play the roles of openers and closers of doors, guardians of
thresholds, connectors or disconnectors of zones. The parents always
occupy a position in a world that is not derived from them.
Deleuze ("What Children Say" 62)
4.6.1 First Series of Diogenes. Alexander- and the Bees
What does it mean that when one mines the rich line of Cynicism shared between
Melville's The Confidence-Man and Foucault's late lectures a little further, the very
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arrangement that Deleuze called Melville's "powers of the false" actually converges
directly with his friend Michel Foucault's explorations of parrhesia, or truth-telling?
Perhaps Deleuze would have been thrilled by this ultimate paradox. Perhaps he would
have been irritated. But, as I hope to show in this conclusion, for Melville, Foucault, and
Deleuzelike for the person imagined in the anecdotes that that have been passed down
of Diogenes the Cynicthe most important program for an ethics and politics without
community and without self is to encourage people of all kinds to speak up in order to
have an equally wide array of people listen. But one does not need a deep theory of the
nature or value of the human community or self in order to motivate such a radical
attitude towards free speech. All one needs is a proper appreciation of the profit motive.
This is the nature of Foucault's surprising accommodation to certain neo-liberal
doctrines in his lectures on The Birth of Biopolitics. What Foucault finds in certain
passages from these 1978-79 lectures is a means of viewing capitalism as a politics of
flux that works without the ideals of community or self. Melville and Deleuze would
likely have been inspired by such a concept. But, at the same time, Melville and Deleuze
do better at supplying the caveats to any endorsement of capitalism as a potential bearer
of critical modernity. Melville and Deleuze will help to align Foucault's portrayal of
contemporary neo-liberalism with his investigations of classical truth-telling that
followed in the years after the lectures on the biopolitics of neo-liberalism and continued
up until Foucault's death.
Where these philosophical and literary lines start to cross fertilize, one finds the
admonition that if education does not shift from the role that Foucault described for it in
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Discipline and Punishthat of disciplining youth and accommodating youth to social
structures of employment as they areand if education fails to take on a new role of
facilitating the parrhesia of youth with the kind of force that Foucault granted to the
image of the Cynic philosopher, then the goals of radical neo-liberalism remain a mere
confidence gamewhat Deleuze called, a society of control. This is going to be the
media theory of Herman Melville.
One of the best examples for clarifying what Foucault was looking for from Cynic
parrhesia comes from his discussion of Dio Chrysostom's description of Diogenes the
Cynic's confrontation with the great imperialist Cosmopolitan, Alexander the great. What
is at stake in Foucault's interpretation of Diogenes's confrontation with Alexander is an
attempt to deface the very currency of kingliness itself.
[Diogenes] went on to tell the king that he did not even possess the badge
of royalty...
"And what badge is that?" said Alexander.
"It is the badge of the bees, "he replied, "that the king wears. Have you not
heard that there is a king among the bees, made so by nature, who does not
hold office by virtue of what you people who trace your descent from
Heracles call inheritance?"
"What is this badge?" inquired Alexander.
"Have you not heard farmers say," asked the other, "that this is the only
bee that has no sting since he requires no weapon against anyone? For no
other bee will challenge his right to be king or fight him when he has this
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badge. I have an idea, however, tha* you not only go about fully armed but
even sleep that way. Do you not know," he continued, "that it is a sign of
fear in a man for him to carry arms? And no man who is afraid would ever
have a chance to become king any more than a slave would. "
Diogenes reasons: if you bear arms, you are afraid. No one who is
afraid can be a king. So, since Alexander bears arms he cannot be a real
king. And, of course, Alexander is not very pleased by this logic and Dio
continues: "At these words Alexander came near hurling his spear." That
gesture, of course, would have been the rupture, the transgression, of the
parrhesiastic game {Fearless Speech 127-8).
Alexander wants a true badge of royalty, a true brand, or an emblem that would
mark him as a rightful emperor of humans. Yet, as a human king, he can only wear the
brand of his own kingliness on the condition that other men defend it while he sleeps. His
imperial cosmopolitan brand could never be more than a fearful defense against the
expression of the truth about himself and the role that he plays in society. A true kingor
more accurate to Diogenes's example of bees, a true queenwould "require no weapon
against anyone." Hence, the Cynic claims that in his poverty, self-sufficiency, and the
one who lives his true life lived as a scandal rather than as a prince is closer to the natural
sovereignty of the "king of the bees" than the emperor himself.
Diogenes articulates to Alexander that in Alexander's pretensions to sovereignty,
Alexander is just a confidence-man because he cannot speak freely and live freely in
what he does. He cannot live without defenses and without the dissimulation of a false
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brand. His very way of informing himself and others about his lifehis freedom of
speechis utterly constrained. Alexander's brand-status as king allows him to pretend to
be a king. The Cynic philosopher whom people recognize as a dog dispenses even with
classing himself as a member of the human species due to the constraints that such
membership places on the development of an individual life. In contrast to this,
Alexander is less free and practically a slave to the things that he believed in as an
apparatus which secured his own power.
This example of Diogenic parrhesia exhibits a crucial trait that seems to have
been ignored by the parrhesiastic assaults on the crowd described earlier as the gesture of
Sternberg's Scarlet Empress.
m
Truth-telling needs to be directed from someone lower to
someone in a higher position of power, not from the pastor-director to the crowd but from
the lowliest Cynical dog-man to the highest king. Sternberg's neutralization of Diogenes
in his Stoic aesthete's interpretation of Diogenes's confrontation with Alexander the
Great misses this very fact that the moment of truth-telling has to be an event that
168
Especially with regard to Sternberg's pretensions to philosophy, a distinction that
Foucault makes with regard to Cynicism's insistence on poverty as opposed to Seneca's
life as "an extremely rich swindler" is important. The Cynic's
poverty raised a number of difficulties in Greco-Roman ethics,
philosophy, and philosophical practice for the reason that Greco-Roman
culture constantly played on a certain socially recognized, validated and
structuring contrast: that between the foremost, the best, the most
powerful, those with education and power, and the rest, the crowd, those
without any kind of power, education, or wealth" (256). If the Stoic
Seneca would only from time to time pretend to be poor so as to
demonstrate to himself and others his detachment from wealth, the Cynics
took on poverty in a fashion that was "indefinite" in term. "It is a stripping
of existence which is deprived of the material elements to which it is
traditionally linked and on which it is thought to depend" (257).
395
corrects the pretensions of the high through a speech-event that comes from lower down.
Sternberg postures,
A shadow is as important in photography as the light. One cannot exist
without the other. The great Alexander threw his shadow over Diogenes
when he asked the man who dwelt in a barrel to name his wish. "Stand
from between me and the sun!" It is doubtful whether this answer meant
that Diogenes craved the sun, as he attempted to achieve the enviable
position of craving nothing. More likely he was irritated by a meaningless
shadow (312).
Sternberg's brief joke that sympathizes with Diogenes on the level of a Stoic aesthete
with pretensions to asceticism misses the basic Cynic insight that Diogenes' interaction
with Alexander was the opportunity to make Alexander's reified power vulnerable to a
speech-event that would deface human political power altogether.
If there is any difference between the kinds of ascetic mortification of desire that
one finds in Cynicism and what one finds in Stoicism, it could very well be that in
Cynicism, poverty and self-denial are not only an internal regulatory principle. Instead of
the strictly internal effects of asceticism in Stoicism, the public display of poverty, self-
sufficiency, and scandal in Cynicism are modes of performance that call out the
impoverished functionality of the norms of the wider society. The Cynic art of showing
people that what they have a perceived as essential and desirable components of their
way of life are, in fact, products of mindlessly received custom is something more than
the austere Stoic art of maintaining one's self in a state of detachment from luxuries.
396
In the anecdote of Diogenes's rough treatment of the emperor in letting Alexander
know that he prefers the light of the sun to the shadow of the king is then, not a paradox
of his own elimination of "cravings," as set out by Sternberg's Stoic asceticism. In fact,
instead of eliminating all cravings, Diogenes was said to have been happy to satisfy the
call of nature to sleep, eat, do calisthenics, masturbate, copulate, urinate, defecate, and die
in public view.
Likewise, in the anecdote of Dio Chrysostom that contrasts the emperor to the
queen of the bees, Alexander's false brand, in constant need of protection by the palace
walls and guarded doors, is torn down by the parrhesia of Diogenes. What does this
anecdote have to say to the present moment? Foucault never seems to have made a clear
response to such questions.
4.6.2 Second Series of the Media Theory in The Confidence-Man
It seems, however, that Alexander's defaced brand might be likened to the
significance pointed out by Jackson Lears as The Confidence-Man's satirical treatment of
marketing in the modern commercial milieu. Lears description of The Confidence-Man
details the operations of a quasi-critical theory through which "technological expertise"
comes to stand in for the original sources of processes and production methods (Fables of
Abundance 99-100). Lears recognized The Confidence-Man as a continuation of
Melville's critique of marketing that was evident in his short story "The Lightning Rod
Man" published in the Piazza Tales two years before. Lears claims that "The Lightning
Rod Man"
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probed the developing mythology of market society at its most vulnerable
point: the promise that people could be released from all fear and anxiety
if they would simply trust in the technical expertise of the vendor ... [The
Confidence-Man] echoes "The Lightning Rod Man" in offering a prescient
critique of the technocratic idiom that would become a major rhetorical
resource of twentieth-century advertisers {Fables of Abundance 99-100).
In "The Lightning Rod Man," the narrator finds himself targeted by the sales pressures of
the titular lightning rod salesman. The salesman unexpectedly and dramatically arrives,
seeking shelter at the narrator's home during a thunderstorm. The Lightning-Rod
salesman raves about the dangers of electrical storms and insists, "Will you order? Will
you buy? Shall I put down your name?" (102) The narrator rebuts,
Do you think that because you can strike a bit of green light from the
Leyden jar, that you can thoroughly avert the supernal bolt? Your rod
rusts, or breaks, and where are you? Who has empowered you, you Tetzel,
to peddle round your indulgences from divine ordinations? The hairs of
our heads are numbered, and the days of our lives (102).
The narrator-hero of "The Lightning Rod Man" resists and throws the invasive sales pitch
out of his home.
By contrast, in The Confidence-Man, the conceptual linchpin of the confidence
circulating through his vast set of human disguises allows the titular Confidence-Man to
maintain his position in unquestioned expertise over his dupes. This original genius's
means of turning a profit relies on avoiding transparent questions of knowledge or value
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regarding the products that are on offer. He does this by instead discursively tongue-tying
his subjects with a vacuous quasi-critical theory of humankind. By his exhortations to his
dupes to believe confidently in the excellence of the human community and the human
self, he offers a purchase of his product as the means of proving their glorious faith in this
gilded ideal.
In one instance, there is not even any product in the game. The Old Miser in
Chapter 15 lies sick and nearly blind in the darkened cabin of the Fidele. He seems
unable even to visually locate the Man in the Traveling Hat. Meanwhile, the Man in the
Traveling Hat refuses to provide any details about why the Old Miser should turn over
his money. The man still prone in bed asks for details about what he is being sold, "But,
but... Ugh, ugh! How is the gain made?" (80:15). But, the Confidence-Man insists, 'To
tell that would ruin me.... No ifs. Downright confidence, or none. So help me heaven, I
will have no half-confidence." And he threatens, "You won't confide. Good-bye!" (81:
15)
Nevertheless, the Old Miser is convinced to "venture an investment" (77: 15)
according to the description of the event from the chapter title. To avoid being excluded
from the secret that the Man with the Traveling Hat never even explains, the old man
proves his confidence in nothing in particular, a confidence that is just the vain desire to
be a part of an imaginary human milieu. The sick old man "tremulously dragged forth,
ten hoarded eagles, tarnished into the appearance of ten old horn-buttons... half-eagerly,
half-reluctantly" (81: 15). By the time the old dupe thinks to ask for a receipt, it is too
late, the stranger has gone.
399
The idea of "confidence" works as a sort of sales panacea, or an immediately
recognizable brand or slogan, applicable to whatever it may be that the Confidence-Man
is peddling in his current disguise. Melville's Confidence-Man is a marketing genius who
expertly produces a personality for whatever it is that he is pretending to be selling. The
Confidence-Man's critical theory based on the concept of confidence is the defense that
each personality deploys that works in the same way that a brand name does to deflect
any demand on the part of the buyer for transparency. The dupes on the Fidele settle for
the reassuring slogan of "confidence," a cliche that defends secrets. Whatever enigmatic
confidentialized object happens to be for sale is made to appear as a self-evident
humanized good by the Confidence-Man's rhetoric. No further investigation is required
because this marketing genius gives his brand of confidence to all of his scams. In lieu of
truth, the passengers on the Fidele settle for a pledge, an image, and the performances of
a tortuous critical theory. But, most importantly, they pay.
