Chapter 1

Video and Interpretation
 
Before defining what video is, it’s worth taking a moment to define what it is not. 
For starters, video is not simply the flickering play of random images or the televised 
reproduction of cinematic forms. Rather, it draws its aesthetic content from a vast 
multinational reservoir of icons, scripts, sound tracks, sound bites and performances, each 
of which requires the most careful critical analysis. Secondly, video’s apparent simplicity 
conceals enormous complexity. The iridescent surfaces, ingenious scripts and user-
friendly icons of the greatest works of video pack an astonishing amount of data into the 
smallest and most portable of aesthetic forms – forms which require, in turn, no less agile 
methods of interpretation and decoding. This is probably most obvious to those of us who 
teach in the university classroom and discover, to our chagrin, that our youngest students 
can swim effortlessly through the sort of hurricane-force media surf capable of 
shipwrecking a platoon of Ph.D. candidates. Still, it’s worth stressing that video works 
are a deeply plebian and democratic art-form. Designed for maximum accessibility to a 
multinational audience, they display many of the best features of the global aesthetic 
commodities they both occasionally mimic and savagely critique: flexibility, ease of use, 
and sheer entertainment value. 
Most of all, video culture is part and parcel of a globe-straddling consumer culture 
teeming with multinational contradictions. However stupefying and mind-numbing 
specific aspects of the consumer culture might be, multinational culture as a whole 
presupposes a remarkable amount of collective cultural labor, everywhere from the 
childhood sports scrimmage to the World Cup spectacular, and from the vast textual 
overproduction of email and listservs to the public-domain freeware powering the server 
farms, hypertext documents and telecom protocols of the Web. Where shoppers once 
distinguished between 19th century family trademarks or waded through 20th century 
corporate acronyms, consumers nowadays confront the commodity form through plastic 
shells brimming with multinational icons, symbols and data of all kinds. Browsing 
through this information has become both a necessary survival skill in the late capitalist 
marketplace, as well as one of its most signal (if signally double-edged) pleasures. 
To bring the market into the discussion, however, immediately raises some thorny 
questions about what role video plays in that marketplace, and whether it is even 
permissible to speak of a truly global media culture, given the horrific social, political 
and economic disparities of the present era. According to the World Bank’s Year 2000 
development report, as of 1998 the average rate of TV ownership in low-income 
countries was 76 TV sets per 1,000 people, while the comparable figures for middle-
income and high-income countries were 257 and 567, respectively, suggesting an 
unprecedented expansion of TV viewership around the globe. To paraphrase the famous 
slogan of the 1960s, for the first time in human history, the whole world really is 
watching. On the other hand, the same report reveals that most human beings on the 
planet can only dream of owning a telephone, let alone a computer or an ISP connection; 
billions must survive on less than $2 a day, and lack the most rudimentary access to 
health care, employment, housing and clean water.1  
Just because the technomillenial hype of the wiring of the planet is wildly 
overblown, however, is not a license to write off the concept as a mere media stunt or 
passing craze. Globalization may be kilometers wide and only millimeters deep, but those 
few millimeters are packed with the densest socio-economic circuitry imaginable. The 
World Bank’s own data proves, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that the end of the Cold 
War has brought not prosperity for all but a pitiless economic struggle for pole-position 
on the food chain of information capitalism. The neoliberalism and neocolonialism of the 
1990s are the direct heir of the Manchester liberalism and colonialism of the 1890s, the 
only difference being that whereas Victorian rentiers extracted their Imperial textile-rents 
from the labor of the Great Unwashed, their postmodern analogues on Wall Street 
speculate on the viewing-rents of the Great Unwatched. The global in its most pejorative, 
polemical sense is simply the word we use to describe the meat hook realities of this 
struggle, namely the hideous swathe of social and ecological destruction spawned by 
flagrantly ill-advised IMF structural adjustment packages, toxic World Bank lending 
practices, and all-round neoliberal deregulation across the planet, and the corresponding 
enrichment of select Northamerican, East Asian and EU business interests.2 
We will argue that video culture at its radical best is far more than just an urgent 
corrective on the global: it is the meditation and self-critical reflection upon such. Itself 
the site of truly planetary political and social conflicts, video culture is also the staging-
grounds for new forms of multinational solidarity and community, being reinvented on a 
daily basis. The Ur-form of this process can be traced back to the micropolitical 
movements of the 1980s, when groups such as Amnesty International and Greenpeace 
discovered that local struggles against polluters and human rights abusers could not really 
be separated from the systemic struggle against globe-trotting oil, timber and mining 
companies and neo-comprador governments under the thumb of IMF neoliberalism. One 
of the most memorable video images of the 1980s, for instance, was a satellite photo 
graphically illustrating the annihilation of the Brazilian rainforest by cattle ranchers; the 
local had gone irrevocably global. By the 1990s, this process was accompanied by its 
logical and complementary corollary, a.k.a. the localization of global issues – something 
visible everywhere from free-trade deals administered on behalf of the supply chains of 
multinational corporations (hereafter referred to as “multis”) to the creation of 
transnational networks of trade unions, and from the packs of well-heeled corporate 
lobbyists prowling the corridors of Washington, D.C. to the citizens’ movements, trade 
unions and peasant associations fighting against ecologically toxic and economically 
wasteful World Bank-financed dam projects in rural India. 
