Faculty Lecture, Margaret Flinn: "1930s 'Banlieutopia' and the Films of Julien Duvivier"
Guest Writer: Cameron Riopelle

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

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Duvivier 1934 
[On Monday, March 12, 2012, Margaret Flinn, (French, Media & Cinema Studies), gave the Unit for Criticism’s annual faculty lecture titled "1930s 'Banlieutopia' and the Films of Julien Duvivier". Below is a response from Cameron Riopelle, a graduate student in Sociology]

“Cinema and the Curious Property of Heterotopia”

Written by Cameron Riopelle (Sociology)

"Third principle. The heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible. Thus it is that the theater brings onto the rectangle of the stage, one after the other, a whole series of places that are foreign to one another; thus it is that the cinema is a very odd rectangular room, at the end of which, on a two-dimensional screen, one sees the projection of a three-dimensional space."
--Michel Foucault “Of Other Spaces” (Foucault, 25)

The modern banlieue (French suburbs) are often sites of poverty, ghettoization, and unrest. The banlieues house mostly poor immigrant communities. Banlieues have been represented in the cinema, sometimes exploitively, through realism or action-oriented representation, or both. Often the movies taking place in these suburbs depict North African characters. This genre is known as Cinéma de banlieue or “banlieue cinema.”

In the period between World Wars I and II, however, the banlieues were represented in movies as working-class utopias. At this time, occupants of the banlieue were primarily white and working-class. Accordingly, Popular Front filmmakers idealized these communities. Although filmmaker Julien Duvivier was considered a second-rate film director by French film critics of his time, and though his works were apolitical, he shared in this idealization of the suburbs.

Margaret Flinn, University of Illinois professor of French and Media & Cinema Studies, discussed this shared idealization in Foucauldian terms, drawing on two Duvivier films Au Bonheur des Dames (1930) and La Belle Equipe (1936). Ignoring the obligatory movie romance plots, in both movies the filmmaker is concerned with the relationship between city center and banlieue. The banlieues are portrayed as places where working-class characters go to escape, relax, be free, and close to nature. They are therefore utopic in a mainstream sense but not in a Foucault’s sense. According to Foucault, a utopia is a space without -- and the banlieue only make sense in the context of place, especially since in these films the space of the banlieue is intentionally created as a space in which actors will perform the drama (Foucault, 24).

Banlieue and city are defined in relation to one another. A dichotomous list appears simple at first glance: 

CITY                           BANLIEUE
Real                            Idyllic
Dystopian                  Utopian
Industrial                    Pastoral
Dirty                             Clean
Technological            Natural
Moral                            Immoral
Individual                     Collective

La Haine 1995
However, Flinn complicates these terms by bringing in Foucault’s concept of heterotopia. By introducing human action into these apparently utopian spaces, both on the part of characters acting out plots and audience members watching the screen in the real world, the banlieues are not utopic but heterotopic, having "the curious property of being in relation to all other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they happen to mirror, designate, or reflect" (Foucault, 24). Contradiction arises as these connections between real/unreal and place/non-place seem to co-exist. All the counteractions between city and suburb that appear dichotomous in fact exist simultaneously in all places at once in the (represented) city center, the (represented) banlieues, as well as the real-world referents known to the audience.

Flinn thus argues that the two Duvivier films depict utopian banlieues that become heterotopic upon their viewing. There emerges an ungrounded simultaneity between the act of observation and the constructions of reality such viewership entails. Behind the viewer’s perception of the film is the director’s construction of a physical set. And in between is the contradiction of an odd rectangular room (movie showing space) with the two-dimensional screen on which is projected a reflection of the three-dimensional world.
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Timothy Campbell
"A Common Milieu: Italian Thought After 1968 and 1989"

Sunday, September 5, 2010

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A Common Milieu: Italian Thought After 1968 and 1989
Written by Timothy Campbell (Cornell University)

[Guest writer Timothy Campbell was a speaker at the Unit for Criticism's Spring 2010 conference, BIOS: Life, Death, Politics. His below "manifesto" on Italian thought is written in conjunction with Cornell University's upcoming September 24-25 conference, Commonalities: Theorizing the Common in Italian Thought. It also anticipates Roberto Esposito's October 2-5 visit to the University of Illinois as the Unit's first Nicholson Distinguished Visiting Scholar.]

For the better part of a decade the position of Italian thought in the Anglo-American academy has increasingly grown in importance. From issues as far ranging as bioethics and bioengineering, to euthanasia, to globalization, to theorizing gender, to the war on terror, works originating in Italy have played a significant, perhaps even the dominant, role in setting the terms and conditions of these debates. Indeed it might well be that no contemporary thought more than Italian enjoys greater success today in the United States. If twenty years of postmodernism and poststructuralism were in large measure the result of French exports to the United States—Derrida, Lacan, Deleuze, and Foucault—today a number of Italian philosophical exports are giving rise to a theoretical dispositif that goes under a variety of names: post-Marxist, posthuman, or most often biopolitical. Yet the fact that Italian thought enjoys such enormous success in the United States and elsewhere begs an important question, one put to me polemically recently by a prominent Italian philosopher. Is there really such a thing as contemporary Italian thought? And if there is what in the world do its proponents have in common?