169
Hence, the rather a-
169
On the whole, the almost swarm-like cloud through which these co-promotions
actually bring the dupe to the point of sale resembles what John Caldwell describes in
contemporary media's "viral" marketing.
Most of what consumers see and know about film/TV behind the scenes
was planted or spun as part of formal industrial marketing and publicity
initiatives. Studio/networks invent fake critics to blurb movie releases.
Media conglomerates buy publications like TV Guide and Entertainment
Weekly to ensure that a tolerable level of effective cross-promotion always
takes place in the form of "reviews" and rankings, even as they feature
above-ground "spoilers" who systematically "leak" information
prematurely (306).
The most diabolical operations of the Confidence-Man likewise consist in constructing a
false milieu through planting and spinning apparently unique points of reference that all
originate in a hidden source behind the scenes. All of these apparently different actors
who appear as different to the readers and to the dupes on board the Fidele are having
their script written by a marketing genius. But, the parallel goes further.
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cinematic structure of the novel enacts an allegory for media advertising that visual
media would have a hard time achieving.
4.6.3 Third Series of Neo-Liberalism and Truth-Telling
Foucault's turn towards the formulation of parrhesia and truth-telling after the
lectures on Stoicism would seem to imply a critique similar to what is found in Melville's
The Confidence-Man. One would think that a study of modern truth-telling would refer to
public discourse and the organization of the media as a key form of modern power.
Foucault in the lectures from 1982-3 asks of classical society, "Who is capable of being
the artisan of parrhesia? What mode of knowledge, but also what exercises, what
mathesis and askesis will make it possible to take up this parrhesia? Is it rhetoric or
philosophy?" (197) He further asks, "What is the site of this truth-telling? Where can
truth-telling find its place, on what conditions can and must room be made for it?" (305)
In the next and final year of his lectures, published as The Courage to Truth, he describes
"scandal" and "non-concealment" as the essentials of the philosopher's "public life"a
life that takes up a relationship of exteriority relative to politics that makes Cynic truth-
telling possible (253).
In short, the boundaries and borders between production and consumption
are blurring, problematic, and constantly negotiated by industry in
public....Critical theory, far from marginalized, is the fuel that makes the
new systems work. Reflexivity, far from radical or oppositional, is the
linchpin of contemporary industrial marketing initiatives (Caldwell 306).
The Confidence-Man's critical theory that fuels the work of his system is based on the
conceptual linchpin of confidence. The philosophical discussions being conducted on the
way to the ultimate con are conceptually "real" enough that the genius's grand theory
helps tip the scales just enough in his favor when it comes to the point of sale.
401
If one imagines Foucault asking these same questions directly of modern society,
one would expect that there be an argument against something like a culture industry in
Foucault's work. Do we not live in a culture whereas on board the Fidele in Melville's
The Confidence-Manthe media has in some respects failed to be the artisans of
parrhesial But, one does not find such a direct parallel in Foucault's late lectures.
In point of fact, Foucault's earlier lectures on the biopolitics of neo-liberalism
1978-79 actually readat least at face valueagainst the alliance between parrhesia and
many well-known critiques of media spectacle. There, he related with great interest the
argument for an economic liberalism that is based on an entirely different critique of
society from any of what was offered by the Frankfurt School or by Guy Debord that
attacked the "society of one-dimensional man, of authority, of consumption, of the
spectacle, and so forth" (113-14). The kind of neo-liberalism with which Foucault
certainly seems to sympathize, does away with such critiques from the get-go.
For the "Ordo-Liberal" economistsnamed after the journal Ordowho were
charged with rebuilding Germany after World War IIon whom Foucault's description
of liberalism relies heavilycritiques of the inherent falseness or inauthenticity of
market-driven spectacle were not only incorrect, they were practically evil. A critique of
society based on the falseness of spectacular capitalism and pretensions to discovering
true political sovereignty and, therefore, any cultural and political critique which claimed
that spectacular capitalism was rotting away traditional authentic values tended
dangerously and even inevitably towards a government that would champion an illusion
of a volk gathered behind a true leader. Such a government was inevitably bound to move
402
ahead towards installing controls on the economy that would end up stifling innovation
and the necessary flows of goods and trade that should happen naturally in a free market.
Critiques of consumerism were core to the specters of totalitarianism and Nazism that the
Ordo-liberals were attempting to stave off.
Foucault recapitulates the neo-liberal argument that anti-market critique of the
spectacle was core to Nazism,
And it was indeed in opposition to this destruction of society by the
[capitalist] economy and state that the Nazis proposed to do what they
wished to do... Rather, [the Nazis] are the product and effect of a society
that economically does not accept liberalism, of a society, or rather of a
state, that has chosen a policy of protectionism and planning in which the
market does not perform its function and in which the state or para-state
administration takes responsibility for the everyday life of individuals.
These mass phenomena of standardization and spectacle are linked to
statism, to anti-liberalism, and not to a market economy (The Birth of
Biopolitics 114).
The Ordo-liberal skepticism that the will of the people and a sovereignty of humanity
could ever be successfully installed through top-down politics is directly up Foucault's
alley.
In a way that seems specifically determined to defy orthodox Marxism, The Birth
of Biopolitics goes on to give the Diogenes treatment to fascism, the critique of spectacle,
and democratic socialism. They are all fused into one enemy and vanquished by anarcho-
403
liberalism's advocacy for the aleatory structures of the free market. It is most revealing to
note that there is no uncertain parallel between the vision of Diogenes telling Alexander
the Great that he does not have the power that he thought he had and Foucault's
restatements of economic neo-liberalism's assault on critiques of spectacle that are bound
up with impracticable statist politics.
Foucault unfolds a radical capitalist conception of modern liberalism in his
presentation of biopolitics where any individual can be viewed as Homo Oeconomicus,
"human capital" himself/itself. An individual is both a resource and a product of various
means of investing, developing, and extracting capital in members of the human species.
But Homo Oeconomicus is not satisfied with limiting the sovereign's
power; to a certain extent, he strips the sovereign of power. Is power
removed in the name of a right that the sovereign must not touch? No,
that's not what's involved. Homo Oeconomicus strips the sovereign of
power inasmuch as he reveals an essential, fundamental, and major
incapacity of the sovereign, that is to say, an inability to master the totality
of the economic field. The sovereign cannot fail to be blind vis-a-vis the
economic domain or field as a whole. The whole set of economic
processes cannot fail to elude a would-be central, totalizing, bird's eye
view (292).
Like Diogenes in his confrontation with Alexander, liberal economics tells the state that it
is does not have the power that it thinks it has, that it does not know what is happening in
the economy. There is no privileged view of the economy. The state is not really king.
404
Only the chaos of the market can or will ever truly rule. The state is just another blind
player in the game.
One need not even deal with the category of the sovereign individual citizen and
his natural rights. Foucault analyzed this formula beginning in The Order of Things in his
reading of Las Meninas. But, one also finds the critique of a rhetoric of rights in the
lectures on governmentality, Society Must Be Defended 1975-1976. Sovereign rights for
citizens were merely concepts misappropriated from the sovereignty of kings.
As Diogenes showed in his parrhesiastic game with Alexander, it was only
uneasily that political sovereignty ever belonged even to kings. There is something that
strips human political power of any self-evident naturalness in the recognition that human
beings can, just as well as anything else, be analyzed in terms of the capital product
returned by capital investments. But, for Foucault, this was clearly not the ominous work
of totalized power that Agamben describes as the reduction of humanity to bare life.
Instead, the gesture of human capital is a radical Diogenic confrontation with falsely
constituted power.
Liberalism says to the totalitarian state, to the king and to those who claim to
speak for the volk, that all must surrender to the aleatory forces of the market without a
definite plan, an unknown outcome produced according to certain rules of the game only.
"Competition is an essence. Competition is an eidos. Competition is a principle of
formalization" ("Biopolitics" 120). Foucault writes further that
everyone must be uncertain with regard to the collective outcome if this
positive collective outcome is really to be expected. Being in the dark and
405
the blindness of all the economic agents are absolutely necessary. The
collective good must not be an objective. It must not be an objective
because it cannot be calculated, at least, not within an economic strategy
(The Birth of Biopolitics 279).
In these claims of Foucault's for the market place as a space of "veridiction," one finds
clear echoes of Deleuze's claims for a critical modernity that "reinstates a chaos that
creates."
In Foucault's anarchic neo-liberalism, society can be liberated only through the
aleatory effects of the market, through a kind of dice-throw that generates aleatory points
apart from the totalitarian control of any one individual or any one group. In order for
economics to precipitate positive results,
the individual's life must be lodged, not within a framework of a big
enterprise like the firm or, if it comes to it, the state but within the
framework of a multiplicity of diverse enterprises connected up to and
entangled with each other, enterprises which are in some way ready to
hand for the individual, sufficiently limited in their scale for the
individual's actions, decisions, and choices to have meaningful and
perceptible effects, and numerous enough for him not to be dependent on
one alone (The Birth of Biopolitics 241).
Overlapping enterprises are the solution to a state that might become too powerful. The
raison d'etre of the structures of veridiction of the free market is precisely that divination
should ground politics in Foucault's appropriation of certain aspects of Adam Smith's
406
notion of the "invisible hand" from the Wealth of Nations.
170
This role of the market as a
truth-producing machine takes on its full value after the "mutation" to neo-liberalism that
substitutes the principle of competition for the principle of exchange in 18
th
and 19
th
century liberalism (The Birth of Biopolitics 117).
It certainly sounds better in Foucault's description than in what one understands
from the ideas conveyed by hordes of middle-aged white people parading the streets with
signs bearing Swastikas and pictures of President Obama. But, the Ordo-liberals and
anarcho-liberals are the originators of this conservatized economic voice of the "tea
party" style advocates for market-based solutions to political problems. Of course, it
should be immediately apparent that there is as great a difference between Foucault's
vision of liberalism and the dominant conservative voices of contemporary American
neo-liberalism as there is between Diogenes and Martin Luther.
This surrender to chance is enacted on the political level in The Birth of
Biopolitics in the portrait of competition amongst overlapping enterprises as a defense
against the fixations of the state. Such a surrender to chance happens equally at the level
of the philosophy of the self when Foucault declares the impossibility of a modern self in
the lectures on the Hermeneutics of the Self saying that "we find it impossible today to
constitute an ethic of the self, even though it may be an urgent, fundamental, and
170
Foucault is not likely to have read The Theory of Moral Sentiments which describes
how this "invisible hand" of the merely proper and not fully virtuous world was not a
goal in itself. Smith merely put faith in providence that educated men of virtue would
eventually become capable to steer the market in the right direction and that only
temporarily such paternal figures would have to take what providence would supply in
the form of the undisciplined market. In short, Foucault's "invisible hand" is different
from Smith's "invisible hand," and closer to something Deleuze might describe as a great
aleatory health.
407
politically indispensable task."
171
We need something other than selves. We are
enterprises.
Without community and without self, the competition amongst various enterprises
gives the individual a new life, no longer as a citizen, but as an enterprise to himself.
And finally, the individual's life itselfwith his relationships to his
private property, for example, with his family, household, insurance, and
retirementmust make him into a sort of permanent and multiple
enterprise (The Birth of Biopolitics 241).
The individual is no longer the political atom and there is no longer a sovereign.
The individual himself is only another enterprise in a vast and labrynthine capitalistic
game in which everyone must be blind in order to prevent the fixations of any one
enterprise from being allowed to determine the game at the expense of further
171
Foucault almost seems to backpedal from his enthusiastic discussion of ethics of the
self in the Hellenistic Epoch as he also seems to declare that political resistance is
impossible,
I think we should also note that the theme of return to the self has
undoubtedly been a recurrent theme in "modern" culture since the
sixteenth century... If you take, for example, Stirner, Schopenhauer,
Nietzsche, dandyism, Baudelaire...all [are] more or less obsessed with the
question: Is it possible to constitute, or reconstitute, an aesthetics of the
self? ...I do not think we have anything to be proud of in our current
efforts to reconstitute an ethic of the self. And in this series of
undertakings to reconstitute an ethic of the self, in this series of more or
less blocked and ossified efforts, and in the movement we now make to
refer ourselves constantly to this ethic of the self without ever giving it
any content. I think we may have to suspect that we find it impossible
today to constitute an ethic of the self, even though it may be an urgent,
fundamental, and politically indispensable task, if it is true after all that
there is no first or final point of resistance to political power other than in
the relationship one has to oneself {The Hermeneutics of the Subject 252).
408
possibilities for change and social evolution that can only come from the consistent
openness to chance discoveries and aleatory potentials. The collective good is to be
achieved, as it were, by the intentional precipitation of happy accident: not by the illusion
of a fusion of a general will but by the chaotic competition of dehumanized enterprises at
a vast number of different scales constantly recreating each other: capitalism as a politics
of flux.
