Resentment

How does a film explore a concept? Would it have to be a film about philosophy, a film that serves philosophy by a certain economy of its form? Surely, in this case the film would have to frame thinking personae in a minimalist style. It would need them as talking heads since it aims at capturing conceptual knowledge. For the latter is not – at least at its point of highest integrity – enmeshed in the unnecessary detail of the everyday. How, or even: can such a film be made by an anthropologist? If yes, would it not entail forsaking some disciplinary responsibility towards the importance of everyday reality beyond the abstract play of concepts?

These general questions may guide some of the future receptions of “The Toxic Reigns of Ressentiment”. Since the film will generate interest within scholarly circles it is worthwhile to investigate the disciplinary desires it may relate to. However, there is a different line of thought to be followed where all formal and disciplinary certainties are put to the test by the film’s images themselves. Before I come to this second argument through which I try to unearth the film’s highest degree of intensity – namely the relation between face, voice and concepts – I need to shortly address the first, the film’s topic: resentment.

The film begins with a vista of the campus of Princeton University, the institution that has provided the project’s funding and features with Alexander Nehamas and Gyan Prakash, two of the philosophers interviewed. American universities have been the genius loci for debates on resentment due to what is often called the “culture wars”. Although these conflicts involve a whole lot of culture, they also index different concepts of the self. The strong, self-reliant liberal autonomous subject is being challenged from two sides – a self-consciously theoretical-political practice (post-structuralism and other non-humanist approaches) and a new political economy that draws on digital infrastructures. The latter datafies human behavior to sell it as a commodity. Moral panics, indignities, resentments and outrages are not just the stuff of human struggle and resistance (although they are also that), but drive some of information capital’s economy. The particular urgency of the film is derived from the rise of populist politics worldwide that capitalizes on this new conjuncture.

Too often, resentment has been captured in liberal stereotypes about its undesirability for a functioning democratic culture often designating its others as resentful losers. Hence, the renewed importance to come to terms with a lot of negative emotion untethered from the welfare states’ former organizational forms and subjectivities. This happens largely within the context of increasingly global movements of capital, groups of human beings, ideas and vulnerabilities. What the film does for this debate is to clarify the political stakes of a bundle of negative emotions called resentment, referring to indignation, anger, ire, bitterness, and a desire for revenge. This bundle is shown to be either transformative and/or illusionary, involving all axis of discrimination and exploitation while raising some fundamental questions about how to imagine emancipatory politics today. They may create an altogether new morality or could enter a triangulated space with existing institutions that may or may not deliver upon their promise of justice.

In the very first sequence we enter from the vista of a pretty New England campus on a summer’s day into the dark underbelly of emotional intensity. Led by a heavy metal track we descent via a pan-shot through the gully into a scene where an expressionist dancer’s black silhouette is portrayed against the background of a sewage system. On a screen behind the dancer’s contortions flicker news attraction montages of several moral panics that resentment is currently attributed to. We get a sense of claustrophobia and impasse.

So, what is the difference between a face and talking heads? A philosophical film – more precisely a film about a philosophical concept in audio-visual form – would likely engage directly with its content. This is precisely what I assume might happen in its reception. Audiences may take the sober voice of the talking philosopher’s ‘head on’ by either challenging their claims or by siding with some of their statements. Of course, there is, as usual, a disconnect between philosophical debates and the more open ended publics that a film “conjures into being” to quote Michael Warner (2002). What comes from a conceptual domain when it is opened up to the opinion of strangers (to the specialist debate). Making a film about philosophers renders their work impure, it makes it vulnerable by changing the medium, time and space wherein their thinking is concentrated and sustainable (slow paced textual production). It organizes their speech through the power of editing according to the aesthetic and political intentions of the filmmaker and funding institutions. Whatever else may happen in the circuits of communication, one thing is sure: the speech of philosophers’ in this film becomes inseparable from their faces.

