Cinema

Samuel Weber's writings generally take as their point of departure the most significant works of Continental thought, from Freud and Lacan to Derrida and Heidegger, Kant and Hegel, Benjamin and Adorno, and oth­ers. Yet, what is unique about his work is that, in the course of careful readings of "high theory,'' Weber frequently moves from these theoretical texts to topics such as the Gulf War, the "War on Terror," the media, and contemporary technologies, topics that are generally regarded as involving more pragmatic, "real world" issues than tlie supposedly airy heights of Continental philosophy. Indeed, Weber's work is, in large part, a sustained effort to disrupt such distinctions between the theoretical and the practi­cal, the philosophical and the political, and between the ingrained figures (for instance, "the heights" versus "the down-to-earth") that support them. If Weber's work takes its departure from theoretical considerations, it never indulges in metatheoretical pretensions; neither does it, on the other hand, pretend to have moved outside of theory, beyond theory, to some more authentic locale. Rather, it is theory itself that moves: a theoretical movement that proceeds not toward a particular destination or end, but that "takes off from" its "objects," so that its own trajectory is continually deflected, displaced, by what it encounters. If this movement may be said to have a direction, it is not a direction that is predetermined, plotted in advance. This "indeterminate" quality has in fact led some critics to depict deconstruction--and theorists influenced by deconstruction--as aimless or lacking in direction, particularly in regard to social and political issues, (politics being defined precisely in terms of clear positionality and direction of movement toward a known end).

Fears of information and information overload are often figured in terms of fluidity and otherness: as, for example, an ocean of information that threatens to overwhelm or drown us. Interacting with this postmodern ocean of data frequently evokes a sense of being lost, unable to chart a course. In response to this fear of becoming lost, techno-cultural interaction is often figured in terms that stress the importance of mapping and navigation. Yet, the metaphor of navigation, with its emphasis on the human mastery of the world, is as much a metaphor of colonialism and corporate strategy as it is of empowerment and political action. In contrast to the figure of navigation, the often maligned metaphor of surfing, with its non-Western origins and emphasis on performance over instrumentality, offers a different way of thinking about our interactions with the fluidity and otherness of the data ocean. Instead of attempting to maintain a human mastery over the world of information, surfing suggests an interaction with it--an interaction in which human beings are not the sole actors.

The notion of "expanded cinema" leads toward a consideration of beauty and the sublime via Kant, Burke and Lyotard in the search for an understanding of what might truly be considered to expand cinematic horizons. To this end, Lars Von Trier's "The Element Of Crime" is examined through a close reading in an attempt to explicate how we might approach the sublime in cinema.

The Work Of Martin McDonagh Karl Marx corrects Hegel's remark that "all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice," by suggesting that "[h]e forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce." 1 However, Marx possibly didn't think to take into account that the same claim might be made of the average Man. If he'd lived another hundred or so years and been a theatre-goer, he might also have discovered that, in the post-modern theatre of a number of playwrights, the two poles coalesce. Tragedy, at least in Nietzschean terms, offers us the Dionysian (abandonment of form, revelry and the chaotic) tempered by the Apollonian (the authority of form, sense and structure). According to Nietzsche, the Hegelian synthesis of these two competing forces gives rise to an experience of the human condition in the form of Greek tragedy. 2 In the fragmentation of narrative that has been a key facet of modernism 3 and the subsequent abandonment to irony that characterizes the post-modern, 4 we have seen various artists come to reconsider this experience of the human condition and, in doing so, to challenge literary, visual, and dramatic forms. Though we might conclude that the anarchic and hilarious works of Martin McDonagh embrace the Dionysian with scant regard for the Apollonian, it would be truer to say that he has reinterpreted the very basis of our distinctions between the two and, as the child of Beckett and Pinter, abandoned the notion that order holds sway and taken the absurd to be the bedrock upon which all action becomes manifest. 5 To say as much, however, is not to reduce his work to a traditional conception of the Absurd.