Sternberg's and Ford's critique of spectacle and the inauthenticities of the market,
their attempts to reground chaos on the ideals of a melting pot community or the truth of
self is easily seen within the ideological target of this neo-liberal critique that so excited
Foucault years before the final work on Cynicism. Ford's and Sternberg's attempts to
elevate community or self, respectively, to the level of an authentic truth that might tame
the chaos of the unruly masses only amount to proto-fascisms. Their Ahab-like ideals of
truth choose the value of control over and above the truth told by the liberated chaos of
the market. The Melvillean critique of their Ahabist classical cinema that I constructed in
the previous chapters was, then, a liberal critique that had to dispense with the ideals of
community and self.
Foucault's gesture towards a potential alliance between philosophy and radical
capitalism, like Melville's ethics that demands a constant willingness to swerve off the
rail, resonates with Deleuze's lauding of the aleatory from his treatment of Stoic ethics in
Logic of Sense. Foucault wrote that only the market can serve as "what I will call a site of
veridiction. The market must tell the truth; it must tell the truth in relation to
governmental practice" (The Birth of Biopolitics 32). Hence, for truly radical neo-
409
liberalism, marketplace divination grounds politics in the shiftless wanderings in a world
of chaos that keeps the king forever banished. However, the reason we have to turn to
Melville and Deleuze is for those lingering doubts over whether the king has ever been
truly banished and stripped of his power by the modern market. The answer will
obviously be, "no." Deleuze and Melville can help us clarify why and how the ethics and
politics without community and without self that would be proper to a critical modernity
has not yet been achieved.
4.6.4 Fourth Series of the WaU of Loose Stones
Foucault's vision of a world without community and without self strikes close to
the heart of what Deleuze generalized as Melville's issue in the American problem: how
to maximize originality by maximizing the aleatory discoveries of literature, art, virtue,
and even commerce. This is evidenced in the image that Deleuze's text on Bartleby uses
to describe Melville's pragmatism as
first of all the affirmation of a world in process, an archipelago. Not even
a puzzle, whose pieces when fitted together would constitute a whole, but
rather a wall of loose, uncemented stones, where every element has a
value in itself but also in relation to others: isolated and floating relations,
islands and straits, immobile points and sinuous linesfor Truth always
has "jagged edges" (86).
The image appears in Melville's fiction at the end of Israel Potter (1854), when the
forgotten hero, patriot, and exile returns to his home in the Berkshires after 12 years spent
in obscurity having been kidnapped, enslaved, and then impoverished in Europe. He finds
410
that the lands and properties he once knew have shifted unrecognizably since his
departure. He finds only one seemingly similar tree where his family once lived. The
walls of loose stones that denote property have all been moved since he left.
Such walls of loose stones that one still finds all around the New England
landscape are easily moved and rearranged for the purposes of denoting movements and
shifts in transparent declarations of local property. If there is a note of melancholy to the
notion conveyed by Melville's use of the image in Israel Potter's return, that melancholy
would certainly seem to stem from the fact that human trafficking and wars between
states held Potter in poverty against his willnot from the fitting position of these walls
for denoting a territoriality that is constantly in flux.
Ranci&re redeploys this image of the rock wall when he closes his reading of
Deleuze's essay on Bartleby with a dismissal of Deleuzian politics.
Under the mask of Bartleby, Deleuze opens us to the open road of
comrades, the great drunkenness of joyous multitudes, freedom from the
law of the father ... but this road leads us to contradiction (163).
Ranciere chooses "the wall of loose stones" unattributed to Melville by Ranciere as
the emblem of these Deleuzian contradictions that block us from any real conception of
"political justice" (164). The Deleuzian-Melvillean vision is dialectically revealed by
Ranciere as a mere Nietzschean "festival of donkeys." That is the image that Ranciere
eventually assigns to the kind of fraternity conceived through the aporias of Deleuzean
politics and poetics. The reappearance of a wall of loose stones is nothing less than the
return of a disavowed signifier of the enclosures of the repressive workings of the regime
411
of ever-present American imperialism. Melville's Cosmopolitan Frank Goodman would
certainly be right at home at such a festival of donkeys.
Yet, Rancidre's critique would be better applied to the pseudo-Dionysian public
image of the public voices of neo-liberalism of today than it is when applied to Deleuze
or to Deleuze's Melville. Ranciere is right to notice an incongruity in the fact that a
philosopher who was often reduced to a program for the "liberation of flows" should use
a wall as the final metaphor in a text that should be counted among the most ambitious
essays of Deleuze's generation of post-structuralist theory on American literature.
However, this wall of loose stones is precisely not the kind of white wall that Deleuze
and Guattari described that Ahab plunged through into nothingness, Christ bounced off
of, nor the kind of wall that Bartleby was forced by his employer to sit in front of until he
converted to austere Stoicism. The wall of loose stones is a wall of defense against a
fusion into a great love. The image of this wall should be, among other things, a defense
against the confidence-game of melting pot politics.
We would do better to interpret the meaning of this wall of loose stones and the
territories such walls might designate as a network of overlapping enterprises that are laid
out to avoid leveling all hierarchies into a totalizing state. This specific kind of wall
condenses the value of the formation of overlapping local alliances, arranged in a
rhizomatic archipelago. These low walls permit the kind of transparent alliances between
territories that are nonetheless distinct, the same kind of relationships that cells have from
one to another between membranes. The wall of loose stones is, above all, flexible. It is
412
ready to be broken down and to have its stones reused to draw new territories when
forces dictate the time is right.
Such an archipelago oikeiosis works only by preserving distinct zones of
evolution that are flexibly formed and transparent with each other to the greatest possible
extent. It is through such a "freedom to indetermination"to use Phillippe Mengue's
term from his unpublished lecture at the International Conference of Deleuze Studies in
2009. The flexibility of the territories denoted by the wall of loose stones is a trait that
makes them more resistance to control from above. So, it is strange that Ranciere does
not recognize in this image of the wall of loose stones the means of a de-centered social
organization that would prevent anyone from becoming an ignorant master.
One cannot simply inscribe neo-liberalism onto Deleuze or onto Foucault. Of
course, one cannot simply say what neo-liberalism is. Nor does Foucault's reading of
liberalism sit simply or easily on Deleuze. The flexibility of overlapping enterprises and
the wall of loose stones certainly coincides with Foucault's picture of a system of
overlapping and competing enterprises within which the individuals life must be lodged,
as itself just another enterprise. Yet, Deleuze in the years after Foucault's deathwithout
ever referring to liberalism or to the parrhesia of Cynicismwas also attempting to
discern the nature of Foucault's picture of contemporary society. Deleuze reformulated
the dangers posed by a society of biopolitics in terms of what he called a "society of
control."
What Deleuze adds to Foucault's picture of the contemporary is the importance of
what Foucault might be seen to have discounted as he dispensed with those critiques of
413
the spectacle and "one-dimensional man" as doctrines having at their core a rhetoric that
only masked a deeper state-centered will to control and traditionalism. Deleuze, to the
contrary, does show some affinities with, for instance, Guy Debord's critique of the
spectacle when he explicitly states that marketing, and it seems media, are the problem in
post-modern neo-liberal configurations of power.
Markets are won by taking control rather than by establishing a discipline,
by fixing rates rather than by reducing costs, by transforming products
rather than by specializing production. Corruption here takes on a new
power. The sales department becomes a business center or "soul." We're
told businesses have souls, which is surely the most terrifying news in the
world. Marketing is now the instrument of social control and produces the
arrogant breed who are our masters. Control is short-term and rapidly
shifting, but at the same time continuous and unbounded, whereas
discipline was long-term, infinite and discontinuous. A man is no longer a
man confined but a man in debt (181).
The key danger when a biopolitical web of enterprises replaces the old institutions of
prison, school, factory, and barrackswhose structure Foucault detailed in Discipline
and Punishwas marketing. Deleuze's invective against the forms of marketing that
extend through corporations directly into their "souls" where it manifests itself as
"corruption" is hardly original in itself.
But what is interesting is that behind Deleuze's problematization of marketing
cannot be a return to tradition corroded by the inauthenticities of the market. What is at
414
stake here is, nonetheless, the manner in which the corruption of the corporation by
marketing smoothes the "jagged edges" that Deleuze takes from Melville demanded of
"truth uncompromisingly told" in Billy Budd (Deleuze "Bartleby" 86). Elsewhere, when
Deleuze ponders the connection of art to the societies of control, he asks
What relationship is there between the work of art and communication?
None at all. A work of art is not an instrument of communication. A work
of art has nothing to do with communication. A work of art does not
contain the least bit of information. In contrast, there is a fundamental
affinity between a work of art and an act of resistance. It has something to
do with information and communication as an act of resistance. What is
this mysterious relationship between a work of art and an act of resistance
when the men and women who resist neither have the time nor sometimes
the culture necessary to have the slightest connection with art? I do not
know ("What is the Creative Act" 322-3).
The passage's disdain for "information" and "communication" illustrates Deleuze's
consistent attack on representation considered apart from a veritable aesthetic event. Ye
the nature of art's alternative to communication is decidedly lacking a clear formulation.
Deleuze described the confrontation between the work of art and societies of control in
terms of an idea of "resistance" that is not easily explained.
Ranciere, elsewhere, further expresses his skepticism that there could be any great
fusion of art and politics in an aesthetics of resistance that Deleuze seems to be searching
for. According to Ranciere, Deleuze's
415
political becomings of art becomes the ethical confusion where art and
politics both cause the other to evaporate, all the same, in the name of their
union. And of this confusion that which is created, logically, is not
humanity rendered fraternal by the experience of the inhuman. It is
humanity sent back to the vanity of its fraternal dream, only a dream ("Les
Confidences" 490-1).
For Ranci&re, artistic resistance is something that always has to remain separated from
political resistance in order to maintain "an irresolvable tension between two resistances"
("Les Confidences 491). Ranciere claims that art's resistance and political resistance need
to remain separate.
But, marketingso important to the very concept of political and economic
power in the neo-liberal biopolitics of Deleuze's societies of controlhas always already
taken aesthetic form into the realm of the political and economic. Marketing, and
therefore the media, remain the key problems in this regard.
4.6.5 Fifth Series of the Great Cock and the Fiddler
Contemporary marketing is all for the good of consumer confidence. But,
Goodman from Melville's The Confidence-Man is an example of a grand gesture of
submission to consumer confidence elevated to the level of a moral ideal. Assured by the
testimonies of co-promotions of the Confidence-Man's operations as Mark Winsome,
Goodman decries Cynicism as "morbid" (247). Irony and satire are decried as "Satanic"
(142). From very early on, Melville recognized that market forces work to institute their
416
own controls on the market's apparently liberating chaos.
172
Religion, for example, was
not the opiate of the people to Melville. As the Confidence-Man shows, religion and
morality can be a massive consumer confidence booster.
Something very akin to Melville's abrasive treatment of the problem of ingenious
methods evolved for marshalling a consumer's confidence in a producteven products
that may or may not exist as when the Man in Gray dupes the old miseris evident in
two of Melville's short stories that need to be compared. Consider the juxtaposition of the
172
Melville was writing in a time where the argument for market forces as the dominant
force of good was pre-eminentthough Foucault distinguishes 18
th
and 19
th
century
liberalism from neo-liberalism. Yet in Redburn, young Wellingborough on his first
journey at sea takes
down this book from a top shelf, where it lay very dusty.... I blew the dust
off, and looked at the back: "Smith's Wealth of Nations.'''' This not
satisfying me, I glanced at the title page, and found it was an "Enquiry into
the Nature and Causes" of the alleged wealth of nations... So, now, lying
down in my bunk, I began the book methodically...where I fancied lay
something like the philosopher's stone, a secret talisman, which would
transmute even pitch and tar to silver and Gold.
Pleasant, though vague visions of future opulence floated before me, as
I commenced the first chapter, entitled "Of the causes of improvement in
the productive power of labor." Dry as crackers and cheese, to be sure;
and the chapter itself was not much better... Dryer and dryer; the very
leaves smelt of saw-dust; till at last I drank some water, and went at it
again. But soon I had to give it up for lost work.... So it must have
belonged to Mr. Jones' father; and I wondered whether he had ever read it;
or, indeed, whether any body had ever read it, even the author himself; but
then authors, they say, never read their own books; writing them, being
enough in all conscience.... After that, I used to wrap my jacket around it,
and use it for a pillow; for which purpose it answered very well; only I
sometimes waked up feeling dull and stupid; but of course the book could
not have been the cause of that (84).