Our own version of the local and global, adapted specifically for the field of 
video, will be the micrological and the geopolitical, respectively. The micrology is 
borrowed wholesale from Theodor Adorno’s negative dialectics, a set of concepts 
designed to locate the smallest gaps, fissures and non-identities buried within 
commodities, works of art, ideological formations or what have you in order to map the 
totalizing dynamics of late capitalism as a whole.3 Geopolitics is taken from Jameson’s 
notion of the geopolitical aesthetic of cinema, which is deployed here in the context of 
the dissolution of the Cold War power-blocs, and the rise of a quite different 
configuration of power-blocs and economies in their stead (a polite synonym for the 
decline of the Pax Americana and the rise of the European Union and East Asia). One 
needs nanometric lenses to read the cosmological constellations of video, so to speak, and 
a theory of constellations in order to properly calibrate those lenses. 
The rise of video accompanied another significant event worth exploring in some 
detail, namely the globalization of cultural theory generally. This is closely connected to 
the rise of a multinational theory-market, not to mention the institutional hothouse of the 
post-WW II university system in which the theory-market emerged. Pierre Bourdieu’s 
Homo Academicus has blazed an impressive new trail here, by outlining in compelling 
detail how the specific contradictions of a massively expanding French university system 
generated the sociological basis for the May 1968 uprising, uniquely catalyzing the 
specific mindsets, life-histories and psychological affiliations by which that uprising was 
concretely lived, felt and rhetorically justified (or symbolically repudiated). Rather than 
attempting to single out a single overriding element – say, the economic – as the 
“meaning” or overriding cause of May ‘68, Bourdieu asks that we think through the 
economic, the political and the psychological, all at once. The historical event functions, 
in essence, very much like Adorno’s notion of the constellation, effectively mediating 
between the objective set of social relations and symbolic capitals (what Bourdieu terms 
the field), and the subjective set of positions, position-taking and strategic maneuvers in 
that field (the Bourdieusian habitus). Just as each field is in constant motion, as various 
schools, class fractions, or aesthetic formations compete for internal forms of symbolic 
capital, status and prestige as well as external position vis-à-vis other fields, so too does 
each habitus offer a range of dynamic positions and possibilities, as individuals, groups 
or entire institutions ascend or descend in the competitive hierarchy, grabbing or 
relinquishing market share as best they can.4 The point isn’t to denounce the grimy 
realities of competition or the existence of the theory-market per se, but to ask why they 
exist, to analyze how they work, and to invent ways they might be changed for the better 
(by increasing public access to the field in question, greater solidarity and cooperative 
ventures in lieu of ruinous competition, and so forth).
Abstract as all this sounds, Bourdieu’s work will be enormously helpful to us in 
the next chapter, which will take the position that Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner was 
to the national mass media very much what May ’68 was in the field of national politics: 
the zero-hour of the multinational. But for now, we need to return to the question of 
theory for a moment, and ask some hard questions about the role of the theory-market in 
the post-1968 period – the trajectory, in so many words, from the theory-booms of the 
1970s and 1980s to the theory-bust of the 1990s. Though a full explication of all the 
factors involved would require a book in its own right, two general features of the process 
need to be mentioned here. First of all, there is a powerful element of social geography at 
work in the theory-market: the Francophone thinkers (Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Derrida, 
Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, and Jacques Lacan, to name just a few) were very much 
concerned with discursive issues, that is to say the mediatization of the French state and 
the emergence of the European Union. By contrast, the leading Northamerican thinkers 
(Fredric Jameson, Judith Butler, Eve Sedgewick, Gayatri Spivak and others) were much 
more attuned to the cultural sphere, particularly the politics of the media culture and Wall 
Street neoliberalism, a.k.a. the ideology of global finance capitalism. 
	Secondly, there’s no question but that the speculative drive of the post-
structuralisms and postmodernisms harmonized, on some deep level, with the real life 
financial speculations of Wall Street. At their best, the postmodernisms were the critical 
meditation and reflection upon those speculations (as with Jameson’s classic essay on 
postmodernism); at their worst, they were little more than the media-chatter of academic 
superstars shielded from the grim realities of economic austerity, skyrocketing tuition and 
rampant privatization – realities which had begun to undercut the very existence of 
autonomous national literary, philosophical and cultural departments, as tenured and full-
time positions were slashed to make way for vast pools of contingent and adjunct 
academic workers. 
