2005 Fears of the Century Fears of the Century
Fear and all the figures of terror such as being scared, violence, fright in the face of catastrophe, the psychological and social varieties of phobia have become in one century the strongest modes of social connection.
The need for security, the recourse to all forms of control, whether they be of moral, police or military nature are consequently the inevitable corollaries which too often today substitute for a political programme.
Most of the analyses carried out on this history of violence and fears in the 20th century have generally considered that the 39-45 war and the atrocities of Nazism marked a decisive breaking point for Europe, and perhaps even for the entire world. How can we understand the barbarity? How can we keep its memory? How can we transmit a narrative which also opens onto a future of humanity in that most precious of things it produces: its meaning? The century seems cut in two.
I suggest a hypothesis: far from reducing the importance of Nazism in the earthquake that our confidence in (the ethics of) humanity has suffered, I think that it is the extreme point of development of a process which it nonetheless does not complete, as violence and fear, terror and all the different figures of fanaticism and hate have never since ceased harassing us.
It seems to me that it is during the preceding war that everything was put into place which make possible the shadows and cruelty of the war-to-come, now major components of our present reality. Questioning the collective responsibility for Nazism means not only looking for the real complicities which permitted and accompanied it but also understanding what was shared twenty years earlier by those who were once again to meet in conflict. The fundamental traits of modernity were constituted in the first quarter of the 20th century. The beginning of the century is stamped by the seal of novelty: the industrial world, urban development, the birth of cinema, of psychoanalysis, the Russian revolution are some of the new components among many others which transformed the way of living and thinking and which give birth to a protoplasmic multiplicity of intimate fears and collective terrors. The trial of the “drôle de guerre” was that experienced by all nations who had sent their troops to share the same horror, the same fright facing the industrial organisation of death, sharing the same view of the millions of bodies of soldiers and civilians, of the innumerable ruins of cities and villages, of the armed crowds who marched on parade, or the unarmed crowds who fled, of the anonymous massacres where nobody knew any more who was killing whom and why it was necessary to kill.
Céline knew how to write about this fear and said that he had found the source of the hatred which would never again leave him. Neither Bardamu nor Robinson are good citizens who leave to die in honour, but obscure unknowns crushed by the industrial machinery of war. Céline submitted the draft of Voyage to the publisher NRF in 1932 and Denoël published
it the same year. In his letters, Céline acknow-ledged that it took him twenty years to be able to express the fear and disgust the horrors of 1914 had aroused in him and which had long seemed impossible to transmit. He had to find that particular writing style which broke all literary conventions to formulate the experience of a new world of unprecedented cruelty, ushering in a world which would be even worse, barren of all hope.
What genealogy does Céline suggest for himself? He said it was reading Freud which set the violence of his sensitivity to war. He considered that the theory of impulse had done more for literature than the reading of Stendhal, Balzac or Zola. On the other side of the borders, Musil described the new phenomenological subject of disillusion and of desire without object. In 1914, Alban Berg in Vienna started work on Wozzeck which he finished between 1917 and 1921: he worked on dissonance at the heart of his count-erpoint, and atonal technique allowed him to express and share with the listener the excrucia-ting violence of a drama that was about
relations of both intimacy and war. Céline, Musil and Berg give threatening and communicable form to the reign of new terrors. Because they are immense artists, their creations are cries of alarm which strive to announce the arrival of a ruthless and desperate world, but which are also cries of hope as their artistic gestures accomplish a kind of redemption of desire and sharing. These are acts of resistance inscribed in the very flesh of an ever more ravaged humanity.
These are the years when all the imaginary
values that had nourished the old conflicts
collapsed: honour, patriotism, bravery, heroism, epic exaltation but also respect for one’s fellow man, the legitimacy of frontiers, the meaning of a people or that of humanity, in a word, the “belief in the soul” as Musil liked to sum it up. Everything disappeared in the cross-tremors of earthquakes engendered by the marriage of industry and war. There functions, in the new subject, a work of extenuating meaning which transforms the imaginary animation of flesh into a henceforth mechanized body, wearing a uniform, traversed by fleeting impulses which can be joyful or deadly, caught up in frames of time that are as multiple as they are unstable. Romantic solitude has become the isolation of modern man for whom the only outlet on offer is the threatening consolation of incorporation into an aggregate, via mass meetings.
The suggestion formulated here is that we look at a selection of documents and fiction films which show how, since the beginning of the century and more specifically during the First World War and after, the figures of threat, of fear and fright are constructed through images which register both facts and their imaginary treatment. I call imaginary treatment both material which comes under the heading of creative fiction and that which arises from pro-paganda operations and the manipulation of belief.
And it is true that in 1914 cinema became the major organ for inscribing memory and transmitting facts but also for manufacturing opinion, inspiring idealised or hateful conviction. The cinema was part and parcel of the combat machinery whether for propaganda or information purposes; a cinema which was already an active player in the constitution of the instances we propose to question, i.e. the crowd, the machine and the person considered each in its relation to the figures of desire.
It is on this occasion that cinema comes on the stage of History and in several ways.
