Page 115 - Darko Štrajn, From Walter Benjamin to the End of Cinema: Identities, Illusion and Signification. Ljubljana: Educational Research Institute, 2017. Digital Library, Dissertationes, 29.
P. 115
the principle of montage and literature
ciety and therefore, he is offered to a reader as subjectivity, with which one
is not supposed to identify. Accordingly, the rapport of counter-identifi-
cation is projected on the reader, who is supposed to get an insight in the
social reality of the time. In Fassbinder’s presentation the main character
consistently acts under the pressure of a compulsion of repetition, submis-
sion, and identifications through unequal exchanges in relations to oth-
ers, as is shown and explained in detail in Elsaesser‘s book cited above. At
the same time, Fassbinder’s film points to shortcomings of psychoanalysis
to transcend the boundaries of explaining individual trauma. It is perhaps
one of those very special coincidences that his film came out at a time when
at least the intellectual audience was widely sensitized by reading and dis-
cussing Deleuze-Guattari’s Anti-Oedipe.
From the interesting viewpoint of gender studies, Fassbinder‘s TV se-
ries discloses a set of reasons for violence against women in this case not so
much in merely simple patriarchal attitudes, but in the framework of such a
system. Because Fassbinder made no secret of his views on the nascent ne-
oliberal capitalist society as a path to a new fascism, his TV series quite vis-
ibly connects the libidinal economy to the capitalist economy. Therefore,
no matter how constraining television as a medium functioned in the ad-
aptation of the novel, Fassbinder made Döblin‘s implicit prophecy, describ-
ing the nascent fascist society at the micro-level of the lower layers of so-
ciety in the 1920s, “functional” again, now signalling the transition from
the welfare state to the economy of neoliberalism. Decentred subjectivi-
ty is forced to define itself in narcissistic terms and is prone to enter cul-
tural reproduction schemes, which are based on ideological interpellations
consisting of entrepreneurial spirit, the myth of individual success, and ce-
lebrity appeal. This is reflected in Fassbinder’s TV series through catego-
ries from the crisis of the late 1920s. Let me conclude by emphasizing that
Thomas Elsaesser‘s analysis of the TV series goes further than most oth-
ers exactly because it points out the perversion of the economy as it literal-
ly becomes visible in the film: “What under one aspect may appear as ex-
ploitation and the power to dictate the terms of a transaction is in another
respect a form of enterprise, where acts of exchange require the material-
ist poetry of savage thinking, of wheeling and dealing, of the opportunist’s
quick response and the speculator’s risk-taking” (Elsaesser, 1996: 232). Now
the question remains open: can one expect yet another adaptation of Döb-
lin’s novel, which still resists total canonization and classification, let alone
113
ciety and therefore, he is offered to a reader as subjectivity, with which one
is not supposed to identify. Accordingly, the rapport of counter-identifi-
cation is projected on the reader, who is supposed to get an insight in the
social reality of the time. In Fassbinder’s presentation the main character
consistently acts under the pressure of a compulsion of repetition, submis-
sion, and identifications through unequal exchanges in relations to oth-
ers, as is shown and explained in detail in Elsaesser‘s book cited above. At
the same time, Fassbinder’s film points to shortcomings of psychoanalysis
to transcend the boundaries of explaining individual trauma. It is perhaps
one of those very special coincidences that his film came out at a time when
at least the intellectual audience was widely sensitized by reading and dis-
cussing Deleuze-Guattari’s Anti-Oedipe.
From the interesting viewpoint of gender studies, Fassbinder‘s TV se-
ries discloses a set of reasons for violence against women in this case not so
much in merely simple patriarchal attitudes, but in the framework of such a
system. Because Fassbinder made no secret of his views on the nascent ne-
oliberal capitalist society as a path to a new fascism, his TV series quite vis-
ibly connects the libidinal economy to the capitalist economy. Therefore,
no matter how constraining television as a medium functioned in the ad-
aptation of the novel, Fassbinder made Döblin‘s implicit prophecy, describ-
ing the nascent fascist society at the micro-level of the lower layers of so-
ciety in the 1920s, “functional” again, now signalling the transition from
the welfare state to the economy of neoliberalism. Decentred subjectivi-
ty is forced to define itself in narcissistic terms and is prone to enter cul-
tural reproduction schemes, which are based on ideological interpellations
consisting of entrepreneurial spirit, the myth of individual success, and ce-
lebrity appeal. This is reflected in Fassbinder’s TV series through catego-
ries from the crisis of the late 1920s. Let me conclude by emphasizing that
Thomas Elsaesser‘s analysis of the TV series goes further than most oth-
ers exactly because it points out the perversion of the economy as it literal-
ly becomes visible in the film: “What under one aspect may appear as ex-
ploitation and the power to dictate the terms of a transaction is in another
respect a form of enterprise, where acts of exchange require the material-
ist poetry of savage thinking, of wheeling and dealing, of the opportunist’s
quick response and the speculator’s risk-taking” (Elsaesser, 1996: 232). Now
the question remains open: can one expect yet another adaptation of Döb-
lin’s novel, which still resists total canonization and classification, let alone
113
