Matthew Flisfeder

Matthew Flisfeder introduces readers to key concepts in postmodern theory and demonstrates how it can be used for a critical interpretation and analysis of Blade Runner, arguably 'the greatest science fiction film'. By contextualizing the film within the culture of late 20th and early 21st-century capitalism, Flisfeder provides a valuable guide for both students and scholars interested in learning more about one of the most significant, influential, and controversial concepts in film and cultural studies of the past 40 years.

The "Film Theory in Practice" series fills a gaping hole in the world of film theory. By marrying the explanation of film theory with interpretation of a film, the volumes provide discrete examples of how film theory can serve as the basis for textual analysis. Postmodern Theory and Blade Runner offers a concise introduction to Postmodernism in jargon-free language and shows how this theory can be deployed to interpret Ridley Scott's cult film Blade Runner.

Slavoj Žižek is one of the world’s most important contemporary public intellectuals. Much of his popularity stems from his constant and recurring references to popular culture and cinema, as well as his own appearances in films such as The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema and Examined Life. Although Žižek refers to cinema in order to help explain difficult concepts in his theoretical writing, film scholars question whether Žižek has his own theory of film. This book argues that Žižek’s writing on film radically reorients the scope of contemporary film studies. Returning to questions about ideology and subjectivity, Flisfeder argues that Slavoj Žižek’s theory of film aims to re-politicize film studies and film theory in order to take on the political challenges of the twenty-first century.

Using Fredric Jameson's category of the "hysterical sublime," this chapter asses the Black Mirror episode, Playtest, and how it addresses, conceptually, anxieties about new media technology and how they relate to our experiences of contemporary, neoliberal capitalism.

Trump’s campaign slogan forces us to ask a simple question: when was America great? Surely, what he has in mind here is the America of the post-war Fordist and Keynesian social welfare models, which saw both the rise of the new suburban middle class and the rise of the white patriarchal figure, the Oedipal agent of the ‘father who knows best’. But the coming post-Fordist society has figured the dismantling of the welfare model under the austerity regimes of neoliberalism, at the same time displacing the phallic signifier of paternal authority. Is it possible to bring back white masculine power and the model that made possible the suburban middle class? Or is ‘America’ the lost object that cuts into the Trumpian imaginary? The American utopia in ‘Make America Great Again’, is the very nothingness out of which the loss constitutive of Trumpian ideology consists, turning it instead into an American nightmare.

This paper looks at some of the early writings of the late cultural thinker Mark Fisher and his use of McLuhan to theorize the cyberculture of the 1990s. Considering the changes that have been made to our digital environments and culture over the past twenty years, this paper reflects upon the usefulness of Fisher’s reading of McLuhan for present conceptions of media, materiality, and subjectivity.

In this paper, I look at the intersection of Jameson and Žižek’s approaches to the postmodern “breakdown of the signifying chain,” or the “demise of symbolic efficiency,” to show how each explains the ideological, cultural, and subjective conditions of postmodern capitalism. While Jameson, on the one hand, approaches the breakdown metaphor from an historical materialist perspective – i.e., using the metaphor to explain the particular historical moment of postmodern culture as somewhat symptomatic of late, or neoliberal, or finance dominated capitalism – Žižek, on the other hand, applies the metaphor to a dialectical materialist reading of the subject of postmodern capitalism. Reading Jameson and Žižek together, in other words, allows us to better recognize the identifications of the objective-historical and subjective logics of postmodern, late capitalist ideology.

This article applies a Lacanian-Marxist critique to Maurizio Lazzarato’s theories of social subjection and machinic enslavement as they relate to algorithmic media. Lazzarato’s approach has been taken up in recent scholarship on social media to explain the role of algorithms and software in subjecting users to capital. In contrast, this article argues that social subjection, the interpellation of desire, and the political dimension of the class struggle must be given priority over machinic enslavement.

Joe Sabatini and Jordy Cummings of Red Wedge spoke with the Winnipeg-based cultural theorist Matthew Flisfeder and had an exchange on Flisfeder’s recent book, Postmodern Theory and Blade Runner, excerpted last month on this site. Flisfeder’s insights transcend the analysis of a single film, rather he offers us new tools with which to engage the popular avant-garde, as well as how we can periodize modernity and postmodernity. A wide-ranging thinker and supple theorist, Red Wedge encourages our readers to seek out his exemplary cultural analysis.

This article examines rise of the alt-Right and Donald Trump’s successful campaign for President of the United States in the context of three overlapping contradictions: that of subversion in postmodern culture and politics, that between the democratic and commercial logics of the media, and the failure of the Left in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Referring to these three contradictions, this article looks at the rise of “Trumpism” and the new brand of White nationalist and misogynistic culture of the so-called alt-Right in its historical context to show how it is consistent but also distinguished from previous Right wing ideologies. More generally, the three contradictions presented here are proposed as explanations for understanding the mainstreaming of the alt-Right in contemporary politics and culture.

What happens when interpellation fails? Matthew Flisfeder suggests that in the current moment, “even the call of the moral supplement towards conscience and duty itself begins to break down under the continuous revolutionary thrust of the capitalist mode of production — that is, its need to break down its own limits and barriers in the further pursuit of profit.”

