w/ Pietro Bianchi (University of Florida)
//November 11th, 2024
//5:30 PM
//GEM Lab, FB 630.15
//1250 rue Guy
As a sensuous supersensible entity — according to Marx's definition — the commodity presents a fundamental problem for its visual representation on screen. On the one hand, it is a sensuous, concrete object like any other (use value), while on the other, it possesses a supersensible, intangible essence (value) that cannot be detected through mere observation. The problem is that the commodity is only fully realized when this supersensible essence becomes visible and tangible by transferring into the body of another object: specifically, when its essence is revealed and transubstantiated into another concrete object called money. According to Marx, the capitalist world, which is "an immense collection of commodities," is a world where these invisible essences are revealed (where social labor is accumulated and made visible). At the same time, however, it is also a Carrollian world turned upside down, haunted by "deranged," distorted, and displaced forms in which what is abstract appears concrete, and what is concrete appears as an abstraction. If we simply capture all this through a camera, we risk confusing the abstract with the concrete and vice versa. So, how is it possible to observe a world where the commodity form dominates? How is it possible to represent this "immense collection of commodities" on screen? Two films in recent years have implicitly or explicitly addressed this problem: Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn by Radu Jude and Licorice Pizza by Paul Thomas Anderson. In our presentation, we will analyze the aesthetic strategies through which these two films engage with the dual nature of the commodity form and reflect on its inversion of subjectivity into objectivity.
Pietro Bianchi is Assistant Professor English at the University of Florida. He is the author of Jacques Lacan and Cinema: Imaginary, Gaze, Formalisation (Routledge, 2017) and several articles on film studies, Marxism, psychoanalysis and philosophy. He also collaborates as a film critic to e-flux, Doppiozero, DinamoPress and FilmTv.
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