The "dullness and stupidity" that moves as if by miraculous osmosis into young
Wellingborough's brain by laying his head upon the doctrines of liberalism is the same
dullness and stupidity in mankind that Goodman adopts as his own when he rejects Pitch
the misanthrope. It is the source of the problems that neoliberalism conveniently tends to
overlook: flattery and marketing.
417
"Great Cock" of "Cock-A-Doodle-Doo or the Great of the Noble Cock Beneventano"
(1853) and the antics of the "extraordinary genius" Hauptboy from "The Fiddler" (1854).
The narrator of "Cock-A-Doodle-Doo" hikes about the New England hills in an obsessed
search of the utterly inspiring sound of a "dear and glorious cock" (55) only to find it
owned by a curiously Stoic farmhand, Merrymusk. At least he is Stoic to all except his
"Great Cock" named Trumpet. The narrator finds Merrymusk living in squalor with his
family. The Noble Cock has taken the house itself for his coop.
Merrymusk responds with insistent disbelief upon hearing the narrator refer to his
former servant as "a poor man,"
"Poor man like mel Why call me poor? Don't the cock I own glorify this
otherwise inglorious, lean, lantern-jawed land? Didn't my cock encourage
you! And 1 give you all this glorification away gratis. I am a very great
philanthropist. I am a rich mana very rich man, and a very happy one.
Crow, Trumpet."
The Roof Jarred (63).
On the narrator's next visit, Trumpet continues on providing the family with the
enchanting home viewings of his roof-jarring spectacle that so impresses the neighbors
for miles around. But, to the narrator's horror, he observes as the entire family, self-
neglected because of the unwavering attention they give to the spectacle of the cock,
expires before his eyes. In spite of Merrymusk's claims that his wife and children are
"Well. All well" (64), Merrymusk collapses dead. The Noble Cock struts around crowing
magnificently as "through long loving sympathy" (64) the wife dies after her husband.
418
The narrator goes to the beds of the children to observe that "their faces shone
celestially through grime and dirt." Yet, they all die as the cock shakes himself and crows
again and again as if "bent upon crowing the souls of the children out of their bodies"
(65). Once the Noble Cock has succeeded, the magnificent animal tumbles over to die
himself.
The line of the Noble Cock is a line of death. It is a becoming-animal whose very
victims believe in the Cock as the brand of their saving grace. The addiction as if to a
drug to the spectacle of the cock infects the whole family. This monstrous emblem that
allows Merrymusk to perceive the failing enterprise of his own home as the life of a
wealthy man is the inroad to a dead end monopoly of the mind. But, the Great Cock
delivers himself in brilliant sound and color right into their own home! Is this adequate
consolation?
By contrast, in "The Fiddler," Hauptboy is encountered by the narrator as an
"extraordinary genius ... who in boyhood drained the whole flagon of glory; whose going
from city to city was a going from triumph to triumph" (72). His performance on the
fiddle convinces the narrator to give up his own pursuit of fame in writing poetry with
such enthusiasm that, "Next day I tore all my manuscripts, bought me a fiddle, and went
to take regular lessons of Hauptboy" (73).
The glorious pursuits of Hauptboy are transparent, teachable, and sustainable. He
carries himself in the way that Foucault described the "stance of the Cynic as anti-king
king, as the true king who, by the very truth of his monarchy, denounces and reveals the
illusion of political kingship" (Foucault The Courage of Truth 275).
419
One cannot say that there is no room for a critique that parallels what Melville has
set up in these two visions of spectacle in Foucault's implied vision for modern
Cynicism. Foucault's turn to the idea of parrhesia in Greek culture, his formulation of
truth-telling as an essential component of the philosophically informed public life, and
even the simple fact of Foucault's own willingness to engage publicly in interviews,
certainly challenge those who continue to read Foucault to speculate on the relationship
of mass culture to this politics of truth that he was reviving from the classical world.
What did Deleuze mean when he said that Foucault was "uniquely close" (Foucault 65)
to the contemporary cinema?
Perhaps for Foucault, having shunned a critique of the society of the spectacle, the
problematic difference between the line of death of the Noble Cock and the spectacular
antics of the educational anti-king Hauptboy would have remained precisely an
educational problem. The difference between the glory of Hauptboy and Merrymusk's
addiction to the Noble Cock does seem quite comparable to the difference Foucault saw
between Hellenistic philosophy's education in parrhesia and an education that remains as
a legacy of the Christian self of obedience.
4.6.6 Sixth Series of Education. Human Capital, and Originality
Education, in fact, seems to be a key point of attack in Foucault's otherwise
fascinated characterization of Ordo-liberalism and anarcho-liberalism. Education in this
world of biopolitics is, of course, just an investment in human capital. But it is important
to follow up on just what this idea of investing means.
420
What does it mean to form human capital, and so to form these kinds of
abilities-machines which will produce income, which will be remunerated
by income? It means, of course, making educational investments
("Biopolitics" 229).
In such a model, this idea of investment certainly risks making the next generation into a
stock option or a bank account that only cashes out when one finally sells and when the
investment is over.
What constitutes this investment that forms [human capital through
education into] an abilities-machine? Experimentally, on the basis of
observations, we know it is constituted by, for example, the time parents
devote to their children outside of simple educational activities strictly
speaking. ...Time spent, care given, as well as the parents' education
because we know quite precisely that for an equal time spent with their
children, more educated parents will form a higher human capital than
parents with less educationin short, the set of cultural stimuli received
by the child, will all contribute to the formation of those elements that can
make up a human capital ("Biopolitics" 229).
The striking thing is that this idea of imposing a capital investment on a child does not
change the conception of educational practice very much from the attempts to render a
child accustomed to the given power structure that marked the modern institutions of the
disciplinary societies that Foucault described in Discipline and Punish. There, Foucault
famously made the connections amongst the architectures of interpersonal arrangements
421
that were common to modern institutions with different functions: factories, schools,
hospitals, asylums, and barracks. In their centralized arrangement of observing gazes,
these architectures all strangely resembled one another. They are all based on
hierarchized rigid observation of a population of normalized individuals by experts
whose authority is backed up by violence that is rarely used and often hidden when it is.
Well-distributed authority figures who are endowed with responsibility by the constituted
power structures of a society monitor the norms of the population and calculate the
violence necessary to enforce norms on the population. This is the basic tenet of
Foucault's "disciplinary" modernity.
One of the boldest statements of Discipline and Punish was that modern
educational institutions, genealogically, have the most in common with key architectural
and organizational structures that were evolved for maintaining prisons. Modern
educational systems were drawn up with modified principles of surveillance and
confinement that were pioneered first in asylums and prisons and that were only later
found useful in maintaining youth in a "carceral" system that would separate out the
future inmates of prisons and asylums from the normal, docile individuals who would be
easily absorbed into non-criminal society.
Education conceived merely as investment in human capital could very well
continue, as Foucault wrote of 18
th
century education in Discipline and Punish, to rely on
"technicians of behavior: engineers of conduct, orthopaedists of individuality. Their task
[in the disciplinary societies] was to produce bodies that were both docile and capable"
(294). The classroom and educational processes of evaluation based on increasing returns
422
on an investmentno matter if the techniques are "problems-based" rather than based on
memory-bankingis still based on a system designed to render children docile for use in
preconstituted systems of employment.
Foucault's work on biopoliticsas Deleuze recognizes in his reformulation of
Foucault's post-disciplinary biopolitics as "societies of control"is Foucault's attempt to
describe the formations that were coming to power as these earlier disciplinary
institutions, the prisons, asylums, schools, etc. described in Discipline and Punish were
withering away. However, nothing seems immediately to change about this general
practice of education from the modern disciplines to the education in a biopolitics of
human capital. Foucault describes the education of the subject of neo-liberal biopolitics,
And what will this investment constitute? It will constitute a human
capital, the child's human capital, which will produce an income. What
will this income be? It will be the child's salary when he or she becomes
an adult. And what will the income be for the mother who made the
investment? Well, the neo-liberals say, it will be a psychical income. She
will have the satisfaction a mother gets from giving the child care and
attention in seeing that she has in fact been successful. So, everything
comprising what could be called, if you like, the formative or educational
relationship, in the widest sense of the term, between mother and child,
can be analyzed in terms of investment, capital costs, and profitboth
economic and psychological profiton the capital invested (The Birth of
Biopolitics 244).
423
In a way, nothing could be more paternalistic than the image of the family that Foucault
draws out of liberalism with a tone that here becomes more accusatory than celebratory.
Does not this "psychical income" being sought through educational investment risk
becoming the absolute reinscription of "paternal authority and filthy charity" (Deleuze
"Barlteby" 88) within the radical capitalism dreamed of by Foucault. The child becomes
for the parent just what the attorney tries to make of Bartleby, another "sweet morsel" for
the conscience when education is nothing but a disciplinary preparation of the child for a
return on an investment.
How different is the weakly neoliberal idea of education as an investment upon
which one expects a return from the hopes of Melville's program for the young writers of
American literature in "Hawthorne and His Mosses."
Believe me, my friends, that Shakespeares are this day being born on the
banks of the Ohio. ...Let America then prize and cherish her writers; yea,
let her glorify them. They are not so many in number, as to exhaust her
good-will. ...It is for the nation's sake, and not for her authors' sake, that I
would have America be heedful of the increasing greatness among her
writers. For how great the shame, if other nations should be before her, in
crowning her heroes of the pen. But this is almost the case now. ...There
are hardly five critics in America; and several of them are asleep
("Hawthorne and His Mosses" 524-6).
These Shakespeares being born on the banks of the Ohio, for Melville, are a resource in
themselves, to be prized and glorified. Melville does not say that we must invest in their
424
education in order to get a capitalized return or that we might expect a great psychical
return on investment if we train them well and bring them up charitably. Melville says
that America ought to seek out young geniuses and praise them in order to reap the
intellectual and psychical rewards of an uncompromising engagement with what young
writers coming into the world are always already striving to be: originals.
4.6.7 Seventh Series of Orieinalitv and Minority
In Deleuze's formulation of a Melville's universal fraternity and in the struggle
described explicitly by Melville in "Hawthorne and His Mosses," the struggle is a
minority struggle. But, the minority of Melville's Shakespeares being born on the Ohio
somehow manages to be absent from most considerations of minority struggles: the
minority of youth. Melville's heralding of writing youth would be a minor literature with
a different valence.
173
Likewise, when Deleuze describes the major obstacle to Melville's
pragmatism of fraternity, the danger he describes remains the main danger in a society of
radical liberalism. Deleuze writes that "The only real danger is the return of the father"
("Bartleby" 88).
The originality of those minor "Shakespeares being born along the Ohio" who are
to be educated does not always coincide with the investment profiles of those making
171
Deleuze compares this essay to Kafka's journal entry from December 25, 1911 on the
literature of small peoples that is so important to Deleuze and Guattari's Kafka: Towards
a Minor Literature. The key thing about the literature of the new America of Melville's
day or of Kafka's minor literature seems to be the "collective enunciation." The
language, literature, and politics of minorities undermines dominant political power. This
idea comes up in both Deleuze's discussion of Melville and Deleuze and Guattari's
discussion of Kafka. But on the other hand, many will find such a notion nearly as vague
as the idea of "resistance."
425
human capital investments in the education of minors. This is where the parrhesia of
originality may very well come into conflict with the formative educational demands that
have been conceived of in terms of the profit motive of the older generation, however
charitable.
This problem of where generational conflict should fit into modern education is
just the same problem confronted in Nietzsche's "The Use and Disadvantages of History
for Life." There, Nietzsche recommended authorizing youth's freedom to fantasize about
the nature of its wider milieu as a necessary solution to just the problem of overbearing
factual history. Youth, according to Nietzsche, needed to be freed from the material
constraints that would be enforced on it by the scientific knowledge that dominates
existing adult enterprises. Nietzsche observed that an overly scientific education imposed
by the older generations was weakening the soul of the German nation's youth. The
solution proposed by the Use and Disadvantages was youth's artistic autonomy from
historical education, fanciful ahistorical community building.
Melville's "Hawthorne and His Mosses" and Nietzsche's Use and Disadvantages
both recognized that the individual being educated must be more than a product with
facts imposed upon him or her. However, for Melville and for the program of "minor
literature" of Kafka that Deleuze compares to what Melville set out in "Hawthorne and
His Mosses," literature was something more than what Nietzsche could have been
envisioning with his "healthy illusions." Melville intimates a better answer for the
problems that were addressed by the Nietzsche of Use and Disadvantages.
426
Melville's and Kafka's programs for youth literature aim to change the very fabric
of society that has made youth into a minority. Education must not only produce students
as future employees. Education's role in a society composed in terms of a system of
flexible and overlapping enterprises is to change society as a whole. If we consider the
process of education as something like what Deleuze and Guattari describe of "minor
literatures" then education is a process where
everything is political. In major literatures, in contrast, the individual
concern (familial, marital, and so on) joins with other individual concerns,
the social milieu serving as a mere environment or a background....