The culture-workers of the 1990s were thus confronted with an unprecedented 
contradiction: while the total stock of conceptual and theoretical capital in their 
specialized fields kept right on increasing, each person’s specific symbolic capital – that 
is, the advanced degree or tenure-track university position – was being devalued, 
privatized or downsized out of existence. The upshot was a phase of excruciating 
personal demoralization and discontent, followed by the sweeping repoliticization o f the 
cultural field, visible everywhere from a remarkable upsurge in graduate employee and 
faculty unionism (involving, among other things, the establishment of grad unions 
throughout the University of California system) to new and interesting work in media 
studies, postcolonial studies and Comparative Literature. Suddenly, the most obscure 
zones of cultural theory had shockingly relevant things to say about the marketization of 
the planet, the rise of media multis like AOL-Time-Warner, Sony and Bertelsmann, and 
the blossoming media cultures of the European Union and a rapidly integrating East 
Asian polity. In classic Marxian fashion, the marketization of the university forced the 
toilers of academe to construct zones of extra-academic solidarity, in a manner similar to 
that of the programmers and technicians of the information culture, who struck back 
against the pernicious greed and privatizing mania of the silicon rentiers by creating the 
electronic commons of open source software and the Web. 
	This is why any theory of video culture has to do more than simply take the 
realities of economic and social polarization seriously. To really do its job, it also has to 
touch base with the ways in which people are creatively rethinking or otherwise resisting 
that polarization, by means of a range of covert and overt solidarities. As Adorno would 
have put it, gloomy denunciations of the totally mediated society are not gloomy – or 
mediated – enough. This, of course, is to defer to Adorno’s invaluable definition of the 
total system as a totality which is never at rest: it is dynamic, it moves in multiple and 
contradictory directions (not all of which are progressive, but not all of which are 
regressive, either). Just as solidarity cannot be simply imposed from without or ordained 
by fiat, but emerges out of the complex interactions of class consciousness, identity-
politics, and legislative and juridical struggles, neither can theory peremptorily exempt 
itself from its own analyses or wall itself off from whatever it is attempting to investigate. 
Rather, it must grapple with the messy micrological resistances and uneven geopolitical 
solidarities of the contemporary world-system, both accessing the global history buried in 
local forms as well as doing justice to the localized content bound up in global forms. To 
paraphrase Adorno once more, cultural theory need not privilege itself over cultural 
praxis, any more than the latter has priority over the former; rather, each is the necessary 
and indispensable corrective on the other.5 Theory must learn, in order to teach.
There is no more striking confirmation of Adorno’s insight than the literature on 
one of the most innovative sub-categories of video of them all, namely the aesthetics of 
the Web. There has been a tidal wave of books, reports and articles on cyberculture, both 
in the mainstream business press and in academia. But one cannot help but notice that the 
first book-length study of videogames to do justice to its subject, Steven Poole’s excellent 
Trigger Happy, appeared in 2000 – more than thirty-five years after the very first 
videogames were written by minicomputer programmers, and fifteen years after 
videogames became a multibillion dollar industry, with revenues rivaling those of TV 
and film. More is at work here than the usual time-lag between the emergence of a work 
of art and its critical reception or canonization (centuries in the case of the novel, decades 
in the case of film). Rather, the field of Web aesthetics is only mirroring a much broader 
set of social tendencies, namely, the all-pervading influence of a Wall Street culture 
which favors speculative frenzies of form over the production of content. At the peak of 
the Wall Street Bubble of the 1990s, the stock market value of high-tech companies – that 
is, their speculative or potential value twenty and thirty years down the road – was 
inflated wildly beyond their actual revenues (let alone minor details such as profits). 
All too many accounts of the media culture in the 1990s suffer from a similar 
fetishism, by overvaluing the dissemination of music, images or other signifiers at the 
expense of what is actually being transmitted. In the musical field, this has resulted in 
countless analyses of how Madonna/MTV/the latest VJ cites or samples auteur film, 
rhythm and blues and funk music, that is to say the video marketing of music, at the 
expense of anything like musical content.6 Something similar is at work in all too many 
analyses of the global news media, which tend to confuse the video clips of the uprisings, 
rebellions and revolutions of Eastern Europe and Southeastern Asia rebroadcast by the 
mass media with the underground networks of local and regional media cultures in those 
regions which spurred those rebellions in the first place (what could be called the 
cybersamizdat of media artists such as Poland’s Andrzej Wajda, the Czech Republic’s 
Jan Svankmajer, China’s Yimou Zhang and countless others). 
That said, contemporary media theorists such as Michael Parenti, Ben Bagdikian 
and Robert McChesney have done a commendable job of critiquing the ownership 
structures of the media, the relentless concentration of media outlets, the gutting of US 
public television and radio, and the firesale of the radio spectrum to well-heeled media 
multis. What we have been lacking, however, is a theory of how video works resist the 
dictates of the media business around them, on the immanent level of aesthetic content. 
