The World is Watching

Video as Multinational Aesthetics 1968-1995


By Dennis Redmond



© 2003 Southern Illinois UP











Table of Contents


Introduction 								x-i
Chapter 1		Video and Interpretation			1-25
Chapter 2		Mapping the Global Village			26-52
Chapter 3		The Information Uprising			53-91
Chapter 4		Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Eurovideo		92-142
Chapter 5		Velvet Television				143-191
Chapter 6		Neon Genesis: Evangelion			192-245
Chapter 7		Dawn of the East Asian Metropole		246-293
















Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to Atsuko Hayashi for the detailed transcripts and translation help with 
Evangelion; to the members of the Comparative Literature Department at the University 
of Oregon for their energy and inspiration; to Wolf Sohlich, who actually gave me the 
idea for this project during a conversation at the Roma; and finally to my family, for the 
moral and financial support that helped make this book a reality.







Dedicated to the memory of Katharine Gelles


Introduction

It’s one of the great paradoxes of culture studies nowadays that despite the ever-
increasing integration of the media culture into classrooms and seminars, and despite an 
impressive body of critical work on film, some of the most significant works of video 
culture remain untheorized, underappreciated or simply ignored by media critics and 
cultural theorists. Strangely enough, this is not because the works in question suffer from 
artistic obscurity or commercial failure; the paucity of critical literature dealing with 
Patrick McGoohan’s masterpiece The Prisoner (1967), Kryzysztof Kieslowski’s 
Decalogue (1988), Hideaki Anno’s epochal anime Evangelion (1995), and the 3D 
videogames such as Quake and Half Life currently revolutionizing the Web culture 
stands in marked contrast to the extraordinary enthusiasm of audiences, artists and 
culture-workers themselves for all these things. This enthusiasm is by no means the 
product of some dubious marketing blitz, but testifies to one of the most intriguing 
aspects of video culture, namely its bedrock plebianism. As we shall see, the greatest 
video works combine the aesthetic power and complexity of the 20th century modernisms 
with the popular appeal and revolutionary panache of the great 18th and 19th century 
realisms.
Much of the difficulty, to be sure, lies in the quicksilver nature of video as a field. 
Spawned in the late 1960s out of the meteorite impact of the counter-culture – or what in 
retrospect could be defined as the unexpected collision of auteur cinema, late modernist 
theater and television broadcasting – video has migrated from the film screen and TV set 
to the personal computer and the Web at a dizzying rate. The speed of video’s 
evolutionary clock is matched perhaps only by the rapidity of its internal metabolism, 
which teleports endless quantities of images, sound-tracks and scripts across a wider and 
wider range of technological platforms. All this creates a number of unique hurdles for 
would-be critics. For one thing, theorists have to be familiar with a far broader array of 
cultural technologies than the concert, record and film audiences of yore ever had to cope 
with. For another, video culture is really and truly multinational, both in terms of its 
canon of aesthetic forms as well as its specific visual, acoustic and scripted content. 
Whereas the most characteristic aesthetic form of the epoch of monopoly capitalism, 
namely the national cinema, was dominated by a relatively narrow range of American 
and Western European studios, advertisers, broadcasters and stars, and an equally limited 
range of cultural forms (the symbolic landscapes of the Western, the national character-
systems of the war movie, the monopoly-era gender codes of the private eye and 
detective thriller, the scriptwriting innovations of the screwball comedy, etc.), video 
culture draws on a much larger library of mediatic narratives, which circulate across the 
length and breadth of the world-system. To read video works means to read 
multinationally, or more precisely, to read the patterns of multinational history encoded 
in the work of art. This is not a license, to be sure, to write off or ignore the levels of the 
regional, national or international; rather, to paraphrase Sartre, the multinational is our 
untranscendable horizon of horizons, which qualifies all these other levels as the local 
manifestations of some larger phenomenon.
If this is true, then why, one might well ask, wasn’t multinational culture on 
anyone’s critical agenda during most of the 1990s? An intriguing shift in critical 
discourse over the past two decades yields a significant clue. The leitmotif of theory in 
the 1980s was unquestionably postmodernism, a term which, whether you celebrated or 
deplored the thing, emphasized a certain historical link to whatever modernism was (or 
wasn’t) supposed to be. But the central buzzword of the 1990s, the term which could 
function as adjective, noun, verb and epithet all at once, and instantly spark theory-brawls 
worthy of an online 3D death-match, was globalization.1 More is at stake here than the 
upstaging of a primarily cultural concept by a crassly economic one. Postmodernism was 
invented in the specialized realm of literary theory, and only gradually conquered the 