By its very definition, it is the art of the new times when the crowd and the machine are inextricable. The cinema is no doubt at once the place where fear can be felt in complete safety because the menace is imaginary, but it is also the place where fear and fright can be the object of violent imaginary manipulation by the collective group. Television today sums up in its acts the media future of fear and fright. Hence the strange combination, characteristic of cinema, of childish and social fears. This inevitable combination is what makes cinema a pleasure, as it takes in charge the psychic economics of story telling, and turns it into the production of politics because this group fear, experienced among adults, raises the problems of collective panic, police security and the voluntary organisation of fear to force submission.
My problem will thus be: how is the future of reality and the collective imaginary prepared during that particular war?
Of course we do not pretend to completely cover the problem. I have therefore chosen the three main axes announced above which together touch on the reality of war and the history
of cinema, and are likely to shed light on the figures of what I call “the fears of the century”.
Our entire approach has, as the indispensable starting point for our historical reflection, the historian Laurent Veray, a specialist of the period with expert knowledge of all the photographic and film archives of the Great War. He is the one who will introduce us to what cinema was between 1914 and 1918. As soon as the war broke out in 1914, the cinema service of the armies was created with responsibility for accompanying all military events in order to provide information and, above all, propa-ganda. But it is also the new memory of the century which takes form, its cinematic memory becoming a key figure in the collective memory. To show or not to show was the key preoccu-pation on both sides of the front. To galvanise,
celebrate, not to demoralise, to pretend that undying values were continuing, the values that daily experience was continually altering. On this subject, we have to compare the newsreels, propaganda and fiction films which, during the war and immediately afterwards, aimed at giving an account of what was going on.
First theme: the machine (factories, arms, means of transport, trains, planes…), figures of the “mechanical”, the fear and fascination of gearwheels. On this side of the coin, whether diabolical in fact or simply pictured as diabolical, of technical progress, machines take on the form both of industrial rationality and the mechanisation of the subject. The fascination with mechanisms and their predictability is connected to a disenchantment with liberty. The 14-18 war was the true breaking point which reversed the promises of the Enlightenment and the trust in reason. When war becomes an industrial activity, when the new weapons allow the distribution of mass murder at a distance, when machines can carry soldiers and casualties over thousands of kilometres, it is not only the feeling of belonging to a common species which is damaged but also the political meaning of the world that we share is brought into fundamental question. It is true that industrialisation is inseparable from the economic exploitation of conflict and war. The fears that result are connected to the feeling by entire societies that their daily and historical life depends solely on the mechanics of the market. This part will be under my direction.
Second theme: the crowd. Real and fictional images of all the multitudes and all the gatherings: filming the uncountable, filming the collective body and the function of the indiscernible, filming the mass just when the image of the people is disappearing, filming an invasive proliferation which is transformed into a blind, uncontrollable and threatening force, filming the disappearance of singularities, the erasure of subjectivities in a quasi-animal appearance
of swarming… The cinema records very exactly what Freud was trying to analyse at the same moment when he made the hypothesis of life and death impulses (1915). This axis will
be presented and coordinated by Jean-Michel Frodon.
Third theme: the subject, the filmed body, through chance encounters, in the heart of conflicts, an anonymous element in the crowd, the man in the street, a singular unit with his speech, fear, transformed into cannon fodder or reduced to the anonymous fragments of mass graves. Subjectivity is reduced to a symptom. Whether he be named Bardamu, Ulrich, Wozzek, Arnheim, or John Doe, the person pictured there in the name of all is recorded in the heart of cinema by the means of actors’ bodies just like those of the extras. We shall question at the same time the cinematic figure of the extra and ask: what is he representing? Who is he? And onwards to the tomb of the unknown soldier and to the anonymity of mass graves. It is Laurie Laufer who will guide our reflection.
Finally we will consider the contemporary industries of fear, terror and security. We are caught between two orders which are nothing more than figures of dictatorship without dictators, for such is the mode of failure of all politic-al life. The empire of vision which I call icono-cracy is inseparable from the empire of fear that I call phobocracy. The mass, the machine and the reification of the subject are the three modes of modern fright. The anonymity of power is accompanied by a plethoric industry of information, entertainment and visual messages. The seat of power no longer states its name, it no longer has a face, there is only a face for fear, fright, terror and the countertype of that particular face is that of a seductive and consumerist ident-ification with idealised, safeguarded, policed, uniformly produced bodies. This modern typo-logy, which is the direct inheritor of the ravages of the last century, completely informs television programming which has no difficulty and no scruple whatever in passing directly, “without transition” as the TV pastiche of famed French newsreader Poivre d’Arvor would say, from real-ity programmes to the Iraq war, from partici-patory games to the tsunami, from a child sex trial to a sentimental series. The tempo of terror and its consolations, threat and the comfort of security, the rhetoric of dirt followed by that of cleansing… This is what we will examine more closely with Hervé Nisic.
By questioning the fears of the century we of course wish to open a vigorous debate with those inheritors of the 20th century who question what this “crisis” consists of which everyone is talking about to characterise what can be called a century but which is neither necessarily hundred years long nor begins or ends with round numbers. Never has History subjected us to eruptions generating such a feeling of discontinuity and rupture. It is the most recent past which seems to be rushing away the most rapidly, and everyone seeks in some distant past what could nourish new hopes or reasons to believe. That is why I think that this moment of reflection on fear is only one road among others to become conscious of the true proximity of our suffering with those of the generations who immediately preceded us.
Re-establishing continuity, recovering our heri-tage is the only way to reconstruct meaning in a long and shared temporality.
Coordination : Coordination: Marie-José Mondzain