And resist they do, clawing, scratching and biting for their own semi-autonomous space, 
everywhere from pointed satires of multinational media executives (e.g. the malevolent 
President in Fall Out, the final episode of The Prisoner) to the creative reappropriation of 
marginalized or peripheral aesthetic forms (e.g. sci-fi, fantasy and horror narratives) 
evident in the best Japanese anime. 
Probably the best way of grasping the problem is to highlight video’s emergence 
in the late 1960s from its constituent national and international predecessors, most 
notably cinema. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam offer this intriguing meditation on the 
subject:

Contemporary video and computer technologies facilitate media jujitsu. Instead of an 
“esthetic of hunger”, video-makers can deploy a kind of cybernetic minimalism, 
achieving maximum beauty and effect for minimum expense. Video switches allow the 
screen to be split, divided horizontally or vertically with wipes and inserts. Keys, chroma-
keys, mattes and fader bars, along with computer graphics, multiply audio-visual 
possibilities for fracture, rupture, polyphony. An electronic “quilting” can weave together 
sounds and images in ways that break with linear character-centered narrative. In such 
texts, multiple images can be “hung” on the screen like so many paintings in a gallery, 
obliging spectators to choose which image to contemplate, without losing themselves in 
any single image. All the conventional decorum of dominant narrative cinema – eyeline 
matches, position matches, the 30 degree rule, cutaway shots – is superseded by 
proliferating polysemy.7

The insight into the multilayered nature of video works, heavily mediated by a 
multinational technological matrix, is well taken, but the recourse to the trope of the 
gallery of paintings is problematic for two reasons. First, video images do not directly 
invoke filmic space in that sense, any more than film directly invokes painted or 
photographic space; rather, they occupy what might be called informatic space – most 
apparent in the graphics interface of the average home computer, the framing techniques 
of the news broadcast, or the onscreen boxscore of the sports event. Second, the crucial 
question of how one aesthetic mediation can negate or otherwise turn the tables on 
another is forestalled by the notion of “polysemy”, that is to say a formalized aesthetics 
or semiotics of the rupture or break, which never quite rises to its (latent) multinational 
content; put another way, Shohat and Stamm are outlining a theory of national cinematic 
forms, whereas the field of video is inherently multinational, and thus requires a rather 
different set of critical instruments.
	We will suggest that any account of multinational content must deal with the 
fundamental reality of multinational consumerism, in its broadest sense as a source of 
narratives of all kinds. In contrast to the great films of high modernism, which combed 
through mass-cultural subgenres such as the murder mystery, the romantic melodrama, 
the adventure thriller, and the costume epic for their raw materials, the earliest video 
sequences cycle through a much broader array of non-cinematic visual forms and genres. 
Some of the most memorable proto-video clips in the films of the late 1960s, for 
example, mobilize the specific visual forms pioneered by that decade – the counter-
cultural street poster, the graffiti tag or protest slogan, and of course the earliest 
videogames – against the narrative machinery of the Hollywood blockbuster. In the case 
of the Western, the obvious example is Sergio Leone’s The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, 
with its thinly-disguised allegories of bureaucratization, the crucial writing of names 
which unlocks the secret of the buried gold (narratives of credit accumulation, rather than 
land accumulation), and the stylized close-ups of the gunfighters which displace the 
panoramic shoot-out. Kubrick’s 2001 did something similar vis-à-vis the visual forms of 
the Cold War space opera: thus the poignant scene of televisual mail, the suggestive span 
from the hand-drawn sketch which an astronaut displays to the computer HAL to the 
glowing, disembodied circuit maps the astronauts later scan for faults, and of course the 
false-color panoramas and close shots of the astronaut’s faceshield during the celebrated 
psychedelic sequence. 
During the 1970s, video techniques began to break out of the cinematic forms in 
which they had emerged, by constructing their own free-standing framing and editing 
techniques. From a narrowly technological standpoint, one could easily assume that the 
crucial influence here was the emergence of the VCR, invented by Ampex all the way 
back in 1956 and commercialized by Sony in 1965. In reality, models affordable to the 
average First World consumer – as well as a corresponding infrastructure of videocassette 
rental stores – did not arrive until the late 1970s. What this meant was that the major 
visual innovations of early video did not materialize in the field of videotaped material 
per se, but rather in those marginalized cultural zones of cinema excluded, for whatever 
reason, from the Hollywood studio system. Two of the most striking examples of this 
dialectic are the Hong Kong films of the late 1960s and 1970s, typified by innovative 
directors such as Zhang Che and Lau Kar-leong and the emergence of global superstars 
like Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan, and the low-budget US horror film whose greatest 
expression was Tobe Hooper’s classic The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. 