By way of responding, it might be useful to recall some details about the recent reception of Italian thought in the American academy. In the aftermath of the end of the postmodern—which a number of American observers savored as spelling the end of the use and abuse of philosophy by large numbers of literary critics—two works appeared in English within a span of three years: Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire. Stepping into the void left by the departure of what in the United States was known as "theory," these works made a number of bold theoretical claims about the relation between political power and individual life (Agamben) and globalization and collective life (Hardt and Negri), claims that uncannily—sometimes almost prophetically—addressed some of the most pressing issues in our current state of affairs. Equally a number of important works of Italian feminism appeared over roughly the same period. Works by Adriana Cavarero and Rosi Braidotti, among others, deeply influenced a whole generation of American theorists in fields like gender studies, political philosophy, and law. Looking back it's difficult to overestimate the influence of all these figures when accounting for the intellectual success of Italian thought today. Certainly it became possible for other voices to be heard, Paolo Virno, and more recently Franco Berardi, Roberto Esposito, and Maurizio Lazzarato among others.

But to take up again the question at hand: what do authors as seemingly different as Agamben and Negri, Berardi and Esposito, Braidotti and Bodei, or Cavarero and Virno have in common outside of the mere fact of writing in Italian? Beyond a common language, is there, for example, such a thing as a common Italian philosophical tradition of which they are all a part? Some, most notably, Mario Perniola, would say yes, one found in the elements of repetition, transmission, mixture, and body that together forged an Italian philosophical culture over the last 300 years. Deleuze and Guattari would have said no, arguing that Italy has historically "lacked a milieu" for philosophy. For them the reason for this lack could be found in Italy's proximity to the Holy See, which continually aborted philosophy across the peninsula, reducing Italian thought to mere rhetoric, philosophy's shadow, and allowing only for the occasional "comet" to briefly light up the philosophical sky.

Yet what if Italian thought today does in fact enjoy a milieu? What "event" or "events" in the recent past might have fashioned a milieu for the emergence of Italian thought? What would the features of that milieu look like?

Undoubtedly, the decade-long Italian 1968 would have played the decisive role. The votes on abortion, the emergence of counterculture and student and feminist movements, and changes in labor and production all deeply changed the space in which politics—as well as philosophy—was practiced. Indeed one of the central features of the Italian 1968 was precisely the emphasis on politics as philosophy and philosophy as a form (among others) of politics. We can see this in the place 1968 and 1977 awarded political militancy; in the increasing prominence given to questions of subjectivization; and more broadly in the birth of new forms of social and political life separated from those that had previously dominated.

Yet Italy’s long 1968 wasn't enough on its own. It was only with 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall that politics and philosophy truly begin to pass intensely into each other, to stay with the language of Deleuze and Guattari. Although it may seem less the case for those writing in Italy, when seen from the outside 1989 was experienced as trauma more in Italy than in the rest of Europe. The result forced a number of thinkers to re-examine the fundamental political and philosophical categories that had underpinned decades if not centuries of thought: what meaning would the end of a certain form of common life have for politics, for philosophy, for culture? Such a calling into question of the previous understanding of the common had the effect of reterritorializing politics and philosophy under new terms and new problematics, one of which will be “life,” broadly speaking. It is only when 1968 is considered as the motor for deterritorialization of the common in political theory and philosophy and 1989 as the turn toward its reterritorialization as newly mapped by (among other things) biopolitical theory that something like a milieu is constructed for contemporary Italian thought.

This is not to say that proponents of Italian thought share the same understanding of the common or even celebrate it. Clearly they do not. Yet the centrality of the common raises a number of questions about Italian thought and Italian public life today. What does it mean to be or have in common in 2010? What are the effects of questioning the weight of shared life and what possible futures are there for the common? How might singularities be thought together so as to create new forms of life and what kinds of co-habitations or contaminations might reinforce these new forms of life? These kinds of questions are ones Italian thought, in all its diversity, has placed at the forefront of contemporary theory, questions that in turn raise fundamental questions about the nature of relationality and of a politics that would seek to strengthen relations and to extend them in order to create yet further relationality. Such is the force of Hardt and Negri’s discussion of the capacity for love near the end of Commonwealth, though one can well imagine others, including a capacity for play, for attention, and for compassion too.