[Another] characteristic of minor literature is that in it everything takes on
a collective value. Indeed, precisely because talent isn't abundant in a
minor literature, there are no possibilities for an individual enunciation
that would belong to this or that "master" and that could be separated from
the collective enunciation (Towards a Minor Literature 17).
This idea of a minor literature is just an education that would be true to what Foucault
saw as neo-liberal economics' opening towards aleatory possibility. Minor literature
entails a kind of liberalism of ideas where no one can become schoolmaster and the
resistance of the fixations of any master enterprises is carried through to the treatment
and harnessing of the human capital of youth.
The generational politics of Melville's vision of a literary education, like that
which Deleuze and Guattari described as a minor literature, depends not on the free play
of the healthy illusions of youth, or the healthy illusions of any minority to envision its
427
autonomy from the larger system of enterprises. Instead, what is at stake in education in
the society of biopolitics is the ability of speech-events by youth's minority to re-
determine or even un-determine the enterprises of the previous generation as one might
reassemble a wall of loose stones.
This goal of minor literature, then, is more than the reconfiguration of education
described, for instance, in Paolo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed. There, Freire makes
the distinction between "banking education" and "problem-posing education" (57-74).
Banking education is the old vision of implanting knowledge into a student by
memorization. Problem-posing education relies on an approach to learning that confronts
the student with problems to solve rather than with information to be memorized. But, a
problems based approach to learning is just as easily converted to a regime of
standardization that shelters adult enterprises from the parrhesia and critique of youth's
minority. Problems-based curriculum are just as useful in achieving the docile and
isolated bodies sought by what Foucault described as disciplinary modernity as an
explicitly "banking" model of education that hinged explicitly on the now-shunned ideas
of scholarly memorization. The shift from memorization to problems-based learning does
not address the basic flaw in the idea of the individual child as human capital product that
is only at some future date to be cashed out as the product of an educational investment.
The real problem with considering education as human capital production is not
that humanity cannot be subjected to analysis on the basis of capital. Nor is there some
dark evil in this human capital thinking that would reduce all human beings to what
Agamben has called, "bare life." The problem when neo-liberal education conceives of
428
the student as a mere investment is that education conceived of as a process of value-
adding underrates what the education of an individual should be achieving for the larger
society in the very moment of the educational process, itself
Melville's image of Shakespeares being born along the Ohio stands for Melville's
belief in the potential for an education that champions the ruptures of the new individual
over integration of the individual within a preexisting order of enterprises. This is just the
reconfiguration of education in terms of the indispensable value of innovation that neo-
liberals try to talk so much about. Youth are a greater source of originality than adults.
They stumble upon those things about the adult world, the potentials for aleatory
innovations, the likes of which the fixations of adults who are positioned and locked
within their own enterprises prevent adult enterprises from conceiving. The reasons for
this are all those pointed to by Deleuze and Guattari with regard to Kafka's minor
literature. The ideas of excluded minorities have not yet been determined by the systems
and norms that define the interests of individuals and enterprises fixed by the larger
adultmajority.
4.6.8 Eiehth Series of Children and the Cvnic Kingdom
To bring the Foucaultian studies of parrhesia in antiquity and the neoliberal
Foucault together with Melville's vision for an education in minor literature, one could
say that the enterprises of youth already possess the necessary human capital assets to act
out a parrhesiastic discourse for the wider networks of overlapping enterprises in the
society of biopolitics. Youth possesses the status of exteriority that is necessary for being
the Cynic truth teller. Youth has not yet become cynicallysmall 'c'engrained in the
429
habits that corrupt all those adult enterprises that have survived primarily by submitting
themselves to the norms of an existing system. Children are the original Cynics and
natural parrhesiasts. This is the inherent human capital value of the Shakespeares being
born along the Ohio.
One more Cynic reinterpretation of the New Testament is most relevant here. In
Matthew 19:14, Jesus of Nazareth rebukes the disciples for dismissing the children who
have gathered around him and instead asking that they be allowed to come to him before
the adults, explaining, "for such is the kingdom of heaven" (King James Bible). The same
reference appears in Mark 10:15, "Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a
little child, he shall not enter therein."
The charitable and paternal interpretation is, of course, that Christ is indulging in
another one of his philanthropic investments of God's pity for the weak and humble. But,
what if, on the contrary, as in something like Diogenes's and Christ's Cynic preference
for animality over humanity, what we have here is the preference for the ideas of children
over the vain, stupid, and worthless tendencies that are so easily ingrained in the
enterprises of adulthood. The Cynic interpretation here is not that Jesus of Nazareth is
making a charitable investment in the education of children. Jesus the Cynic is looking
for the words of truth that can come only from a perspective outside the cosmopolite
pretensions of the world of adults.
174
174
It is not out of place to mention that Nietzsche misinterpreted just these passages in his
chapter on the Festival of Donkeys from Thus Spake Zarathustra. Zarathustra speaks
against his guests as "roguish fools" saying
"To be sure: except ye become as little children, ye shall not enter into
that kingdom of heaven. (And Zarathustra pointed upward with his hands.)
430
Consider what the attorney never does for Bartleby in Melville's Bartleby, the
Scrivener. The attorney never gives Bartleby the ability to play a role in determining the
attorney's world. His attitude is always one of investigating Bartleby to figure out what
he can tell Bartleby or do for Bartleby. The attorney-narrator's investigation naturally
runs up against the limits of what he believes is possible for human charity and pity
limits that he has set by his own resistance to allowing Bartleby to speak any truth about
the attorney's own life. The attorney never asks what Bartleby has to say about the
attorney's enterprise. Of course, in all this, the attorney is perfectly willing to take
advantage of Bartleby's absence from the office on weekends to obtain a little more truth
about what little privacy Bartleby had by executing a little surveillance, and just poking
around in Bartleby's desk drawer when no one is looking (Melville Bartleby 17).
4.6.9 Ninth Series of the Two Father-Narrators
On this point of what adults should expect from children in the process of
education, consider the difference between the unnamed father-narrators in Melville's "I
and My Chimney" and in "The Apple Tree Table or Original Spiritual Manifestations."
They would seem to be the same person. Both men have a wife and two daughters named
Anna and Julia. Yet, on closer inspection they must be two men from different parallel
universes. The paternal behaviors exhibited in the two tales could not be more different
from one another.
In "I and My Chimney," the narrator introduces, "I and my chimney, two gray-
headed old smokers" but is careful to specify "the precedence of my chimney ... hereby
But we have no wish whatever to enter into the kingdom of heaven: we
have become menso we want the earth." (316: 18.2)
431
borne out by the facts. In everything except the above phrase, my chimney takes
precedence of me." The father-narrator further declares "I bring up the rear of my
chimney ... my chimney is my superior" (149). The volume of the chimney, the core of
the narrator's pride and self-confidence, seems almost to equal the size of the house itself.
His wife and daughters want to "abolish the chimney" (161) to make way for a "projected
grand hall" (169) for parties. His wife quips at the narrator's resistance that "Holofernes
will have his way, never mind whose heart he breaks for it" (163).
He concedes to consult with Mr. Scribe, the mason, about at least lessening the
overwhelming size of the chimney. Having assessed the chimney's massive girth, the
mason advises that within this massive chimney there may be a secret closet left by the
former occupant of the house, the narrator's "kinsman," Captain Julian Dacres, who "had,
in his day, been a Borneo pirate" (165). But, the narrator begins to imagine that the
mason's speculations are actually the product of a conspiracy hatched between his wife
and the mason. He takes the opportunity on the mason's next visit to bribe him with fifty
dollars in return for a signed certificate testifying that upon closer inspection the mason
has assured that there is no such hidden closet. "Would you be so kind, Mr. Scribe?"
(169)
His confidential manipulation of expert testimony allows him to get his way.
However, at the end of the tale, due to the continued threat of vandals attempting to steal
the chimney's antique bricks,
It is now some seven years since I have stirred from home. My city friends
all wonder why I don't come to see them, as in former times. They think I
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am getting sour and unsocial. Some say that I have become a sort of
mossy old misanthrope, while all the time the fact is, I am simply standing
guard over my mossy old chimney; for it is resolved between me and my
chimney, that I and my chimney will never surrender (172).
The narrator will not permit the desires and interests of his wife and children to trouble
the secrets that the narrator imagines that he shares with chimney and kinsman. But, in
the end, he lives in virtual exile in what seems like a McMansion in the Exurbsthat we
might imagine has a massive lawn. What has he gained by excluding the insights that
were coming to him from the human capital that he subordinates to his own familial
enterprise?
By contrast, the father narrator of "The Apple Tree Table or Original Spiritual
Manifestations" must in public view of his family's minorities confront the issues of his
own imperfect knowledge about what is going on in the enterprise of his own home. The
family is faced with a mysterious "Tick! Tick!" in his house that emanate from a table
that would seem to be haunted in a way that recalls Edgar Allen Poe's "Tell-Tale Heart."
His daughter, Anna, cries, "Spirits! Spirits!"
Through the combined influences of the narrator's late night reading of Cotton
Mather and his daughters' supernatural explanations of the marvelous table, the father-
narrator finds himself thrown into "the contest between panic and philosophy" (188). The
narrator sees this contest emblematized in his own conflicting ideals of Democritus, the
philosopher, and the apocalyptic ideas of the conservative witch-hunter, Mather, from the
Puritan Salem of the 18
th
century.
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Late at night, while the narrator is on one of his reveries debating apocalyptic
spiritualism with philosophy, from the ticking table comes a "supernatural coruscation"
(189) and a hole in the table reveals an emerging insect. "A live bug come out of a dead
table? A fire-fly bug come out of a piece of ancient lumber, for one knows not how many
years stored away in an old garret?" (189) But, even after this first emergence, the ticking
is not yet over with. Young Julia still insists that this beautiful organism that has appeared
is the work of other-worldly spirits. For a moment, the father-narrator's sympathy with
his daughter's spiritual interpretation of the event perpetuates the narrator's painful
oscillation between Democritus and Cotton Mather (193). After a night-long vigil by the
ticking table ends with the emergence of yet another magically decorated bug, Julia cries
"Do go and consult Madame Pazzi, the conjuress."
"Better go and consult Professor Johnson, the naturalist," said my wife.
"Bravo, Mrs. Democritus!" said I, "Professor Johnson is the man" (195).
Cooperation between children, wife, and father-narrator brings the family to welcome the
testimony of the naturalist into the mysteries of their own home. Professor Johnson
calculates that
by careful examination of the position of the hole from which the last bug
had emerged in relation to the cortical layers of the slab ... it appeared that
the egg must have been laid in the tree some ninety years before the tree
was felled (196).
And the narrator adds that the true calculation must further "allow eighty years for the
age of the table, which would make one hundred and fifty years that the bug had lain in
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the egg" (196). That period of time sounds approximately commensurate with the length
of time for the nature of another Diogenic mystery dealt with earlier in the previous
chapter of this study to have made a new emergence.
But, it is not Dr. Johnson who has the last word in Melville's "Apple Tree Table,"
nor is it the prophetic father. It is the young Julia who speaks the truth from the
perspective of youth's minority. She reconfigures the very problem of the ultimate
meaning of this long awaited and lively metamorphosis of an inert impenetrable block
into a part of a still living organism caught up in an invisibly slow flux. She defends her
earlier interest in what the Doctor decried as merely a "crude, spiritual hypothesis."
"Say what you will," said Julia, holding up, in the covered tumbler, the
glorious, lustrous, flashing live opal, "Say what you will, if this beauteous
creature be not a spirit, it yet teaches a spiritual lesson. For if, after one
hundred and fifty years' entombment, a mere insect comes forth at last
into light, itself an effulgence, shall there be no glorified resurrection for
the spirit of man? Spirits! spirits!" she exclaimed, with rapture, "I still
believe in spirits, only now I believe in them with delight, when before I
but thought of them with terror" (196).
The juxtaposition between this father-narrator of "The Apple Tree Table" and the closed
off locked up father-narrator holed up with his pipe in the exurbs of "I, and my Chimney"
invites the question: Why is it that the education of youth should be separated from the
daily workings of adult enterprises that do appear like so many carefully guarded
chimneys bequeathed by Borneo pirates to Lightning Rod Salesmen?
435
4.6.10 Tenth Series of Marketin2 and Education in the Societies of Control
The quick reason that we would take from Foucault is that the contemporary
world has also inherited the disciplinary architectures of an educational system that was
geared to suppress the spiritual materiality of the speech-events of children. The
classroom is still based on the model of a prison that isolates and monitors. Even the
classroom of a problems-based education, if the speech-events produced from the human
capital of its students does not bear directly on the system of overlapping adult
enterprises, will fail to directly spiritualize the science that goes into the making of a
home, a factory, a hospital, a film, a farm, etc to the maximum extent that Shakespeares
being born today along the banks of the Ohio are capable.