Cet article propose une réflexion sur la théorie lacanienne de la représentation filmique du rapport sexuel. L’auteur se fonde sur la logique lacanienne de la sexuation et sur l’interprétation qu’en ont faite Joan Copjec et Slavoj Žižek pour analyser ce qu’il appelle le « cinéma masculin », en prenant notamment comme exemple le film Y tu mamá también (Et… ta mère aussi, 2011), d’Alfonso Cuarón. L’auteur considère que les conclusions de Laura Mulvey, qui a été la première à utiliser la psychanalyse comme arme politique pour contester la représentation phallocentrique des femmes dans le cinéma hollywoodien, étaient justes, non pas en ce qui concerne la production d’un « regard masculin », mais en ce qui a trait à la construction cinématographique de la jouissance masculine, qui est constitutive de la société. Il avance donc que ce n’est pas en créant un cinéma « alternatif » qu’on peut remettre en question l’idéologie dominante, mais plutôt en utilisant la théorie comme arme politique. C’est la pratique de la théorie qui politise le cinéma et le spectateur.

This article challenges the Foucauldian conception of the neoliberal subject by addressing self-promotion as a key feature of users' engagement with social media websites. The essay argues that the rational choice rhetoric of neoliberal entrepreneurialism involves a process of further objectivizing and reifying—rather than producing—the subject by increasingly commodifying the time spent outside of paid labor. The neoliberal idea of investing in one's human capital is compared to the Marxian category of the reproduction of labor-power, which, in the neoliberal context, is subdivided into the time spent on the promotion of the Self. Social media help to facilitate the latter by providing a material space for self promotion and result in the expansion of working time into what Jonathan Crary calls “24/7 temporalities.” The arguments made here are aided by developing a neo-Lacanian conceptio —in opposition to the Foucauldian one—of neoliberal subjectivity.

Drawing on Fredric Jameson's thesis that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, this article examines recent representations of communism, anti-communism, and the end of the world, in popular film and television, and argues that both work towards re-enforcing the utopian view that there is no viable alternative to liberal democracy and capitalism. In the context of the ongoing financial crisis and global political uprisings, representations of the apocalypse are being paralleled with a return to images of the 'communist threat'. Here, it is argued that such images aim to dissuade people from thinking about alternatives to the existing system. This article concludes with a discussion of recent reconsiderations of the 'communist hypothesis'.

Drawing primarily on Slavoj Žižek’s Lacanian reading of Kant and Hegel, but also taking up arguments made by Joan Copjec and Fredric Jameson, this article asserts a conception of the ‘feminine sublime’ in accordance with the political-philosophical approach of dialectical materialism. The article begins by distinguishing between historical and dialectical materialism in order to assert what is at stake in the Marxian critique of ideology, followed by a discussion of the Lacanian conception of the feminine subjective position. The conception of the ‘feminine sublime’ articulated here draws connections between the feminine and proletarian subjective positions, and proposes a way of articulating an ethics of revolutionary subjectivity.

This article defends the relevance of Slavoj Žižek in the field of film studies through a close reading of his book, The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kieslowski Between Theory and Post-Theory (2001). In this book, Žižek responds to critiques of film theory, particularly those of David Bordwell and Noël Carroll in their anthology, Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (1996). In doing so, Žižek adds significantly to film theory by addressing errors found in early psychoanalytic film theory, and amending them in a way that focuses more specifically on questions about ideology and subjectivity. The first part of this article demonstrates the way in which a psychoanalytic interpretation of cinema can add to a theory of ideology and subjectivity; while the second part focuses on Žižek’s interpretation of Kieslowski’s films, which serve as a means for defending Theory [capital T] against post-Theory. For Žižek, this split in film studies indicates the existence of class struggle in intellectual discourse at the level of ideology.

Todd McGowan, Assoc. Prof. of Film Studies at the University of Vermont, discusses the concept of the Lacanian objet petit a, how it has been taken up in first and then second wave Lacanian film theory, and his own conception of 'atemporal' cinema.

As the subtitle of Marshall McLuhan’s seminal text, Understanding Media: Extensions of Man, suggests, media and technology connect to the human body in ways that force us to rethink the boundaries of our biology: where does the body end, and where does technology begin? Donna Haraway’s essay, “A Cyborg Manifesto”, and N. Katherine Hayles book, How We Became Posthuman, also encourage us to think beyond the standard liberal humanist conceptions of corporeality. The connection between the body, technology, and the media is a theme that runs throughout the films of David Cronenberg. In this assignment, students will be encouraged to think critically about media and technology as co-extensive of the body.

Presentation slides:

This paper draws on two themes that are part of the neoliberal discourse: the first is the conception of the self as an entrepreneurial subject; the second, tied to the first, is the practice of reputation management, or “identity curation.” This paper looks at these themes in two recent films: Noah Baumbach’s While We’re Young (2014) and David Fincher’s Gone Girl (2014). Beginning with Baumbach’s film, I address the theme of identity curation as a manufactured construction of reputation, and one that is produced out of the entrepreneurial spirit of neoliberalism. I look at how the main character, Jamie (Adam Driver), uses the manipulation of appearances in the form of identity curation to advance his own entrepreneurial interests as a film artist. I then move on to consider possible practices of subverting the entrepreneurial ethic of identity curation through a critical examination of Fincher’s Gone Girl.

My interpretation of Gone Girl begins by addressing opposing political critiques of the film: is it wrapped in misogynistic ideology, or can it be claimed as a Feminist film? Proceeding from here, I argue that the “cool girl” speech in the film is a point of entry for understanding the film, not only as a Feminist critique of patriarchy, but as a thesis about the politically subversive role that appearances play in holding the ruling ideology to account. Applying Foucault’s critique of neoliberal entrepreneurialism, the Lacanian conception of the Symbolic order, and contemporary theories about media surveillance and control, I argue that the film teaches us about the necessary role that appearances play in political discourse. The film, I claim, shows us that ideology critique is not always a matter of revealing the truth behind the illusion. Gone Girl, in fact, shows us that sometimes the best strategy is to use the level of appearances to our advantage – not unlike the self-reflexive entrepreneurialism of reputation management and identity curation – in order to entrap existing figures of power and to hold them to account based on the appearances that they, themselves, create.