sociological, political and journalistic realms; globalization, on the other hand, required 
no such dissemination, for the simple reason that the thing seemed to arrive everywhere, 
at all points of the compass, all at once. 
This suggests that the real weakness of cultural theory in the 1980s was not its 
inability to diagnose the dominant economic, political or cultural logics of the era, a.k.a. 
monetarism, Thatcherism and postmodernism. Rather, it lacked a comparative metric 
capable of triangulating between all these things – that is to say, a genuine concept of 
multinational capitalism. Nor, in fairness to the critics, was creating such a metric a 
simple task in the era of the Cold War. Probably the only thinker of note to take the 
notion of multinational capitalism seriously was Theodor Adorno, whose very 
complicated concept of the “total system” was largely ignored by the postmodernists, 
with the signal exception of Fredric Jameson, who hit the nail on the head by famously 
proclaiming Adorno to be the “thinker of the Nineties” in Late Marxism. 
One of the main subtexts of this book will be that Adorno is indispensable to 
contemporary culture theory, only not in the way this is usually thought of, i.e. in terms 
of the Frankfurt School’s denunciation of the culture-industry and commitment to early 
20th century Central European modernisms (the span from Kafka and Klee to the music 
of the Second Viennese School). One of Adorno’s most telling points was that the 
Eastern and Western blocs had long ago become two sides of the same coin, and that the 
job of intellectuals was not to make false choices about which set of power-elites to 
swear fealty to, but to resist Cold War tyranny on both sides of the Berlin Wall: to try, in 
short, to create truly democratic and humane alternatives on a global scale. Probably his 
greatest contribution to this project was the 1966 Negative Dialectics, an epochal 
intellectual bequest to the critics of the future. The central achievement of this text was to 
create the world’s first concept of multinational form, or what Adorno called the 
constellation; these were a kind of trail or legible script created by the historical process. 
The job of theory was therefore to map out, interpret or otherwise decode these scripts, 
thereby opening up a space for new types of praxis and new types of theory alike.
	To see how this works in practice, consider the striking fact that even the most 
compelling media critiques of the late 20th century – e.g. Fredric Jameson’s Signatures of 
the Visible and Laura Mulvey’s Visual and Other Pleasures – are limited to a very 
narrowly defined constellation. Specifically, they define video in terms of a neo-national 
set of media tropes, micropolitical issues or interpretive viewing-positions, linked to 
various international networks of dissemination (CNN or MTV, the feminist music video, 
the Fourth World documentary and so forth). The upshot is Jameson’s famous definition 
of video as the depthless, hallucinatory rush of images, shorn of their national and 
international significations. This is a fine exegesis of that early 1980s sci-fi cinema 
typified by Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, but tells us very little about the achievements of 
a William Gibson or Hideaki Anno. 
That said, the conclusion of Jameson’s 1991 Postmodernism offers an 
indispensable set of guidelines for a future theory of video. The depressing and 
demoralizing reality of multinational capital, Jameson tells us, is both true and untrue, 
both ruthless demystification and rampant ideology. As demystification, it is socially 
necessary appearance, the mere reiteration of our individual helplessness in the face of 
the vast, almost incomprehensible networks of global capital. Yet as ideology, it is an 
equally necessary resistance, and ultimately the remobilizing injunction to create a new 
kind of cognitive mapping or subjective consciousness of the world-system. This 
cognitive mapping can be thought of as the ideological equivalent of open source 
software, a set of theoretical models capable not only of hacking into the total system 
which surrounds us, but also generating new forms of collective consciousness and 
multinational solidarity. It goes without saying that such models are neither prefabricated 
interpretations handed down by self-appointed central committees, nor the spam-infested 
blurbs of marketing bureaus, but are simply tools which each local user must 
reappropriate, rethink and redeploy in their own unique way. Above all, Jameson takes a 
page from Adorno by insisting that we can only think against the total system to the 
extent we are willing to think through it. The mote in our own eye, wrote Adorno in 
Minima Moralia, is the best magnifying glass;2 as we shall see, the greatest works of 
video are very much the mediatic mote in the basilisk eye of the Information Age.




Footnotes to Introduction

1. For those unfamiliar with the term, death-matching refers to online videogames such as 
Quake, Half Life and Unreal, played via modem by individuals or teams. They combine 
eye-popping graphics with visceral gameplay and pulse-pounding excitement.

2. Theodor Adorno. Minima Moralia. Ges. Schr. 4. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 
Verlag, 1951 (55).



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