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8 Jean-Luc Godard and Ludwig Wittgenstein in New Contexts
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127 8 8 Jean-Luc Godard and Ludwig Wittgenstein in New Contexts Christina Stojanova Progress is ambiguous, isn’t it? —Jean-Luc Godard The trouble about progress is that it always looks much greater than it really is. —Johann Nestroy in an interview for New York Times Magazine, given in the wake of the 9/11 tragedy, Jean-Luc Godard voiced his perennial anxiety “about the invasion of technology and false memory, created by the media to replicate or explicate the past,”1 stating: “I suppose that’s a feeling many people in the world have today—a kind of incoherent rage against all things technocratic . It comes from being powerless.”2 Godard’s concerns with the very real dangers brought on by what Slavoj Žižek calls the “unchecked invasion of technology and media”— and its potential to reduce humans to “abstract subjects devoid of all substantial content, dispossessed of our symbolic substance”3 —informs his whole oeuvre. And yet, as a filmmaker, Godard has widely availed himself of technological innovations from the early portable cameras in the 1950s to cellphone imaging and digital editing, used for his latest Film socialisme (2010). Godard’s ambiguous attitude towards technology and new media could be interpreted in light of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy, or more specifically, in light of its reading by Ray Monk, one of Wittgenstein’s most versatile interpreters and biographers. In an early draft of his foreword to Philosophical Remarks (1930), quoted by Monk, Wittgenstein expresses his own strand of technological pessimism: “Our civilization is characterized Godardian Legacy in Philosophy 128 by the word ‘progress.’ Progress is its form rather than making progress being one of its features.... And even clarity is sought only as a means to this end, not as an end in itself. For me on the contrary clarity, perspicuity are valuable in themselves.... So I am not aiming at the same target as scientists and my way of thinking is different from theirs.”4 The ambiguity of Wittgenstein’s and Godard’s attitude towards technological progress is not the only similarity that brings them together. This chapter foregrounds other striking examples of conceptual and structural affinities—or “family resemblances” as Wittgenstein would have it—displayed in their key works. While both Wittgenstein and Godard sought to fundamentally redesign their respective fields conceptually and artistically , their efforts betray a major concern about the fate of the arts vis-à-vis the encroachment of technology and consumerism—a concern made all the more paradoxical in light of consistent attempts at appropriation of their oeuvres by new-media theorists and practitioners. GODARD AND TECHNOLOGY: AlphAville AND BEYOND Godard’s 1965 film Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution, declared programmatic, even prophetic in many ways within and without Godard’s body of work, reveals concisely the controversy at the heart of Godard’s work. David Sterritt, for example, sees Alphaville as programmatic in terms of its “fundamental stance toward the influence of entertainment , diversion, and spectacle on everyday social and political life,”5 indicative of Godard’s notorious ideological contradictions and artistic ambiguities. More to the point, Richard Brody considers Alphaville as the “end of a certain road” for Godard, marked by films “reminiscent of those made within the mainstream of the industry,” before “venturing dangerously far into the cinematic wilderness”6 towards “complex and maddeningly cryptic essay-films,” as a recent review of Film socialisme for the fashionable lifestyle Montreal weekly Mirror has it.7 Godard’s journey away from anything that remotely resembles artistic compromise could be defined as one of his most consistent authorial characteristics . It is also his unique way of fighting consumerism and commodification in the name of giving “humanity back a ‘place in the world.’”8 And while his film 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle (1966)—where he flatly equates consumerism with prostitution, prompted however “not out of necessity … but to pay for consumer items … considered [until recently] luxuries”9 —becomes his anti-consumerist manifesto for the 1960s, Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–1998) passionately solicits resistance against commercialization and marginalization of arts and culture that have been [54.226.68.181] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 06:05 GMT) Jean-Luc Godard and Ludwig Wittgenstein in New Contexts 129 growing exponentially over the last three decades. Yet being fully aware that consumerism, coupled with commercialization, has the power to nullify criticism and resistance by turning them also into commodities, Godard has kept reinventing his technological, aesthetic...