The Europeanization of Cinema: Interzones and Imaginative Communities

Conclusion

Conclusion It is a point of consideration, in the current moment when transnationalism as a term is very en vogue, how odd it is that the majority of research on culture that invokes the term transpires nevertheless within rather rigid national parameters. Studies of “transnational” German, Japanese, or Brazilian literatures or cinemas create for themselves a conundrum that cannot be properly studiedwithintheirownparameters:ifitistransnational,itcannotbeassessed within national parameters. Therefore, this book has been all over the place, and that is the point. To recognize the relationship of the cinematic apparatus to the social configurationunfoldinginEuropeandbeyondcurrently ,thestudyhasnecessitated a broad comparative and historical approach. At the same time, to invoke the term transnational here is itself misleading. This study set out to correct and revise my own research on transnationalism by rejecting the neo-Hegelian assumption that informs much of the work on transnationalism in Europe. Overcoming the Neo-Hegelian Impasse Hegel’s model of consciousness (Geist) developed from the individual in the family unit through concentric circles expanding dialectically outward, to the local, regional, and national. This model of Geist haunts the understanding of European transnationalism in which it is generally assumed that Europe, or 184 • Conclusion European identification, is the next in the expanded circles of political cultural unity and that Europe is the sublation of the nation-state into some greater union.ThismodelofthinkingpresumesanentityEuropethatstandsasaunion above the locales, regions, and nations of Europe. Jürgen Habermas, for instance, advocated for a constitutional legitimation process in order to accomplish a European public sphere. Habermas sees transnational communication as the key here because precisely new forms of communication fostered the emergence of the first modern form of social integration : the nation. He does note that the nation was once an artificial form of civic solidarity, and hence the current artificiality of the transnational need not be taken as a sign of the impossibility of transnational union. He is careful to acknowledge that the new European public sphere need not be a replication of the national onto the European, yet precisely in that opposition, national/ European, he evidences the neo-Hegelian perspective. He advocates, then, for higher order supranational political bodies legitimated through a constitution and democratic procedure as well as a new, albeit multilingual, public sphere ofdebateandconsensusbuilding,ofcivicsolidaritythatovertimewouldcease to be artificial and become key to a truly European culture. Habermas’s model points upward and outward. Habermas’s model of Öffentlichkeit was always an idealist proposition that had some material form in bourgeois coffeehouse culture of the Enlightenment. Retaining that model nowignorestherealityoftheEU:thatthepolitical,economic,andculturalunion has developed its own form through systems of subsidiarity, harmonization, synergy,andsoforth.Thisstudyhasnotshiedawayfromthetermspublicsphere or civilsociety, but it has sought to attend to the public sphere as it now emerges and even does exist in Europe. In this dynamic, the nature of solidarity, association , communication does not flow upward and outward from key nations and linguistic communities to a meta and European level. Communication is diffused and dispersed in multiple directions, drawing together interlocutors withvaryinginterests,inlocationsthatneednotbeproximate.Infact,itisfrequently the case that communication across space and in compressed time is easierinthisnewEuropethancommunicationwiththemostimmediateneighbor —who may simply not be “at home.” European solidarity does not develop upward and outward but across, through, from below, sideways, crisscrossing terrains,potentiallyviaurbancenters,andequallylikelyviaregionalresistance to metropolitan control. The interzone describes both the moments in which such communication begins and the fact that a move to union, i.e., an emergence of new forms of solidarity,isindeedoften“artificial,”hesitant,andtentative.Imaginativecommunitiesdevelopnowmorefrequentlynotasmetacommunitiesbutassubcul - Conclusion • 185 tures,micropoliticalassociations,ethnicmigrantidentities,midleveleconomic partnering, sexual communities, and other “lower order” distinctive societies. Europe develops not through grand schemes of social and cultural reconciliation , as once took place in the development of national solidarities out of the spiritofregionalandethnicconflict.Europedevelopsinsmallerformsofconciliation , alignment, and approximation. It develops more through a network of cheap seat flights across the continent that convey party youth, traveling businessmen, and migrant laborers than it does through quests for a constitution . It develops more through audiovisual production than it does through uninspiring lists of bureaucratic decisions that are generated out of Brussels. Cinema, this study has argued—that is, the moving image in its transforming forms, or better stated, the audiovisual apparatus—plays a key role in generating the interzones on which the imaginative communities of the new Europe meet themselves for the first time. Theneo-Hegelianisminthisapproachtakesontheformofapoliticalidealism. There is another form we might describe as a culturalidealism, more attentive to questionsofvaluesandculture.PoliticalidealismaswithHabermasrepresents aproscriptiveapproachinwhichcertainstandardsofpoliticalorganizationare setascriteriawithwhichtoassesscriticallytheprogresstowardparticulargoals, particularlyaliberaldemocraticbias.Theapproachbasedonculturalidealism, ontheotherhand,isascriptive,basedonmakingadistinctionbetweenEurope and the European Union, where the...