Ping Pong 48: Empires of Possibility
What is it that has given America its extraordinary power in the last century or so? However, before one answers such a question, one must consider the problem of exactly what this power involves. It clearly goes far deeper than mere military might. The strange thing about such a power is that it is clearly not simply military. It is not the guns and boats that make America powerful, so much as hope. America offers the rest of the world a very certain kind of hope. This hope is not really founded on political freedom (one can reject the American system and yet still hanker after America). Nor is it even founded on the promise of material wealth. But rather it rests upon the belief or the faith that one can re-work or re-stitch a life, so that however bad one’s life might seem, at any one moment, it could always improve. Such is of course the ‘American dream’. And yet it is not clear exactly what this dream does, or how it operates. Nor is it yet clear the risks and pitfalls of such dreaming. Both these surprisingly complex areas will be investigated here in some detail.
Firstly then, beyond vapid hot air what is the American Dream? Is it merely the dream of always being able to better oneself? Perhaps. But there is clearly more to it than that. How after all, is one imagining this advance? And why does this imagination remain precious to folk who clearly are never going to share in it? Why do the poor of Kenya or even rural America still share the dream? Or to put it slightly differently, what is it in the dream that makes it so powerful (and so immune to eventual dissolution)?
At this point it becomes rather clear that at the core of the American dream lies something more than mere hope. There lies also the power or the ability to double up a life. That is, the power of America, is the power which it has wielded since the invention of film - the power to embed one life within a kingdom of possibility and fantasy. To watch a film is therefore to be jolted out of one’s own mere existence. One becomes swept away by perception, and into the hopes and dreams of another. One stands on the bare alien plain of a distant planet, or else retreats with Napoleon, or endlessly falls in love. It is well not to underestimate the power of film here. On a mass level it turns mundane (or peculiar) experience into entertainment, a complex move that has three further effects.
Firstly it allows the audience, from their position in a darkened room, (whether cinema or living room without the lights on) a vision of other worlds. But these worlds are caught in a curious paradigm. Visions of other world are common. The seventeenth century court of Louis XIV was after all an open one. Peasants could and did come and gawp at their monarch. As they did so they no doubt felt the gap between themselves and their rulers. The American dream works almost in the opposite direction. To watch a film about other cultures or other people’s lives, is to be encouraged to emphasize with those others. They become in the viewer’s eyes not merely themselves, but also a cipher for one’s own self. One sees one’s life as it might have been in their thoughts or actions. The spectacle therefore, far from putting the viewer in their place, elevates them, and gives them an afternoon of dreaming they were someone else. My own life might then be horrid, but to watch a film is to have a reprieve from horror. My own experience might be blinkered, but to watch a film is to expand or extend what I am or what I can do or think. I might be but one individual eking out a life on the margins of a great empire, but through Film I am an inhabitant of many worlds, and many fractured dreams. That is, many different hopes and fears, that need not be related directly to each other, or focused in a single experience, and held nevertheless in a darkened room and the ‘one and nines’.
Film therefore opens up the mind in the oddest of manners. One becomes able, in watching, to become for in whole, or in part, as someone else. Experience is pooled, and one’s life need not be simple (or simply one’s own). It is this dream that has been so incredibly powerful. It animates not only the world of advertising, but also seeps across political conflicts and trouble spots. One might hate America, but watch American films (and still hanker after hamburgers and fries): Such that in splitting itself up into numerous separate pages of experience, America ensures that others will always draw upon its power to open one to other lives, and so people long for it even as they condemn the physical reality of America out of hand.
Secondly, the power of film is the power of the face to triumph over the soul or the storyline. What matters after all in films is never complex stories (which very easily become utterly incomprehensible as one cannot go and ‘re read the necessary section’); nor yet is it the deep insight into other’s thought (which remains hidden behind expressions). What matters rather are faces. One watches faces, and in their reactions and refractions one grasps at the plot, and sees the dream. The Film therefore turns a face or a set, into a mirror of story. This move then opens out to others, aspects of the self same story. But then of course expressions are open phenomena. You smile and I smile. In telling a story in glances and in pulling expressions, one opens it out for anyone to retell it. More than that, the expressions themselves becomes their own telling. To pull the expression of a film star is enough to be part of a series of tales of one’s own.
The very medium of film, light and expression, opens out the world of possibility for its audience. They might not share in the plotline, but they can share in the expression of that plot line. They can become a part in that dream. In effect, their entire ability to express themselves becomes caught up in the dreams which films give them. They pull expressions which echo films, and participate in plots and dreams. To arch an eyebrow or blow smoke, is therefore to enter many worlds and many different guises. If films open one’s experience into other lives, expressions allow one to navigate these worlds or inhabit them in all their complexities.
Thirdly films are fundamentally social. And yet it is an odd form of the social. One watches a film with others and one discusses it afterwards. This discussion opens up a film in two ways. On the one hand it splits up films. They become a sequence of favourite pieces or special effects which work and which do not work (‘I like the bit when…’). Films therefore become the topic for buffs. That is, for individuals who know how to split experience up into a series of special effects, each of which can be discussed in turn and separately. On the other hand, films are never very far from lynch mobs. A bad film will be hooted out of existence. Or more commonly will set up fracture lines within a society of those who are caught up in this plot line, and others who are not. Likewise films can and will indict epochs (greed is good) or form the image of them for subsequent eras (Laurel and Hardy and the soup queue). A film therefore claims to be as a book never does, the ‘first d(r)aft’ of history. That is it claims to reject how one epoch understands or pulls itself together, and articulates what it is to another time; although what that other time will make of it is of course an open question.