As Stephen Teo points out, the Hong Kong film industry pioneered the use of 
extended editing techniques for quite pragmatic reasons – namely, to make up for tiny 
special effects budgets, overworked production crews, and short production runs.8 The 
result was a quantum leap in framing techniques – something most obvious in the 
multiple tight shots of the martial arts contest, capable of either shrinking down the 
panoramic space of the Western into a kinetic field of moving objects, or else telescoping 
small spaces into dramatically larger ones, via stylized combat sequences and slow-
motion stunts. By contrast, Hooper’s shot techniques radically accelerated or decelerated 
the flow of time, most notably in the use of chase sequences and the twin themes of a 
terrifying bodily incarceration (most notoriously, the scene where the video work 
symbolically “watches” the modernist horror film, i.e. we’re forced to watch someone 
forced to watch someone else being carved up by Leatherface) and exhilarating escapes 
(hinted at by the close shots of Sally’s eye, juxtaposed against the moon, and sealed by 
the concluding reverse tracking shot of Sally aboard the fleeing truck, reflexively 
realizing her liberation). 
Though the sheer visual energy of the Hong Kong films certainly exceeds 
anything found in the toolkit of the horror film, it’s significant that the latter manages to 
compensate by much more effective use of the sound-track (something which can be 
traced back to the trademark shock-theme of Hitchcock’s Psycho, and forwards to the 
electrifying sound-track of Kubrick’s The Shining). This is the genesis of Texas 
Chainsaw’s clattering machines, sputtering engines, and of course the sussurating 
chainsaw, that household item of consumer technology which gruesomely consumes its 
erstwhile consumers. Put another way, where the Hong Kong films answered for a lack of 
expensive scenery and set designs with ingenious stunts and rapid editing techniques, the 
horror film answered for a lack of studio musicians and theme music with a bone-jarring, 
technological sound-track, with profound affinities to the acoustic palette of 1970s punk 
rock. 
In fact, the affinity between the horror film and punk rock runs much deeper than 
one might think. The horror film showcased downscaled or proletarianized teenagers and 
students, who experienced the freezing shock of economic austerity as low-wage workers 
in suburban malls and convenience stores rather than as apprentices in factories or mines; 
punk rock was similarly scripted by London’s service-sector working-class, historically 
excluded from the counter-culture by deindustrialization and Thatcherism. Both explicitly 
turned the logic of the media culture against itself, by politicizing not merely the 
production of culture but its networks of distribution and dissemination as well: where 
the horror films negated the special-effects-laden Hollywood monster and occult 
blockbuster, punk rock repudiated a predatory record and concert industry. Finally, each 
almost single-handedly invented two of the most lucrative cultural niche-markets of the 
1980s, namely the slasher film and heavy metal music. 
Such affinities tell us a great deal about why – and how – video works differ from 
cinematic ones. For starters, video works are clearly the product of a much more complex 
division of aesthetic labor: whereas the filmic auteurs operated under any number of 
constraints, ranging from the technological dependence on live actors (or, in the case of 
animation, hand-drawn cels) and raw film stock to the economic dependence on 
Hollywood studios or national film agencies, video works can electronically sample, alter 
or pastiche a vast library of prerecorded media. The price paid for this increase in 
complexity, however, is a much tighter degree of integration with the multinational media 
and consumer culture as a whole – something which has incalculable consequences for 
the vocation of cultural politics. Unlike film in the heyday of modernism, video does not 
have the option of what might be termed national-autarkic strategies of aesthetic 
development – the creation of specialized filmic languages or genres, ranging from the 
Soviet documentary montage to Italian neorealism, and from the Japanese samurai 
adventure to the American screwball comedy. This is because culture (defined as the sum 
of the tourist, media, entertainment, sports and gaming industries) has become one of the 
biggest, fastest-growing and most multinational consumer markets of them all. The 
upshot is that the cultural politics of mobilization endemic to the modernist period, where 
the point was to persuade, shock or otherwise bestir the audience to think and act on a 
monopoly-national level, has acceded to the cultural politics of interpretation, where the 
point is to get the audience to think and act multinationally. Put another way, whereas the 
filmic modernisms narrated the seismic conflicts of Fascism, Communism, and the New 
Deal in terms of one’s allegiance or antipathy to a fairly restricted set of nation-states, 
national political parties or corporate brand names, video is directly tied to the political 
conflicts of a genuinely global geopolity, a.k.a. multinational states, political movements 
and corporations. 
To see how such an interpretive politics might work, one need look no further 
than the musical field of the 1970s. Two of the greatest sources of musical innovation in 
that decade were (1) the reggae compilations of Bob Marley and the Wailers (Legend and 
Exodus), which transformed Jamaican folk music, African American rock and roll, and 
the technologies of the electronic studio into the reggae dub; and (2) the Sex Pistol’s 
stunning Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols, which retrofitted working-class 
blues and rock music with cutting-edge studio mixing and processing technology. 
