The Fiction of Geopolitics: Afterimages of Culture, from Wilkie Collins to Alfred Hitchcock (review)

The Fiction of Geopolitics: Afterimages of Culture, from Wilkie Collins to Alfred Hitchcock. Christopher GoGwilt. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000. Pp xiii + 265. $49.50 (cloth); $18.95 (paper).

"Oh, who will tell us the whole history of narcotica?" asks/pleads/sneers the writer of The Gay Science. "Why--it is almost the history of 'culture,' of so-called 'higher culture' [der sogenannte höheren Bildung]!" What Christopher GoGwilt has done in his excellent new book is respond to Nietzsche's implicit second and third questions, rather than the more obvious first. The Fiction of Geopolitics is not a history of drugs per se, but a history of "culture" (the almost-narcotic which remains a seductive, addictive, stupefying, and potentially toxic substance), and an insightful exploration of the relation between "culture" and "so-called high" or "higher culture." Specifically, GoGwilt explores the "intertwined fate" of nineteenth-century conceptions of culture and twentieth century discourses of "geopolitics," a "fiction" that masquerades as an anything-but-gay science. Returning to the time frame of his first book, The Invention of the West (1860-1940, the "long turn of the century") and to some of the themes covered in it (including literature, the geographical imagination, and the will to political power), GoGwilt asserts that "the fiction of geopolitics took shape around the turn of the century through a breakdown and reconfiguration of nineteenth-century ideas of culture" (1). We live, as we dream--he wants to suggest--in the "afterimage" of that breakdown.

The arc of GoGwilt's analysis, as his subtitle suggests, carries him from the Victorian novelist Collins to the early Hitchcock. His argument pivots on sustained readings of The Moonstone (1868), which he suggests is a kind of literary working through of the culs de sac of Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy (1869), and Sabotage (1940), Hitchcock's reworking of Conrad's The Secret Agent (1907), in which he sees the emergence of cinema as the "classic medium" for "discourses of geopolitics" (161). He suggests that while Arnold attempts to "plot" culture, Collins's writing points up "a problem of form, at once political and narrative, which lies at the heart of mid-Victorian formulations of culture"--a problem he calls the Victorian "blot" (59). This "blot" occurs when a "variety of different ideas of culture" (concerning aesthetics, education, nationality, and anthropology) "get blurred into a single word, 'culture,' whose distinctive English formulation looks simultaneously back to the hypothesis of universal human development and forward to its eclipse" (100). By the time Hitchcock comes to Hollywood from England a set of important material and perceptual shifts has occurred: cinema has become "an extended and systematic" way of "screening industrial political relations" and "sabotage has become the "contradictory principle of organization for modern industrial society" (198). This is a moment in which a certain geopolitical version of "culture" is poised to blot out vast swaths of Europe and in which culture-as-Bildung, according to Horkheimer and Adorno, has indeed been "eclipsed" by the return of a repressed barbarism. Another possible subtitle for The Fiction of Geopolitics, then, deleting the following parentheses, might be: From Anarchy (articulated vaguely by Arnold, but an organizing principle still predominant in The Secret Agent) to Sabotage (a term from anarcho-syndicalism, which GoGwilt associates with the political modalities of Hitchcock's approach to film; the term, which depends on the idea of a nebulous, mobile, progress-arresting enemy, also encompasses the emergence of the post-1945 conspiracy-laden Cold War ethos lying just on the chronological horizon of this study).

The Fiction of Geopolitics balances this persuasive genealogical argument with illuminating analyses of individual writers and texts. In addition to the fine treatments of Collins and Hitchcock, there are insightful discussions of the struggles of geographers H. J. Mackinder, Friedrich Ratzel and Eliseé Reclus, to "get" the world "picture," and a lucid treatment of...