Now this educational problem has to finally be brought back together with
Deleuze's identification of marketing as the key problem in biopolitical societies of
control. Marketers are the ones left to deal with generational antagonism generated by
this gap between speech-events of youth's minority and the enterprises of adults. We can
further Deleuze's account of the societies of control by adding that the "powers of the
false" of marketing succeed through the withering away of the old educational
disciplines. To reawaken the little Bartlebies from the dissatisfaction of whiling away the
hours at their withering disciplinary desk, the enterprise of the consumer household is
forced into the domain of all those leisure choices marketed to relieve the distress,
boredom, and unreality caused by an education that remains locked out of the domains of
professionalization: boardrooms, factories, farms, and laboratories that constitute power
in the contemporary world's biopolitics of interlocking enterprises.
436
For the moment, entertainment and marketing fills up the void produced by the
disconnect between an outdated disciplinary education and the world of adult enterprises.
Supplying a false milieu that builds up youth's confidence in the healthy illusions that all
goings-on are normal, marketing to youth takes a form that is no different from the work
of the Man in the Traveling Hat as he exploits the Youth in Chapter 9 of The Confidence-
Man: collecting and planting information in order to construct a palatable critical theory
about the nature of the human milieu that is rapidly followed by an invitation to join in
and be happily defrauded.
In this way, Melville's move from the sea adventures to the mystery of marketing
on the river in The Confidence-Man seems to recapitulate the transformation articulated
in Foucault's insight that
for our civilization, from the sixteenth century up to our time, the ship has
been at the same time not only the greatest instrument of economic
development of course ... but the greatest reservoir of imagination. The
sailing vessel is the heterotopias par excellence. In civilizations without
ships the dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the
police that of the corsairs ("Different Spaces" 185).
The great educational youthful journeys on a ship that might engage youth to inspect and
reevaluate the mechanisms of the global market itselfthe kind of journey that led
Melville to write his first memoirs and the magnificent passages on whaling in Moby-
Dickhave been replaced by an educational life lived as false adventure under a regime
of commercial espionage. What can education do about this?
437
4.6.11 Eleventh Series of the Dark Truth of Melville's Shakespeare
Melville did not glorify the potential resistance of Shakespeares being born on the
banks of the Ohio to such a confidence game without including a brief flash indicating
what he felt was so good about Shakespeare: truth. But what kind of truth?
Through the mouths of the dark characters of Hamlet, Timon, Lear, and
Iago, [Shakespeare] craftily says, or sometimes insinuates the things,
which we feel to be so terrifically true, that it were all but madness for any
good man, in his own proper character, to utter, or even hint of them.
Tormented into desperation, Lear the frantic King tears off the mask, and
speaks the sane madness of vital truth (522).
This is not the indexical trace of truth epistemologically secured by the observations of
scientific research. Nor is this Melvillean-Shakespearean truth easily condensed into a
quasi-critical theory based on higher ideals of a community or a self.
Melville is championing youth's potential for literature-events and art-events of
all kinds. Shakespeares are today being born in every American ghettoand many more
in those of other countries. Their insights should not be allowed to go to spoil. The
spoliation of youth's truth is evident in all of the plays that Melville cites here.
All of the four plays and characters that Melville chose as the exemplars of the
moments when "dark" Shakespeare's voice rings "terrifically true," the central role of
truth and flattery in intergenerational strife is brutally clear. In the case of Hamlet, a
sudden dearth of royal flattery that has psychologically sustained him suddenly thrusts
him outside the bizarre family drama after the mysterious death of his father. Those
438
inquisitive imaginings about his mother and uncle very much like those Melville's
Pierrelead him to explode the destructive truth of what is rotten in his own state of
Denmark. Having had no education in how to deal with truth outside of filial loyalty,
Hamlet's line becomes a line of abolition like Ahab's and Pierre's and the house of
Denmark falls.
In Othello, the old Iago's ambitious flattering of the young man in power, Othello,
further intensifies the concentration of the ability to speak in the hands an older
generation and in the hands of the racial in-group to which Othello is an outsider. The
young Moorish king finds himself obliged not to speak any truth at all as his kingdom
falls down upon him.
In King Lear, it is only when Lear becomes an outcast and is thereby freed from
the trappings of self-delusion nourished by his flattering fratricidal daughters, Goneril
and Regan, that he can finally speak with what Melville called "sane madness." Lear
realizes that he was only ever a "simular of virtue" (266) and that it was to his daughter,
Cordelia, who refused to flatter him that he should have given his confidencenot to
those who conspicuously and very enterprisingly pledged their confidence in him.
King Lear was recognized by Charles Olson during the Melville revival of the
early twentieth century to have been a model for Melville's Captain Ahab. In Moby Dick,
Ishmael interprets a great deal of what Melville called the "sane madness" from behind
the mask of "this proud sad king." Ahab, like Lear, will not be swerved from his path
along rails until it is too late.
439
Ahab has also been linked forward in time to Ford's Ethan Edwards (John
Wayne) of The Searchers (Girgus 31). So we might therefore speak of the American
paternalism targeted by Melville's dreams for youth literature in terms of a series: Lear-
Ahab-Ethan. Of course, in The Searchers, Ford rewrites Melville-Shakespeare with a
happy ending in which the Ahab-like quest for revenge succeeds against Scar-Moby
Dick. The ending is further sweetened in The Searchers when the Ethan's Learlike
reversal of mad aggression towards the child Debbie-Cordelia does not come too late as it
does for Shakespeare's Lear. This is again Ford's mad desire to play the normalizing
Head, obscurely dissimulating in a deceptively clear voice in order to comfort the Hearts
of the audience justifiably frightened in the face of the path fixed on mad rails by the
American great white father.
Finally, Melville's mention of Timon of Athens in "Hawthorne and His Mosses"
provides an important allusive link from "Hawthorne and His Mosses" to Melville's The
Confidence-Man. Timon of Athens is Shakespeare's treatment of misanthropy in the form
of the man-hating Timon. In the Cosmopolitan Goodman's inane attempts to confute
Pitch, the Misanthrope from Chatper 24 of The Confidence-Man, Goodman contrasted
the "man-hooting" of Diogenes the Cynic with the "man-hating" of Timon as he
inadvertently slipped up in his philanthropy and aped Montaigne's critique of human
stupidity
Shakespeare's Timon of Athens begins with Timon as a high-rolling citizen
famous for his generosity in granting free gifts to his friendsmany nearly as rich as
himself. When it is suddenly revealed that Timon is in trouble with debt, he sends
440
messengers to his closest friends requesting that they reciprocate the many instances of
friendly assistance Timon has given them, or, in his time of need, send him recompense
for the nights of dining and whoring that he shared with them in the past. Of course, he
receives no assistance from his former friends by making such requests.
Shakespeare makes a delightfully misanthropic spectacle out of Timon's fall. At a
final farewell banquet for the best of Athenians, Timon's servants reveal to the expectant
banquet attendees the ascetic contents of the table's covered platters: lukewarm water.
Timon then flies into a rage throwing the platters at one and all. Resolved to loathe all
men after his precipitous fall from grace, he lives in a cave in the forest where, digging in
the soil for roots to eat, he stumbles upon gold. Disillusioned with anything that gold can
get him from other humans, he gives it away. He takes particular relish in granting it to
Alcibiades who is anothermore youthfulexile from Athens. The exile of Alcibiades
has been legally coerced rather than financially and personally obliged. The play ends
with Timon dead and buried and Acibiades storming the gates of Athens in revenge.
Goodman in The Confidence-Man disparages Timon as much or more than
Diogenes. But, the end of the novel seems to find him headed for a Timon-like crash.
Happy to accept the flattery of himself and his humankind proffered by the quasi-critical
theory of the Confidence-Man, he may end up skulking in the forest himself. Melville
critics have been wont to see The Confidence-Man as a gesture of Melville's own
Timonism, as an assault on the literary world after the utter financial failure of his two
mature novels {Moby-Dick, Pierre) that in this third and final book, even more wildly
441
difficult than those before, he was already anticipating another rotten failure that he
turned into an assault on the literary establishment that fiscally and socially shunned him.
4.6.12 Twelfth Series of Marxism and Timonism
Making The Confidence-Man an expression of Melville's financial and social
identification with Timon would make Melville much like Karl Marx's 1844 reading of
passages from Shakespeare's play. Marx describes with vitriol the despicable thoughts of
he who possesses money.
I am bad, dishonest, unscrupulous, stupid; but money is honoured, and
hence its possessor. Money is the supreme good, therefore its possessor is
good. Money, besides, saves me the trouble of being dishonest: I am
therefore presumed honest. I am brainless, but money is the real brain of
all things and how then should its possessor be brainless? Besides, he can
buy clever people for himself, and is he who has power over the clever not
more clever than the clever? Do not I, who thanks to money am capable
of all that the human heart longs for, possess all human capacities? Does
not my money, therefore, transform all my incapacities into their contrary?
... Money thus turns each of these powers into something which in itself it
is not -turns it, that is, into its contrary.... Since money, as the existing
and active concept of value, confounds and confuses all things, it is the
general confounding and confusing of all things -the world upside-down
-the confounding and confusing of all natural and human qualities ("The
Power of Money").
442
In Marx's vigorous appropriation of Shakespeare, he gladly sides with the character of
Timon who finds that money is the ultimate obstacle to truth. For the Marx of this
passage, money is the ultimate dialectical machine converting all truth to its opposite.
Strange that Marx should have gone on to advocate dialectics as a philosophy when it
was epitomized in that which he seems to have most despised. How different this is from
Foucault's vision for the market as a space of veridiction!
Marx tries to sympathize with Shakespeare's critique of flattery-money as it is
voiced by Shakespeare's Timon and yet Marx may have becomeabove all of the clever
people who have been bought by the money of modernitycapitalism's best and most
important flatterer. Louis Althusser writes in his late reconsideration of Marx that Marx's
theory of history moved towards
the thesis of a mythical 'decay' of the feudal mode of production and the
birth of the bourgeoisie from the heart of this decay, which introduces new
mysteries. What proves that the feudal mode of production declines and
decays, then eventually disappears? ... What if this was not how things
happened? What if the bourgeoisie, far from being the contrary product of
the feudal class, was its culmination and, as it were, acme, its highest form
and, so to speak, crowning perfection? ("Materialism" 200-1)
If Althusser's reconsideration of Marxism is right then Marx truly became the ultimate
flatterer of the bourgeoisie. The hypothesis of a historical discontinuity between feudal
classes and the bourgeoisie is the only aspect of Marx's theory that has been openly
accepted by modern market societies while the Timonism of Marx's bare critique of
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money is practically disposed of without a second thought. The main idea propagated by
Marx's writing, the difference of the bourgeoisie from feudal classes, has allowed those
members of the bourgeoisie who know about Marx to think that there is a historically
verified difference in kind between the modernity of their class and the old feudal class of
the flattered kings one reads about in Shakespeare.
If one considers the bourgeoisie as the crowning achievement of feudal society, as
Althusser suggests, then the role of Shakespearean dark truth in generational conflict that
is so evident in Shakespeare's treatment of flattered kings would appear in a different
light. For Marx's theory of "the wicked spirit" of capitalism, money was evil. For
Shakespeare, the dark truth is simply that money is extremely dangerous. The danger of
money is that it facilitates flattery. However, the core problem is not money itself but
flatterythat can take so many forms.
4.6.13 Thirteenth Series of Flattery qua Marketing
So Marx's inadvertently flattering Timonism has nothing to do with Melville's
exuberant Cynicism that winds throughout his fiction. For the Melville of The
Confidence-Man, the flattery centered around the kings in the days of the old feudal
classes does not disappear in modern commercial societies. Instead, when as Deleuze put
it, the marketing department becomes the soul of a corporation, flattery becomes the de-
centered pervasive flurry of cliches everywhere formed in terms of deceptive images of
what is human, what is good, and what is desirable. This ubiquitous flattery qua
marketing has furnished the souls of many a corporation with the consumersoften
youth'slargely unquestioned confidence in entrenched adult enterprises.
444
Perhaps Melville's turn to Shakespeare, then, might dovetail with Foucault's
rationale for turning to classical antiquity and then we might feed this towards Deleuze's
accusations of marketing in the societies of control. Foucault wrote that "Actually, it
seems to me that parrhesia and flattery are certainly two major categories of political
though throughout Antiquity" {The Government of the Self and Others 302) On this point,
the critical modernity that encompasses all of Foucault, Melville, Marx, and Shakespeare
should be referred one last time to Machiavelli for whom flattery is a key problem for
individuals who encounter prosperity of any kind.