The power of a film is to open up experience. One becomes for a while (or for good) the actors an the moving screen. In sharing their thoughts, one’s mind directly communes with everything that can be or what it could dream. More than that it gains the ability to carry an aspect of that dream into every day life. One might not be an actor or actress but one’s life, and one’s expressions can mirror them in some manner and at certain times. Experience and expression become currency (currency that has a possibility underpinning it). Society on the wider level becomes then the agency within which these echoes of another life are expressed and understood. We might not be going anywhere fast, but if we all talk of other worlds and do so together, then those worlds might feel more real, and make our current lives feel that bit better.
America’s peculiar power lies then, in opening minds to a medium of possibility. It is always a mistake to understand such a world in terms of what will happen or even what might happen. Its power does not lie in the fact that every child has a silver dollar, so much as that the dream that they do, is itself a powerful social force. That is the dream itself changes lives, and allows society to understand its nature a little differently. American films therefore make possibility itself a transforming force.
However there is of course a cost to this transformation. Or perhaps better, it is the endless delay of costs that allows the system its power. Or to put it another way, at the heart of this system, what allows the possibility its power is the impossible dream of being someone else. One is caught up in the aspects of other’s lives and other’s powers, other’s effects. In the dream world of films this move is understandable, and even relatively stable. The trouble is when this dream seeps into the world beyond film. The problem of course is that there is really nothing preventing finance taking up and aping the world of film, for example.
In this, finance of course has a peculiar role to play. Finance is very like film. It therefore rests upon looking at aspects of the world and in attempting to predict their outcomes, defining how they mean to participate in those aspects. That is whether (or not) they will invest in them. The world therefore quickly slips in a network of hope, fear and possibility. It is then this network that the sentiment of the market takes up and makes real. That is, makes itself an object of trade. One becomes then able to trade in hope itself (and in the hope of hopes), until the entire process vanishes into a world of dream states. Finance, in translating a world into an infinite series of hopes, expresses as it were in a material manner those hopes. However there remains of course a fundamental difference between the two. A single action might be finite, and yet can, through imagination and hope endlessly redouble itself within that finitude. One action might therefore be open to many different interpretations across a life. But all this multitude leads back always to the same expression. Film therefore always has a cellulose (or digital) level. A point of vision, that remains master (and is therefore external to those things that follow on from it). The same is not really true of the market. Here the materiality of this system, money, reinvents itself across each and every level of the process. Hopes of hopes are as marketable (and therefore as real) as the initial hope itself was.
It is no wonder therefore, that the financial markets in the American system are unstable. They are directly ‘materializing’ the dream world of possibility that films merely conjure. It is therefore no surprise that this expression, this materialization, is founded on nothing; or better, nothing substantial. How could it be? In a sense that is the point. The expression of the market of hopes (or fears), is itself a reality. That is it is an expression of that extra, that gold dust, that sparkle that we add to our lives in opening them up to other possibilities.
The problem that the market faces is that it can only express a material hope within a series or sequence of ‘actuals’ (that is, priced out hopes). The tension of course is, that the market strives to be as film. That is, it strives to make hope last (and spring eternal). But the fact of the materiality of its medium ensures that however in might strive for the stars, the series which it creates (the ladders of possibility), remain rooted in their initial moves. That is the chain of hope is only valid as the first investments remain good. If they are blown asunder then the entire ladder collapses.
America in the 1920’s (or now) is therefore caught between two conflicting forces. On the one hand there is a dream. This dream is not thought of in terms of anything actually realizable. It is rather an opening out of possibility, and a rendering of the possible as an actual transformational force in the world. To dream becomes to affect (something), even if that something is oneself. On the other hand there is the desperate attempt to make this productive world of dream actual. This move is always problematic, as it risks embodying not only the dreams but also the fact that this dreaming is just that, a dream. The point of it, the power of it, is that it is not real, and not even realizable. Why should it be? Is a myth real? Its power lies rather in pooling what humans are. And yet because the myth appears to be about people, one is blind to the fact that is merely a myth. Thence systems spring up to actualize the impossible, and it is hardly surprising when these systems fail.
The power of America lies then not in its actual power (boats and planes or finance). That power is gloriously limited and problematic. It is moreover held in check or limited by the peculiarly actual power of America. That is the power in movies to open up lives and double or treble their experience. In pulling an expression or perceiving something, one becomes a character in a film, caught in an endless web of possibilities, of other’s lives, (other films) other hopes. This remaking of humanity, the magic of possibility, is likely to be America’s great (and perhaps most problematic) legacy. How can one deny people hope? But how can one allow it when that hope is unrealizable (and when it might destroy itself or the planet)? This is a deep and rather dark problem, and one that the next Rant will consider in detail.
