Geopolitical Aesthetics
The third, most abstract allegorical level is that of the acousmatic gaze, which Jameson himself does not address, but which is implicit in his theoretical re-evaluation of the conspiracy motif. In analyzing the paranoia films of New Hollywood, I am interested in the theoretical mediation of the concepts of suture and allegory. I show that the acousmatics of these films correspond with the intransparency of social totality. The films diagnose the negativity of totality in order to make it graspable again for the subject’s capacity of imagination. In my discussion of Miami Vice, I try to sketch out how such an aesthetic of cognitive mapping is also effective under the new geopolitical conditions of globalization. In the final sequence of the film, for example, the almost melancholic recourse to the suture of shot and reverse-shot coincides with the allegorical utopia of an unrepresentable Cuba. In this sense, in Jameson’s aesthetics of the politically unconscious, the mapping of totality is always interwoven with a utopian impulse.