I do not wish to omit an important matter and an error from which princes
protect themselves with difficulty if they are not clever or if they do not
have good judgment. And these are the flatterers which fill the courts; for
men delight so much in their own concerns, deceiving themselves in this
manner, that they protect themselves from this plague with difficulty; and
wishing to defend oneself from them brings with it the danger of
becoming despised (155).
Flattery means the withholding of initially painful truths from someone in order to remain
in their confidence. Flattery is the humanistic enemy to the kind of sudden "swerve," that
essential flexibility and willingness to alter one's habits based on new information,
however painful and unorthodox, thatas detailed in the above discussion of Melville's
Pierrethe Machiavellian man of action must always be ready to make.
Flattery specifically does not supply the prince with the facts that he needs to
experiment in the world in order to become the virtuous man of action. Yet the flattered
445
prince fears rejecting flattery and pursuing truth for fear of the pain that comes with
alienating his deceivers by changing one's habits, and being perceived as abnormal and
as an outsider to the in-group to which he thought he belonged. The prince to whom self-
confidence is something always at risk will often have a hard time recognizing of his
friends that "men always turn out badly for you unless some necessity makes them good"
(Machiavelli 157).
Could it be that enterprises in the biopolitics of neo-liberalismat every level
suffer too much from the art of flattery qua marketing that Deleuze described as the
rotten soul of the corporation? Machiavelli described how a prince should avoid the
dangers of flattery. "There is no other way to guard yourself against flattery than by
making men understand that telling you the truth will not offend you" (155). The
Machiavellianism of Melville's theory of media and education suggests that guarding
enterprises from the dangers of flattery may very well supply the very Machiavellian
definition of the mysterious idea of Deleuzian resistance to societies of control.
It serves to mention that Machiavelli was not working within a framework of
generalized human capital to which the contemporary biopolitics of neo-liberalism
purports to aspire. Hence, Machiavelli added the caveat to his advocation of truth-telling
that need not apply to our present.
When each man is able to tell you the truth you lose their respect.
Therefore, a wise prince should take a third course, choosing wise men for
his state and giving only those free reign to speak the truth to him, and
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only on those matters as he inquires about and not on others (The Prince
155).
Machiavelli could only recommend an institutionalization of what Foucault described in
the Greeks as parrhesia in so far as this truth-telling did not disrupt respect for the public
image of the king. Respect required keeping free speech within the private domain of the
king where and when he demanded it. But, now the king has supposedly been banished
by an economics that showed the sovereign right of kings to be a confidence game.
In the world of biopolitics where an overlapping and competing enterprises are in
place for the purposes of enfolding and protecting the good of the overall system in the
case of a failure of one or another specific enterprise, then failure of an enterprise due to
parrhesia is actually a positive thing, a necessary thing, and a thing to be fervently sought
and desired. This is the logic of competition at the core of neo-liberalism, after all.
A contemporary enterprise is not like Machiavelli's prince who must defend
himself from flattery by restricting truth-telling to secret conferences with the wise. An
enterprise that defies parrhesia weakens the position it holds within the market's logic of
competitionand hence weakens the execution of this logicthat is necessary for the
market itself to produce the ultimate truth through chance innovations rather than through
the fixations of over-dominant individuals or classes. An enterprise's refusal to facilitate
and admit the input of outsider parrhesia by shielding itself from public image problems
is never a success story. Without such a vision of parrhesia, what is supposed to
differentiate modern societies from the doomed world of the flattered Lear?
447
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have made the case more conspicuously than
anyone else for the reconsideration of Machiavelliinitiated by J.G.A. Pocock and
Althusseras a thinker of relevance for postmodern political philosophies that avoid
tendencies towards totalitarianism. But, Machiavelli's admonitions about flattery in light
of Shakespeare-Melville-Foucault conduct us to the importance of reconsidering
education as a process of parrhesia and of revaluing the human capital that is spoiled
without the unfettered integration of the outsider opinions of youth's minority into the
processes of adult enterprises.
Melville's The Confidence-Man demonstrates the consequences in a liberal
society when, in thinking themselves good and equal, enterprises and individuals fail to
take Machiavelli's advice seriously. On the Fidele, there is no parrhesia and
correspondingly, it demonstrates how easily individuals forsake caution for confidence as
if confidential consumerism could itself be an ethical principle. Who is Frank Goodman
but the flatterer taught to flatter himself?
One reason that many theorists of neo-liberalismincluding the pseudo-Cynicism
of Peter Sloterdijk after his Critique of Cynical Reasonhave failed to properly take the
problem of flattery into account in their endorsements of the free market may be the
distinction between general knowledge and firm-specific knowledge. Neo-liberal icon,
economist Gary Becker, in his Nobel Lecture from 1993, in discussing neo-liberal
applications for education, called the distinction between general knowledge and firm-
specific knowledge "one of the most influential theoretical concepts in human capital
analysis." The idea, at first, seems self-evident.
448
By definition, firm-specific knowledge is useful only in the firms
providing it, whereas general knowledge is useful also in other firms.
Teaching someone to operate an IBM-compatible personal computer is
general training, whereas learning the authority structure and the talents of
employees in a particular company is specific knowledge (641).
But, this description of firm-specific knowledge is based strictly on the hiring and firing
practices of firms and takes for granted that all a firm should be striving to do is to
maintain its own internal status quo and power structure. Becker continues,
This distinction helps explain why workers with highly specific skills are
less likely to quit their jobs and are the last to be laid off during business
downturns. It also explains why most promotions are made from within a
firm rather than through hiringworkers need time to learn about a firm's
structure and "culture" (641).
Such an analysis holds an all-too-obvious effectiveness for sociological explanation of
the corporate world as it is. But, restricting human capital analysis to such a dichotomy
also presumes that an insider to any enterprise who is fully accustomed to "a firm's
structure and 'culture'" is the best kind of person to contribute to the firm's human
capital assets. When it comes to evaluating the operations of the "firm's structure and
'culture'" it seems just as likely, and slightly more likely, that the perspective from as far
outside as possible would always be the most valuable. The distinction between firm-
specific and general knowledge avoids an account of the human capital value of outsider
opinion.
449
The value of the youth's human capital and its capacity for parrhesia has very
likely been undervalued because breaking down the distinction between firm-specific
knowledge and general knowledge is a precondition for an education that facilitates
parrhesia. Extremely eclectic transparency of all adult enterprises to the enterprise of
youth in the process of education would give the human capital being harnessed through
the process of educationreconceived as the truth-telling of minor literaturethe widest
possible purview of the different interlocking network of enterprises that comprise human
society and marketplaces.
4.6.14 Fourteenth Series of Transparency and Surveillance
An education that moves beyond the distinction between firm-specific and general
knowledge and that, in turn, tends towards the deepest possible transparency of the
widest array of enterprises is the only one fit to harness youth's capability for parrhesia.
This is not a human right. This is only a means and the only means to maximizing human
capital in the society of biopolitics. The great promise of alliances between commerce
and education would be that those being educated will be allowed to redetermine the
enterprises that are educating them in the process of education.
In order to become our Cynic philosophers, our "scouts" as the Cynics called
themselves, children need to be able to evaluate and give grades to the enterprises that
run their world, rather than being evaluated and adapted to the world that already exists.
To do this requires a reversal of the idea of education that was inherited from disciplinary
modernity, a reversal of the isolation of the ideas of children from a transparent
relationship to the free market of enterprises and ideas that is still walled-off by the
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remnants of disciplinary education and the modulation of consuming enterprises through
marketing. In fact, the problems of parrhesia that Melville's media theory raise for
Foucault's liberal society refer us back to the possibility of reappropriating and
redistributing the tools of domination of an early period for a different use today:
surveillance.
It was in elaborating the idea of modern surveillance as centralized monitoring of
individuals in order to prevent deviance amongst a population in Discipline and Punish
that Foucault first began to deride critiques of the spectacle. Surveillance had rendered
irrelevant the spectacular punishments and executions that functioned to display state
power of feudal regimes. The deployment of surveillance in institutions like the prison,
school, and mental asylum that arose in the late 18
th
century had pushed mere spectacle
outside the domain of modern political power.
Yet, in a world where marketing spectacle has largely usurped the role of earlier
educational institutions by Lear-ishly covering over the precious resource of the speech
of dissenting youths with the healthy illusions of confidence in adult enterprises, we have
to wonder, then, if surveillance can be radicalized into a means of transparency amongst
enterprises. If so, then the reconciliation of Foucault's and Melville's lines in
approaching the American problem may be found in the liberatory aspects of Rousseau's
idea of the value of surveillance during civil rituals.
As Jean Starobinski explains, in both Rousseau's theory of the individual and his
theory of the ideal community, what he was ultimately seeking was a means to true
transparency,
451
Traditional criticism sees a mysterious hiatus between the Social Contract
and the rest of Rousseau's work, because he fails in the former to sanction
the claim of personal happiness, which elsewhere is so important to him.
But in fact Rousseau is, in a profound way, faithful to the principle of
transparency. If transparency is embodied in the general will, then society
must take precedence over the happiness of the individual. If it can be
achieved only in solitary life, then solitary life must take precedence over
society. Rousseau's hesitations and "vacillations" merely involve the time,
place, and conditions under which transparency can be restored.... [But,] a
solitary transparency remains a fragmentary transparency, when what
Rousseau wants is total transparency (44).
So the goals of Rousseau's ritual are as different from Ford's civil religious ritual as the
goal of Rousseau's surveillance is from Foucault's centralized surveillance. The idea is
not that we should affirm a unified healthy community at the cost of uncomfortable and
divisive truths. Thus, Rousseau's transparency is, again, precisely at odds with Ford's
healthy illusions for a youthful society. The goal for Rousseau was that no proprietary
secrets should be allowed to form. Secrets inevitably undermine the community or
equality amongst individuals whose very raison d'etre was transparency.
In Rousseau's idea of civil rituals described in Letter to D'Alembert on the
Theater, Rousseau advocated that spectators become spectacle to themselves.
452
Ought there to be no spectacles in a republic? On the contrary, there ought
to be many ... We already have many of these public festivals; let us have
even more; I will be only the more charmed for it (125).
But, according to Rousseau, it was spectacles like dances, parties, and balls that should
replace the passive relation of the audience to the dissimulations of the theater as a more
effective means of connecting the people to each other.
At such events, Rousseau touted the role of surveillance with the positive value of
inculcating proper mores in the youth before they became issues that would break a
community into factions. As Trachtenberg describes,
For, as spectacles, the balls provide opportunities for surveillance,
ensuring that the meetings between the sexes are conducted in line with
social norms. That is, the balls provide a transparent setting for meetings
between the sexes. Thus the balls render visible what would otherwise be
hidden, and therefore dangerous. ... Youthful sexuality can be better
controlled by making it visible, Rousseau argues, than by an inevitably
futile attempt to prohibit it outright (202).
The paternalism in what Rousseau was advocating is immediately apparent. Rousseau's
civil rituals and balls were supposed to give adults the opportunity to enforce educational
goals and mores upon children by monitoring their development.
However, in the texts where Rousseau was describing such festivals of
surveillance designed to maintain norms, he was presuming the kind of idealized society
that he saw in the sheltered bastion of the city-society of Geneva, whose opinions he felt
453
needed to be preserved against corruption. By contrast, in Emile, the goals Rousseau set
out for education were those of isolating the child away from the kind of corrupt society
that he saw exemplified by the more advanced modernity of the France of his time. In
Emile, like in Nietzsche's healthy illusions, the goal was to keep youth in a simulated
state of nature for as long as possible by keeping the romanticized innocence of childlike
fantasy segregated from the corrupt endeavor that Rousseau perceived in the modernizing
urban world.
In both cases, that of Rousseau's portrait of the surveillance exacted upon youth
by an ideal society maintaining itself and that of the natural education resisting the
corruptions of modernization, what Rousseau left out from his ritualized surveillance was
the kind of radical surveillance where visibility should move in the other direction:
where youth can monitor and assess the enterprises of the adult generation. Most
important, in a world where enterprises must make do without the ideals of community
and self, an education designed to maximize the encounters of all enterprises with the
aleatory effects of outsider opinion, surveillance would still be as different from the form
that civil rituals took on in Rousseau's insistence on transparency as it would be from the
kind of surveillance that Foucault described in the prisons, schools, factories, asylums,
hospitals, and barracks of the modernizing 19
th
century. Surveillance that would facilitate
the articulation of truth by youth about the existing network of enterprises would
educationally deliver explicit, complete, and eclectic knowledge about all adult
enterprises to youth in the process of education.
454
Youth in the process of being educated are the perfect form of human capital to
assemble, process, and evaluate the kind of knowledge that has been thought of as firm-
specific without developing firm-specific bias. This requires youthful surveillance of all
knowledge that was excluded from general education as being firm-specific. The
enterprise of youth is the bearer of truth in the form of speech-events drawn from the flux
of time and changenot to assumption geared to firm-specific flattery.
