Professional Documents
Culture Documents
To cite this article: Paul Willemen (2013): Introduction to Subjectivity and Fantasy in Action: For a
Comparative Film Studies , Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 14:1, 96-103
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14649373.2013.746773
Paul WILLEMEN
ABSTRACT Originally written as an introduction to Willemens unpublished book of essays, this paper
provides perhaps the most concise outline available of what he meant by the concept comparative film
studies. Making a strong case for why all thinking on film should once and for all jettison the discredited framework that saw films at the intersection of national specificity and universal values, Willemen proposes that we replace that intersection as an encounter between national histories and the
capitalist-industrial production of culture. This requires us, first of all, to replace the very concept of
universality with what underpins it, namely a pervasive capitalist mode of production. In exploring
the historical-narrative constructions of such a capitalist mode, the argument draws from several disciplines to propose thatcontrary to conventional viewsit is not only language that defines
national-cultural memory. He draws from Marx to contend that past generations accumulated
efforts and experiences are also stored as a kind of labour power, in the form of dead labour in machines
of various kinds. A good way to understand this concept of dead labour, then, is to see the purpose of
narrative as also concerned with proposals, suggestions and dreams about the management of what he
calls the dead labour savings account. Finally, Willemen outlines the way by which such an
approach allows us to rethink the trope of modernity, and whatever it constructs as coming both
pre- and post- that modernity.
97
98
Paul Willemen
99
100
Paul Willemen
101
102
Paul Willemen
References
Adorno, Theodore. 1998. Critical Models: Inventions
and Catchwords. Translated by Henry W.
Pickford. New York: University of Columbia
Press.
Anderson, Perry. 2002a. Confronting Defeat.
London Review of Books 24 (20): 1017.
Anderson, Perry. 2002b. Internationalism: A
Breviary. New Left Review (II) 14: 525.
103