Whatever their other differences, reggae and punk music were crucially dependent on 
their location in the world-system for their lyric content: for Marley, the resistance 
movement of Rastafarianism, with its diasporic links back to the African fatherland and 
the African American and Jamaican communities scattered across North America and 
Britain; for Johnny Rotten, the Cockney accent, urban camaraderie and volatile class-
consciousness of the London proletariat. Each unites a radical neo-national identity cut 
loose, exiled or otherwise cast adrift from its traditional moorings in the traditional 
nation-state by means of a multinational musical palette, thereby creating a kind of 
“liberated zone” or space of post-colonial cultural solidarity with other neo-national 
identities. Put another way, the Sex Pistols and Bob Marley set the musical materials of 
the First World working-class and Third World peasant liberation movements into 
motion towards one another, the former from post-colonial London and the latter from 
post-colonial Jamaica, thereby creating a genuinely multinational musical aesthetics. 
Applying this insight to our previous discussion, it is therefore no accident that 
the Hong Kong films were spawned in a British colonial entrepot turned export-platform 
heavyweight, while Texas Chainsaw was produced as an independent film project in 
Austin, Texas, one of the leading university towns in the blossoming service-sector 
economy of the New South. In Hong Kong’s case, the crucial elements here were (1) a 
displaced or otherwise deeply compromised Chinese national culture, (2) a dynamic and 
restless population of urban immigrants who experienced a massive economic boom but 
no corresponding political decolonization, and (3) direct access to the English-speaking 
film markets of the Chinese communities of the Pacific Rim. For the horror film, the key 
ingredients were clearly (1) a displaced or otherwise compromised Southern culture 
located at some distance from Hollywood, (2) a dynamic and restless population of 
students at the University of Austin, during the transition from the great student and civil 
rights mobilizations of the 1960s to the micropolitics of the 1970s, and (3) direct access 
to the post-1968 youth market, in the form of the slasher film genre. 
Now, at last, we can put all the pieces of the puzzle together. For just as the horror 
film is the visual analogue of the punk album, so too does reggae have a formal visual 
equivalent: nothing less than the space of post-colonial video. The obvious example here 
is Bruce Lee as the breakthrough Asian American superstar, who single-handedly blazed 
the trail for John Woo, Chow Yun-Fat, the Chinese Fifth Generation filmmakers and 
countless other luminaries. But one could also point to Richard Roundtree and Mario van 
Peebles, who blasted open the door for the African American actors and directors of the 
future; or indeed the Polish “cinema of moral anxiety” of Wajda, Zanussi and others, 
which achieved something similar for Eastern European media producers. 
This suggests, in turn, that the great anti-colonial and revolutionary films of the 
1960s have more in common with the video works of the 1970s than is commonly 
presupposed. Both Gillo Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers (1965) and Tomás Gutiérrez 
Alea’s Memories of Underdevelopment (1968) culminate in the collective spectacle of 
national mobilizations, wherein an urban space (the comprador city turned revolutionary 
citadel) is occupied by a new kind of micropolitics. This is closely linked to a 
revolutionary politics of gender, loosely aligned with a kind of Second Wave or juridical 
feminism: thus the women dressed in European garb smuggling weapons to the rebels in 
Algiers, or the love-affair subplots of Memories. Each reappropriates the shot techniques, 
editing and composition of the documentary, the existentialist-era thriller (especially film 
noir), and the newsreel, creating what amounts to the post-colonial version of 
telejournalism. The limits of this strategy were therefore the limits of telejournalism as a 
cultural form, or put another way, whereas telejournalism broadcasts the symbolic capital 
of the news announcers, broadcasters, executives and news firms involved, its 
postcolonial reappropriation could be said to broadcast the symbolic capital of the 
national-revolutionary mass party or anti-colonial movement to international markets. 
During the 1960s, the latent antinomies of this strategy were not really an issue, 
thanks to the brutal power-politics of the US and Soviet national security states, which 
crushed or derailed fledgling democracies and nascent developmental states everywhere 
from Guatemala, Chile and Vietnam, to Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary. By the 
1970s, however, in the context of political decolonization and the winding-down of the 
Cold War, this particular aesthetic solution was no longer a viable option. The experience 
of the newly independent countries was especially bitter, as the relentless pressure of the 
world-market transformed erstwhile revolutionary movements and parties into cash 
machines for neo-comprador elites, little better than the colonists they once chased out. 
Political decolonization, in short, turned out to be the flip side of electronic 
neocolonization. 