How else could this be achieved without marshalling every aspect of media
technology available? This is Melville's Deleuzean American Dream for an education
transformed into minor literature. Since it could probably never be accomplished without
modern visual and communications technologies, this educational theory is also a media
theory.
4.6.15 Fifteenth Series of Jefferson. Madison, and Hawthorne
Deleuze claims Jefferson's very Rousseauist romanticism for the predecessor of
Melville's American dream. But, absent from Melville's "Hawthorne and His Mosses" is
any attitude proposing a kind of charitable need for the adult generation to accomplish
what is best for future generations. This was the idea of the "usufruct" that was so
important to Jefferson. According to such a doctrine of the usufruct, the earth was a
temporary loan to any one generation, and every generation had a duty to return it
without imposing obligations to the following generations. The environmental
stewardship of Jefferson's usufruct sounds initially appealing, but it has the ring to it of a
certain paternal charity cloaked in philanthropic pastoralism that is bound to fail in a
biopolitics that does without community and without self.
455
According to the dictums of radical neo-liberalism, no enterprise can be allowed
to determine the development of the whole system. The idea that adults can truthfully
conceive of their own duty to the next generation is a confidence game. No adult
enterprise is capable, by itself, of conceiving of an agenda that would assuredly give
youth a world that is better than the adult enterprises are now finding it. No enterprise has
sovereign access to the totality of the economic field.
All we can say for certain, though the precise details differ, is that the disturbing
thought that we are in danger of effectively not having resources to pass on to the youth's
future enterprises is real. For Melville, neglecting the Shakespeares being born on the
Ohio will be the older generation's loss. As in King Lear or as for those on board Moby-
Dick's Pequod as well as in Hamlet or Othello, or worse Euripedes's Heracles, without
receiving the parrhesia of youth one engages in a politics that welcomes the fall of the
minorities, as well.
If one needs to look to the founding fathers for some origin of this type of
American Dream that Deleuze attributed primarily to Melville, then one finds it more
strongly in what little remains of James Madison's writings.
175
Yet even Madison, in his
insistence on freedom of speech and universal education, still did not see that education
itself needed to be a practice of freedom speech and not just indoctrination in preparation
for exercising the liberty of a press financed by enterprising adults.
17S
"What spectacle can be more edifying or more seasonable," [Madison] inquired of
[W.T. Barry in 1822], "than that of liberty and learning, each leaning on the other for
their mutual and surest support?" (McCoy, 198)
456
Melville's friend, Nathaniel Hawthorne, recognized all there was to gain from
making the adult world more transparent to youth. He explained his decision to adapt
myths for children in his Wonder Book for Girls and Boys (1852) as
one of the most agreeable, of a literary kind, which he ever undertook
the Author has not always thought it necessary to write downward, in
order to meet the comprehension of children. He has generally suffered the
theme to soar, whenever such was its tendency, and when he himself was
buoyant enough to follow without an effort. Children posses an
unestimated sensibility to whatever is deep or high, in imagination or
feeling, so long as it is simple, likewise. It is only the artificial and the
complex that bewilders them (1163).
To say that children must become parrhesiasts is not at all a romanticization of
childhood: this is already the situation where ideas of children are segregated from the
rest of society. It is no more a romanticization than when Melville wrote that Americans
should have missionaries come from "primitive" tribes come to the United States rather
than to send missionaries to convert primitives to our form of civilization.
4.6.16 Sixteenth Series of Little Dioeenes and the Humanities
It is a modest acknowledgement that one's enterprises are far from perfect when
one admits and welcomes outsider perspectives and actually listens unconditionally.
Consider that all enterprises are progressively going bankrupt of human capital and all
the more of originality. Does it not then behoove all enterprises to think of education as
the process by which they put themselves into the receivership of the enterprise of youth?
457
As Melville wrote, "It is better to fail in originality, than to succeed in imitation" (527).
The danger of the flattered King is that he should seek his pleasure only in imitations
while thinking he is praising the real thing.
This attitude is as secretly modern as Deleuze's and Melville's wall of
uncemented stonesa very New England image and to some extent a radical Puritan one.
The good is only the product and the means of an antagonistic and universal war of truth.
It would be the product of something like Foucault's description of the Cynic life as, "a
militancy in the open, as it were, that is to say, addressed to absolutely everyone"
(Courage to Truth 284). Do Americans want to make their young writers into militants?
It is in so far as minor literature is the natural enemy of civilization as we know it that
education should become the process of making youth the dearest friend and most trusted
confidant by all enterprises that want to maximize on the capital invested in them.
This is not a question of preference, but an obligation in any modern ethics to say
to youth, not as Socrates did to Alcibiades, "Know thyself," but instead to say, if you
want to yield true power then, youth, begin by telling me the truth about myself. The
deceptive simplicity of the ordinary goals of humanistic study are evident in accurate
rendition by Geoffrey Harpham of the "traditional rationales for humanistic study ...
condensed into a single sentence." He describes the humanities as that through which
the scholarly study of documents and artifacts produced by human beings
in the past enables us to see the world from different points of view so that
we may better understand ourselves (23).
458
But what happens when the reflection of human documents to the self relies on
legitimizing itself by privileging the preparation of youth's selves, the inculcation of
youth with an adult and mature viewpoint that is predetermined for use in the network of
enterprises behind the education? Such a humanistic-Socratic-paternalistic confidence
game, in a biopolitical society of control, is all too likely to ironically follow its leader
and thereby to leave the pages of minor literature as blank as a tabula rasa. It would miss
the different viewpoints that are not offered by history in itself, but by youth's
confrontation with the histories that are embedded in the very enterprises which are
presently constructing the world we live in.
The final chapter of Melville's The Confidence-Man offers a final illustration of
the trajectory of the tangled web of confidence-games that deny the parrhesia of youth a
determining role in the network of adult enterprises. Chapter 45 shows Frank Goodman
to be an adult who would not extend his philanthropic ear to the words of a child any
more than he would give his hand to a clever backwoods Cynic. Goodman is not in the
market for truth.
In the cabin late at night, Goodman borrows a bible from an Old Man, and the
two have just finished discrediting apocrypha from the bible that trouble Goodman's idea
of faith in his fellow man. "To distrust the creature, is a kind of distrusting of the
Creator" (243: 45) reasons the Old Man. After they summarily dismiss such unnerving
doubts, a child-beggar arrives silently to yet further disturb them. He brandishes a
mysterious miniature door. In response, the Old Man ushers the strange boy away,
"Go thy ways with thy toys, child."
459
"Now, may I never get so old and wise as that comes to," laughed the
boy through his grime; and, by so doing, disclosing leopard-like teeth, like
those of Murillo's wild beggar-boy's (243).
The little Diogenes should be considered one of Melville's greatest originals though
the beggar-boy appears only briefly to sell the old man a portable lock made for travelers
at risk of theft. The boy demonstrates the operation of this lock on his little door. The old
man also buys a money belt to further defend from pickpockets and, as part of the deal,
the child throws in a "counterfeit detector" for detecting counterfeit bank notes. It is one
last all-too-obvious hint that maybe the reader should have been trying harder to detect
some counterfeit where there seemed to be an original.
The Cosmopolitan refuses the money-belt because he is faithfully confirmed in his
belief that he belongs in that kind of fellowship that exists among the protected
confidential top-men, the kind of professionals committed to austere gain and who preach
charity in their spare time. He carries his money loose but without intention to share it
and the child mocks Goodman claiming that he is taking his chances as one might by
pissing out of doors without observing the direction of the wind.
"Loose bait ain't bad," said the boy, "look a lie and find the truth; don't
care about a Counterfeit Detector, do ye? or is the wind East, d'ye think?"
"Child," said the old man in some concern, "you mustn't sit up any
longer, it affects your mind; there, go away, go to bed."
"If I had some people's brains to lie on, I would," said the boy, "but
planks is hard, you know."
460
"Go, childgo, go!"
"Yes, child,yes, yes," said the boy, with which roguish parody, by
way of conge, he scraped back his hard foot on the woven flowers of the
carpet (246: 45).
The little Diogenes is ready to dream away on the cushy brains of Goodman and
his friend. The child is a modern reminder of the savage intelligence that is there to be
harnessed in a little Shakespeare born today in any ghetto of the world. We might further
modernize the image by imagining that nowadays the grimy appearance of such a little
Diogenes might be due to his having just come from picking copper and rare earth
elements out of a brown-field covered with the burned plastic of discarded portable
electronic devices. "Oh! Paradise of Bachelors! and oh! Tartarus of Maids!"
176
176
In "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids," Melville's prophet goes to
a mysterious templar in "the stony heart of stunning London" to "dine among the banded
Bachelors, and see their convivial eyes and glasses sparkle" (109). In the next chapter, he
visits a factory hidden amongst some frozen mountains in northern New England.
"Machinerythat vaunted slave of humanityhere stood menially
served by human beings, who served mutely and cringingly as the slave
serves the Sultan. The girls did not so much seem accessory wheels to the
general machinery as mere cogs to the wheels" (120).
He inquisitively wonders that "the girls don't cough." His little tour guide reassures him,
"Oh, they are used to it" (121).
As he follows the paper into its final formative process, it becomes a white wall or
screen upon which a projection suddenly appears as if the index of the process of its
formerly mystified process of manufacture.
A fascination fastened on me. I stood spell-bound and wandering in my
soul. Before my eyesthere, passing in slow procession along the
wheeling cylinders, I seemed to see, glued to the pallid incipience of the
pulp, the yet more pallid faces of all the pallid girls I had eyed that heavy
day. Slowly, mournfully, beseechingly, yet unresistingly, they gleamed
along, their agony dimly outlined on the imperfect paper, like the print of
the tormented face on the handkerchief of Saint Veronica (125).
461
Can one really count on a cinema to come, or on a "people to come" as the
Deleuzian refrain goes? The media theory of Herman Melville may, as far as we can
imagine it, be silent on that point. But, it was only Melville's silence, his skillful hiding
behind the masks of his cracked prophets that yields his treatment of the American
problem as if it were hidden in plain sight. Does a biopolitical oikeiosis without nostalgia
still have a chance to reconcile originality with secondary humanity into a universe of
people and goods? Can the future of youth marketing undo the distinction between firm-
specific and general knowledge through an educational program of minor literature
comprised of civil rituals of parrhesia! Can education encourage the general study of
human documents to provide the Shakespeares being born on the Ohio with all those
tools necessary toin the very process of educationmaximally impact the entire
network of overlapping enterprises that comprise contemporary culture. All of this seems
tantamount to asking: Can Diogenes become king?
The more likely and less untimely path for the future of an education in the
marketing confidence games of biopolitical societies of control is portrayed quite clearly
in the situation of the old man and Frank Goodman after the boy exits from Melville's
satire "by way of conge." The candles are burning out. The frail old man in the cabin of
the Fidele complains that he could not find any life-preservers where he had been assured
that they would be.
Naturally, the heat of that room is too much for Melville's prophet. His final words
certainly recall those of the attorney from Bartleby, "Oh! Paradise of Bachelors! and oh!
Tartarus of Maids!" (126) In this story the tabula rasa of the young women working
becomes black and thereby indistinguishable from the white wall of signification that
Bartleby was forced to stare at, that Deleuze and Guattari write Christ bounced off of and
that which Ahab tried and failed to pierce.
462
Reassuring his friend in response to his concerns, Goodman acts not out of
diabolical evil but out of stupidity taught to flatter itself as slyness. He offers a chamber
pot to his sleepy friend. He has heard that such things can double as life-preservers! The
Old Man is astounded and due to Goodman's cheers of confidence and mutual flattery, he
is also exceptionally grateful.
"Why, indeed, now! Who would have thought it? that a life-
preserver? That's the very stool I was sitting on, ain't it?"
"It is. And that shows that one's life is looked out for, when he
ain't looking out for it himself... you could have confidence in that stool
for a special providence."
"Then, good-night, good-night; and Providence have both of us in
its good keeping."
"Be sure it will," eying the old man with sympathy, as for the
moment he stood, money-belt in hand, and life-preserver under arm, "be
sure it will, sir, since in Providence, as in man, you and I equally put trust.
But, bless me, we are being left in the dark here. Pah! what a smell, too"
(250-1).
Call it intentional unenlightenment when what we were looking for was
unintentional enlightenment. And though there may yet be no small money still to flow
from such contrivances, yet surely there be no great health in diddling for a sequel that is
not to come. With the words that end the final novel published during his lifetime,
463
Melville's narrator smokily ventures a little unreliable speculation on the future of such
American problems. "Something further may follow of this Masquerade."
464
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