The highly controlled black-cube background and lighting creates a play of shadows that indexes emotions and intensities beyond talking heads. But there is more to this mise-en-scene. We are dealing with prominent academic figures, some perhaps star personae in our little world. The black-box and dramatic shadow play stresses precisely this social status. It also strips them off everyday contexts and yanks them into the domain of conceptual abstraction – not mediated by a common political understanding of resentment but by the filmmaker’s framing of their protagonists’ appearances through the black box. Thus, it is tempting to bring these personae and their work in relation to the performance of their faces. The formal minimalism of the film affects the spectator to invest into the face-image forensics. These forensics work via slight gradual variations in affective intensity moving along a field of tension established by light, shots, posture, persona, speech and bodily expression. To give some examples: can’t we see Nietzsche’s ironical Übermensch in Nehamas’ occasional condescending smile, a certain indignity in Grayson Hunt’s hurt, the smirk of Robert Pfaller’s hedonistic communism, a sensitivity and grace in Wendy Brown’s rhetorical skill as foucauldian aesthetics of existence?

Where we would perhaps assume sober neutrality - if that has ever been the case for a film that involves faces – we find lines of gravity, gesture and grimace. The speculation ad-persona encounters its intellectual boundary in the stereotypes we want to assign to them. Say I’m a staunch nieztschean, will I see Nehamas’ smile as a noble, aristocratic and affirmative? Does Pfaller really smirk while commenting on political correctness? Perhaps it is just a dignified amusement about the absurdities of micro-politics? Is Wendy Brown really performing some aesthetical ethics in the graceful movement of sentences and gestures or is it some intellectual armor, some deformation profesionelle? The face is ad-persona – it enables us to open a whole new world of assigned subjectivity that lingers in the ethical space between the indexical signifier (face) and the signified (theory). It makes it possible to charge theory with the popular appeal of a theorist’s persona as acquired in some academic circles today. All of this reaches us in ways that seem to confuse and render impure the conceptual terrain proper.

Now, we are finally in the position to explore the relation between the voice of the filmmaker, the voices of the philosophers and their faces. As a metaphor, the voice refers to the subjective organization of the filmic form (mis-e-scene, editing etc.) – the filmmaker’s voice being the main organizing principle amongst a film’s polyphony. The dark background, controlled light and stark contrasts position the faces in relation to our expectation of negative emotions. How does the face get affected by the particular conceptual stance the thinkers have vis-a-vis resentment? How does the film relate these via editing and mis-en-scene? For example: is there a rather hard transition from the coherence between face and words when Robert Pfaller says that the left was known to speak bluntly? We see Pfaller slightly from the right with his torso diagonally positioned. While speaking, we may assume some neurotic gestural overdrive (fitting for a psychoanalyst who is a friend of Slavoj Zizek). In this case, it involves gun-like two finger combinations, middle-fingers either shown as a sign of insult or an index to some imagined opponent (I take Pfaller as an example because I’m sure he can handle it).

This is where the anthropologist Schaflechner enters the scene. The film subverts the neat and thoughtful elaborations of their contributors. Judging by Schaflechner’s work on the Hindu goddess Hinlaj Devi (2018) and his former film “Thrust into Heaven” (2017) on forced conversion, the problem of representation and the difficulty to claim truth qua voice always involves some notions of an underbelly. It is in the filmic medium where the visceral dynamic emerges as a particular kind of contingency: that between the face and the voice. Here we encounter a wild reality that escapes the strict and restrained formal approach of the film. Every line of facial variation moves along the margins of established meaning of vocal and textual authority. After all, the improper, unruly, popular and marginal are the key domains of anthropology.