	The political stakes of this transformation are probably easiest to grasp in the 
context of what is most dated in Alea and Pontecorvo’s classics: this is the trope of the 
existentialist urban intellectual, whose painful vacillation between the high culture of the 
colonial metropole and the urgent demands of the anti-colonial resistance can be said to 
symbolize the desperate choices of Third World nationalism and identity-formation. The 
national intellectual thus incarnated a particular national identity-politics in much the 
same way that the national mass party embodied those broad coalitions of peasants, 
agrarian workers, and urban comrades and intellectual sympathizers which energized the 
national and anti-colonial movements of the post-WW II period. Each is an allegorical 
narrative designed to reorganize and reconfigure a host of local, regional and 
international narratives into a single coherent code or set of ideologemes, or what 
amounts to the creation of a national cultural currency, if you will, roughly analogous to 
the economic kind. It’s striking that the later, more radicalized works of Third World 
cinema (Ousmane Sembène in the 1970s or Yimou Zhang in the 1980s) explicitly 
critique such codes, in what amounts to a nascent solidarity with that strange new thing, 
the neocolonial proletariat spawned by capitalist neoliberalism and Communist 
industrialism alike. These are the residents of the rapidly-swelling favelas and 
shantytowns, who are as ruthlessly exploited and politically marginalized by the post-
colonial nation-state as the landless peasants once were by the colonial authorities, but 
whose habitus is heavily influenced by First World consumer goods and media culture. 
Culturally speaking, the vast migration from the farms to the factories in the Third World 
did more than just broaden the base of urban culture; it also transformed the natural world 
into an object of aesthetic contemplation – most famously, in the gorgeous outdoor 
panoramas and eroticized bodies of Yimou Zhang’s Red Sorghum, which fluoresce with 
the global energies unleashed by Chinese rural industrialization.
This immediately raises the question of how multinational class structures, 
ideologies and identities relate to video culture. The simple answer is that there is no 
simple answer here; as Adorno noted long ago, the proletariat is an object of domination 
in capitalist societies, a situation which cannot be remedied by simply snapping one’s 
fingers or issuing Party ukases. Rather, the consciousness of people who work for a living 
will be as varied as their modes of work and as complex as the division of labor itself, 
registering everything from the crassest xenophobia and consumerism to quite 
sophisticated scientific and cultural critiques (not to mention the ubiquitous micropolitics 
of gender, ethnic affiliation, and family structures). This is true even of those societies 
which notoriously claimed to have abolished class, e.g. the Communist regimes, which 
promulgated the ideology of proletarian rule while practicing the reality of autarkic 
proletarianization.
What differentiates the contemporary experience of class from anything in the 
past is the fact that, for the first time in human history, the majority of the human beings 
on the planet live in cities and exist outside of the agrarian economy. Significant enclaves 
of rural and peasant culture do of course continue to exist, but are far more tightly 
integrated with the urban centers of accumulation than ever before, something which has 
led to new types of popular mobilizations against formerly revolutionary one-party states 
and crossing all manner of national borders, everywhere from Ken Saro-wiwa and the 
Ogoni people in Nigeria to the Uw’e people of Colombia locked in struggle against 
Occidental Petroleum, and to the Zapatistas of southern Mexico. Urbanization also 
transformed the one-party state from within, spurring both its complete abolition (as in 
the case of the Eastern bloc) as well as its drastic modification. Thus in 1949, the Chinese 
Communists were the leading expropriator of the landlord class, while the Nationalists 
were its leading defenders; five decades later, both parties had evolved into astonishingly 
similar developmental technocracies. 
Probably the best strategy here is to think of multinational class identity as a hazy, 
provisional habitus, locked into struggle with its more organized monopoly and national 
analogues, and located in a multinational cultural field littered with monopoly-national 
and neo-national forms. This enables us to avoid overly simplistic questions about the 
immediate political stance of a given aesthetic work (for or against the Party, for or 
against neoliberalism), by grasping the fact of geopolitical location as a crucial structural 
feature of video culture. The leading cultural works of post-colonial video, for example, 
had to sublate the broadcasting monopoly and cinematic heritage of the one-party state 
and Third World nationalism alike in order to create their own cultural space. The rather 
different location of the earliest First World video works, situated in the core economies 
of consumer capitalism, dictated a rather different strategy; but to see how different, we 
need to turn to Patrick McGoohan’s classic series, The Prisoner.
Footnotes to Chapter 1

1. The World Bank defines low-income as annual per capita income of $755 or less, 
middle-income as $756-$2995, and high-income as $2995 and above. The middle-income 
countries have the greatest share of the world population, 2.7 billion residents; by 
contrast, 2.4 billion live in low-income and 891 million in high-income countries. The 
2000-2001 World Development Report, World Bank (174-175, 311-312). 

2. Though the World Bank and the IMF publicly insist that the poor have made great 
progress under their tutelage, the World Bank’s own statistics prove otherwise. Despite 
heavy regulations and strong state intervention in the economy, the Second and Third 
World grew very rapidly indeed from 1945-1980. Since then, the vast majority of these 
countries have been subjected to punishing structural adjustment packages by the IMF; 
the typical prescription is fiscal orthodoxy, a decline in real wages, deregulation of the 
financial sphere, abolition of national tariffs, and lush subsidies for well-heeled foreign 
investors. The results bespeak a planetary developmental disaster: annual per capita 
growth in consumption in low-income countries declined to only 1.4% from 1980-1998. 