Yet the relationality implicit in these new forms of shared life doesn't only lead to greater and more positive capacities for relationality among singularities. The deterritorialization of the common as biopolitics, the posthuman or even insurrection by no means conjures away the specter of power; thus with greater capacity on the one hand comes the possibility of more intense and invasive forms of power on the other. The question then becomes: how are new forms of the common that are being forged today—shared singularities, mirror neurons, impersonality—also being reterritorialized and recontained, and by whom? Is it possible that more intense forms of relationality might signal a return to the very terms that earlier critiques of the common had attempted to uncover? On the one hand the recent success of social networking sites like facebook suggests that new forms of virtual relations involving vast numbers of "friends" are not only possible but involve ever greater exposure to others. On the other hand such exchanges continue to be premised on the notion that my body and my opinions belong to me, what the Invisible Committee unforgetably characterized as treating "our Self like a boring box office," using whatever prosthesis is at hand "to hold onto an I." In such a neo-liberal scenario, the circulation of information, of goods, of persons, of persons as goods is taken to mean a return to a common mode of being-together. It's a film we've seen countless times before: the common's reinscription in contexts less open to affect that are continually based upon a conflation of connnectivity with more open modes of relating.

These questions among others will be the foundation for a two-day conference sponsored by the journal diacritics to be held on the campus of Cornell University on September 24-25, 2010. The conference, titled "Commonalities: Theorizing the Common in Italian Thought," will bring together a number of Italian voices so as to think together not only the relation between Italy and the common but to consider emerging forms of the common and common life today as well as consider the efficacy of a term like the common for a progressive (bio)politics. Equally, the event, the first of its kind of recent memory in the United States, is an occasion to register the state of Italian thought today. When seen from the other side of the Atlantic, no other contemporary thought more than Italian seems better suited today to offer what Foucault called an ontology of the present. At a minimum, and pace my doubting Italian philosopher, the editorial and intellectual success of Italian thought merits a closer look.

Featured at the conference will be some of the leading philosophical figures from Italy today, including Franco Berardi, Remo Bodei, Cesare Casarino, Ida Dominijanni, Roberto Esposito, Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri. The conference will be transmitted over the internet at http://www.commonconf.com. A number of Cornell students will be blogging the conference live over the two days.



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Dan Colson, "Teaching in the Panopticon"

Sunday, April 4, 2010

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[Each fall the Unit for Criticism provides travel grants to select graduate student affiliates, inviting awardees to publish a post on Kritik about their paper. Below Dan Colson, a grad student affiliate in English, writes about conference paper he delivered in fall 2009.]

Teaching in the Panopticon

Written by Dan Colson (English)



Last fall I had the opportunity to present a paper on my experiences teaching an upper-division literature course in a medium-high security prison. I used my experiences in this unique teaching environment (defined in part by distinct racial, class, and gender formations) as the starting point for a discussion of my continued efforts to develop an effective pedagogy (for both a prison classroom and a University of Illinois classroom).

I started with some guiding questions that attempted to conceptualize the overlap of the university campus, the prison, and approaches to teaching through the institutional and disciplinary powers that structure both.

What is the role of transgression in teaching or learning? What do the knowledges we teach transgress against? Is it possible to teach transgression as a skill and how might I teach this skill in different settings? While I recognized that such a position might make some uncomfortable, I argued that transgressing discourses of legality is not entirely distinct from transgression against other knowledge regimes. Put differently, the value placed on “critical” thinking in the university, especially in the humanities, is an effort to teach students to transgress against–and hence transcend–other ideological formations. We encourage the ability to consider multiple ideas beyond provincial and static modes of thought, to weigh them against each other, and to choose the most reasonable, humane, and effective option. In many cases, this requires teaching students to transgress against inherited knowledge or, at the very least, to allow for the possibility that new knowledges can transgress against, and eventually replace, received wisdom.

Understanding power not as emanating from a recognizable monolith, but as a series of overlapping discourses and social relations–that is, exploring Michel Foucault’s concepts of discipline and governmentality–suggests that criminality is only one example of transgressive resistance. The discourse-power dyad that Foucault theorized may be inescapable, but counter-discourse and localized transgression of strategic power formations are still possible.

Though I admit that teaching in a prison is much different from teaching in a university, it raises the question of transgression or disruption as a pedagogical goal. The prison-classroom contains transgressive subjects subsequently inscribed as “criminal,” while the university contains potentially transgressive subjects who wish to be inscribed as “educated persons.” What to do with this lesson in these two settings is a persistent challenge.

In the traditional classroom, issues of politics, academic freedom, and the scope of humanities education all complicate the goal of teaching a nebulous “skill” that cannot be reduced to the apolitical professional knowledge that some advocate. Once we admit that learning and the advance of thought are inherently transgressive--or at least potentially so--we must ask: what knowledges do we want our students to transgress?

In prison, the questions are quite different. Is it appropriate to theorize learning as transgression in a setting where the consequences of criminality are all too visible? How do I teach intellectual transgression within an institution where transgression is met with severe reaction? At the conference, I confessed that I don’t have answers to all of these questions, but I do argue that it is worthwhile to explore the possibilities of what I call a pedagogy of criminality, a politicized orientation to institutional education from which I argue that transgression is valuable as such.
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