Mike Shapiro Day 1

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Mike Shapiro taught a course entitled GEOPOLITICS IN CINEMA. This class attempts a rethinking of the planetary impact of media such as cinema as a challenge to political thought.

NOTE: As with all my notes from the EGS, there will likely be mistakes because I did not record the lectures, I made notes as they spoke, so I am perhaps interpreting what they are saying as I am writing.

This class is going to bounce between his two most recent books.

What is the significance of Kant for me? He changed the grammar:

• Heidegger put it from "What is the thing?" to, "What is man?" Then it became, "How is man?"
  
• Nietzsche says, "Which one from the multiplicity?"
  
• The Kantian experience is a narrative structure, "What are the conditions for the experience of the thing?"
  
• Political Science, as a discipline, is in a pre-Kantian slumber.

My often asked-for methodology is in the introduction to my new book:

• Poeisis as method - beyond reproducing the setting and how it feels in order to illuminate the politics of urban space. A refractive interference between philosophy and literature. Interference understood in Deleuze's Cinema 2. I am offering a poetics of the city. Politics has been so involved in the State that it has lost attention on the City.
• Dickens' writings had in some ways interfered with Shapiro's newest book and reappears throughout it. Eisenstein wrote about Dickens saying he developed montage because of Dickens.

The Devil in a Blue Dress (1995) Carl Franklin

Almost all black crime novels are concerned with property. They were property and now...

Le Corps Cinematographiques bodies in film; Blacks in Virginia were considered real estate because it was easier for purposes of the tax code and presented less problems in the cases of inheritance.

Here we have Black-White encounters in a historical shift from being property to managing property

Bodies tell us the normative discourse in cities; we see this also in Lyotard's discussion of the referant and the referand.

Robert Altman, like the director of Fog of War, takes away the privilege of the body by never utilizing a master shot.

The ontology of encounters requires staging; the cross-cutting nature of film also lends itself to our understanding. To what extent can we write a script such that there is room for self-fashioning?

A crisis of intention is found in the city; Georg Simmel's "The Metropolis and Mental Life" - Simmel is unable to account for the micropolitics of the city, however.

Kant's thinking was much more radical than what he intended. Deleuze calls it the Attendant when discussing Francis Bacon.

Social History of the Machine Gun shows that soldiers were at first hesitant to use them because their bodies weren't involved enough.

We can't really talk about "the society" because we are more fractals, we're primarily in enclaves.

For tomorrow we discuss the Hegel Chapter, The End of Violence, and Benjamin.

[END OF CLASS]