In middle-income countries, per capita growth was 2.2%, which at first glance seems 
comparable to that of high-income countries (also 2.2%). These figures, however, include 
India and China, which grew at 2.7% and 7.2% rates, respectively, from 1980-98. Both of 
these countries pursued economic policies which broke every rule in the IMF’s neoliberal 
playbook, i.e. rejected fiscal austerity, emphasized state-owned enterprises, carefully 
regulated financial markets, and protected domestic markets. Excluding these two, 95 out 
of the remaining 107 countries listed in the World Bank report saw per capita 
consumption levels fall (in some cases, quite drastically) relative to those of the richest 
countries. If this is success, one shudders to think of what failure might look like. The 
2000-2001 World Development Report, World Bank (277).

3. Adorno’s classic formulation of the vocation of a negative (read: multinational) 
dialectics poses this issue in terms of the antipodes of the micrology and the macrology: 
“Immersion into the particular, dialectical immanence raised to an extreme, requires as 
one of its moments the freedom to step out of the object, too, the freedom which the 
claim of identity cuts off. Hegel would have abjured this; he relied upon the complete 
mediation in objects. In the praxis of cognition, the resolution of the irresolvable, the 
moment of such transcendence of thought comes to light in that solely as a micrology 
does it employ macrological means. The demand for committalness [Verbindlichkeit] 
without system is that for thought-models. These are not of a merely monadological sort. 
The model strikes the specific and more than the specific, without dissolving it into its 
more general master-concept. To think philosophically is so much as to think in models; 
negative dialectics is an ensemble of model-analyses.” (My translation). Theodor 
Adorno. Negative Dialektik. Suhrkamp Verlag: Frankfurt am Main, 1973 (39).

4. Applying this insight to the rise of cultural studies more generally, it’s no accident that 
new literary fields such as New Criticism, existentialism, and the canon of Western 
European modernism all emerged in the 1950s at the exact moment that the post-WW II 
English and literature departments were confronted with the task of educating swelling 
numbers of undergraduates. The transformation of the theoretical field was part and 
parcel of an intergenerational struggle between professors, administrators and educators, 
caught up in the transition away from the Ivy League model of training a narrow, 
privileged elite, and towards the publicly-funded, heavily militarized mass research 
university. One can observe a similar dialectic at work in the 1960s, where the rise of 
structuralism, semiotics and micropolitics went hand-in-hand with the mediatization, 
multiculturalization (and of course repoliticization) of the university system. 

5. “Theory and intellectual experience require their reciprocal effect. This does not 
contain answers for everything, but reacts to a world which is false to its innermost core. 
Theory would have no jurisdiction over what would be free of the bane of such. The 
ability to move is essential to consciousness, not an accidental characteristic. It signifies a 
double procedure: that of the inside out, the immanent process, the authentically 
dialectical, and a free one, something unfettered which steps out of dialectics, as it were. 
Neither of them are however disparate. The unregimented thought has an elective affinity 
to dialectics, which as critique of the system recalls to mind what would be outside of the 
system; and the energy which dialectical movement in cognition unleashes is that which 
rebels against the system. Both positions of consciousness are connected to one another 
through each other’s critique, not through compromise.” (My translation). Theodor 
Adorno, Negative Dialektik. Suhrkamp Verlag: Frankfurt, 1972 (42). It’s one of the most 
hopeful signs of the late 1990s that a wide range of activists and thinkers are starting to 
take Adorno’s point very seriously indeed. Post-colonial theorists such as Gayatri Spivak, 
Homi Bhabha, and Aijiz Ahmad are beginning to ask the same unsettling questions about 
multinational culture and identity as First World gender theorists such as Judith Butler 
and Eve Sedgewick, while the work of economic critics such as Doug Henwood and 
Patrick Bond in critiquing Wall Street neoliberalism is increasingly informing (and being 
informed by) the theoretical insights of sociologists such as Boris Kagarlitsky, David 
Harvey and Pierre Bourdieu. 

6. My own feeling, shared by many hip hop cognoscenti, is that the real musical 
innovations of the 1980s and 1990s were made by hip hop artists, e.g. Public Enemy’s 
album It Takes a Nation of Millions… to Hold Us Back, Cypress Hill’s eponymous first 
album, and Kool Keith’s Dr. Octagon. Unfortunately, no really comprehensive 
musicology of late 20th century hip hop has yet been written.

7. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism. London and New York: 
Routledge, 1994.

8. Stephen Teo, Hong Kong Cinema. London: British Film Institute, 1997.


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