Isn’t this opening towards an interpretation of the philosophers’ persona already an important achievement? Here philosophy is taken to the body, entangled in emotions, dramatizing the thinkers’ thinking. But can we take the face further still? Yes, because “The Toxic Reigns of Ressentiment” is not a film that communicates a philosophical concept at its highest intensity – it is not about voice, about a conceptual tradition, it is not a debate. Only some sequences are edited to suggest conflicting positions. In fact, it is the voice of the filmmaker that anchors the polyphony in a topical arrangement. His own position within this arrangement remains as unclear as the actual fields of force from which the protagonists have emerged. So, let me suggest a path towards Toxic Reign’s newness here: What if the film’s line of flight is to pose the question of what a face can do (Richard Rusthon)? This questions is in need of some unpacking. It involves, first, to clarify what we usually expect faces to do and, second, what possibilities exceed these expectations if we were to take them more serious. After all, what does it mean to say that a face can communicate something (see also Rushton 2002, 219)? Let us rehearse Gilles Deleuze’s “ordinary” roles of the face:

Ordinarily, three roles of the face are recognisable: it is individuating (it distinguishes or characterizes each person); it is socialising (it manifests a social role); it is relational or communicating (it ensures not only communication between two people, but also in a single person, the internal agreement between his character and his role). (Deleuze 1986, 9)

What I have done above is precisely to enter the realm of the ordinary: I was individuating the protagonists, I was socializing them by bringing them into contact with politics, institutions and structures, and, I was relating them to personas. Keeping in mind its ordinary function we can now turn to Richard Rusthons’ elaboration of the face through Deleuze’s concepts of the virtual and the actual. The virtual is not another level of reality but rather our expectation or imagination of the real (for example our expectation of not falling over when we take the next step forward or having written a book anticipating a tenure position for it). But the virtual is also how we sense what will happen beyond the threshold– the potential that something identifiable becomes unrecognizable. Thus, the face is not really communicating in the sense given above: there cannot be an expression between an academic persona’s character and her or his role in a film as the provider of conceptual thinking. Rather, I am interested in “the direction of the thoughts, feelings, and affects that energize the face” (Rushton 2002, 228) and how it will “give rise to action” (ibid.). In some sense, there is simply a face and there are simply words: “Following the arrival of a face, a communication between sender and receiver can occur, but by this stage the face will no longer be a face-for its activity of facing will now be concluded, and it will be on its way to somewhere else” (Rushton 2002, 225). The face becomes virtual (an opening) and the film becomes actual (a matter of our experience) by way of its performance.

The last sequence of the film provoked me to think towards the direction mentioned in the passage above. What do we see and feel there? The sewage system in red light, the faces of the interviewees with shifting shadows passing by on a screen in slow motion, the expressionist dancer moving along the affective edge of the metal track - no longer with the images but by ignoring them now becoming a singular motion. The dancer shares with the face that s/he may be turned into a “model of representation” (Rushton 2002, 2019). Of course, a face differs from contorted movements. The latter seem, however, to be part of a doublet consisting of signifier (movement of the dancer) and signified (its relation to the images on the screen). This model is different from a representation where, for example, a painter intends to depict something. The expressionist dancer’s movement is an affective force dependent on the spectators deciphering power. In this last sequence, however, this potential contract breaks down: the dancer is no longer expressive of something. What we get instead is the face without representation – all of the speakers are captured in a slow-burning affective force that is toxic. I experience this not as a sign of ressentiment referenceable by being aligned to every single one of these academic’s conceptual thinking or the differences between them. We may understand that the voice tethers the personae back to the topos but that isn’t the interesting point to make.

Rather, it is here that the dancer is free, it is in the affective domain proper – face, music and dance – beyond the capture by language, that the filmmakers’ voice announces an aesthetical-ethics. Although carefully curated by the filmmakers we are still dealing with an index of an affective force – the kind of wild reality that anthropologists are looking for – whose acknowledgement in politics may have some transformative potential (cathartic, redemptive or joyous). Could we imagine to consume the poison like Lord Krishna and emerge stronger with a sense of a more sustainable relation between subjectivities, negative emotions and the political?

References
Deleuze, Gilles. 1986. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. London: Athlone Press

Rushton, Richard. 2002. What can a Face do?: On Deleuze and Faces. Cultural Critique, No. 51 (Spring, 2002), pp. 219-237