Dialectics without synthesis
The film doesn’t only go about this problematic with an abhorred sledgehammer, but it does seem to have some understanding of the dialectical relation that repugnance has with fascination. As Ngai explains, that which disgusts us seems to foster a morbid fascination, due to our inability to rationalize it or incorporate it within a system of pleasure or desire. [32] [open endnotes in new window] For lack of a better example, a child might be fascinated with its own feces, wishing to taste it, know its properties, process it through its bowels, although its faculties wholeheartedly reject and protest such a notion. Why? Because that object does not allow itself to be known or conquered, it exists outside our means of knowledge and dominion. As Adorno and Horkheimer discuss, much of the enlightenment rationalist project which has driven the progress of history until the dawn of postmodernity has been based on ithe dealization of knowledge and the rational human.[33] However, this idealization also led to a colonialist ethos, where all aspects of reality had to be analyzed and studied so they could be owned and dominated.
“The reduction of the world to what can be calculated is a form of domination.”[34]
Disgust rejects this domination. It is not a knowable property that can be analyzed and quantified in a spreadsheet, it is a phenomenological affect. As such, subjects born into a world shaped by this value system naturally find the confrontation with the edges of their dominion frustrating – especially when it is the history of their ancestors and their race. But if one can abstract the revolting, if one can aestheticize it, find a means of consuming it in another form without regurgitating it, the disgust may be conquered and thus one can take ownership of it, master it.
This may explain the film’s many depictions of African-Americans loving and appreciating Mantan. At first glance, this depiction may seem incomprehensible, and thematically counterintuitive. But, if one examines this with an eye to the dialectic, this depiction takes on an added layer, perhaps portraying a latent desire within the African-American community to conquer this history and overcome it within the current world order.
“The colonized intellectual wants to use history to prove that his people had a culture (...) But this passion is still dominated by colonial time, colonial categories.”[35]
In this sense, Delacroix’s arc of creating the show as a means to get fired, only to later embrace it and defend it as a satire, takes on a more tragic character. Instead of merely being an opportunistic ploy to seize on the success of Mantan, it could be read as an attempt to take ownership of his own monstrosity without succumbing to the revolt he has for it and the history it evokes.
The scene where he defends Mantan on a radio show highlights his predicament. When confronted with adverse reactions to the show, he counters them with an attack on the African-American community’s self-victimization – ”slave mentality”, “this is the new millennium”, “slavery has been over” – framing their revolt and disgust as a lack or inability to overcome this history. But his project ends up becoming a negation of the very real structural, cultural and material consequences of history, and instead functions as what postcolonial theory terms as internalized oppression, where the values of the oppressor are subsumed by the oppressed and lead to participation in continued oppression.
Delacroix is a victim of this kind of internalized oppression, as mentioned, with his adoption of a white cadence, the gentrification of his name, and his very mannerisms echoing Fanon’s thoughts in Black Skin, White Masks.[36] And his way of staunchly defending his adoption of the White mask, and attacking those who remember the history of violence and hierarchical inequalities, also speak to Fanon’s description of the colonized intellectual in The Wretched of the Earth and that figure’s maintenance of the colonial structure.[37] Furthermore, Delacroix’s way of making his own product palatable to himself directly emulates the values, talking points and language of critics of African-American culture – “they pull each other down”, “stop thinking that way”, “adapt to the times” – thus also embodying the linguistic imperialism and mental colonization. Such a process is described by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o in Decolonising the Mind[38] where she outlines how the language and culture of the oppressor is internalized and eventually leads to self-negation.
The use of 35 mm by Pierre Delacroix in the film, but also from a metatextual perspective by Spike Lee and his crew themselves, could be read as an extension of this – showing how film is the aesthetic language of the oppressive cultural system. Using it to tell such stories risks maintaining the very cultural relations one tries to defeat. The stylistic flourishes and positive reception of Mantan prove this dilemma. At first, it might seem a clever artistic means of ironizing bigotry, but in doing so it risks appealing to an aesthetic sensibility based on inequality and become unironically appropriated as pleasurable – thus upholding the cultural paradigm it claims to satirize. But, as mentioned, Digital Photography would not have offered a better alternative to this dynamic, as it too proves to be a language or aesthetic subject to the same systemic power relations.
In this sense, the dialectical relations which the film explores, blackness/whiteness, film/digital, modernity/postmodernity, all seem to reach a form of neo-colonial synthesis, rather than any equal progress. As such, many of Fanon's critiques of Hegel’s master/slave dialectic when it comes to race or colonization bear fruit.
“The Negro did not become a master. When there are no more slaves, there are no masters. The Negro is a slave who was allowed to assume a master’s attitude.”[39]
One cannot free oneself or liberate oneself within the ideology or ontology or epistemology of the oppressor, because this culture is precipitated on a fundamental belief that the oppressed are sub-human and therefore not capable of offering sufficient recognition to the oppressor. In a postcolonial world order, this mode of thinking makes it fair for the oppressed to maintain a system littered with asymmetrical distribution of means, opportunities and power. It needs what Sylvia Wynter calls an ontological revolution, where the very idea of being and having value is redefined,[40] so that any dialectical notion of progress would have to be based on a renewed and equal conception of the human.
Virtues of disgust
In this way disgust maintains its power and may prove a radical way of challenging ideological and historical aesthetic paradigms without fully succumbing to them. Because the one dialectic which isn’t able to resolve itself as some neocolonial synthesis within or outside the film is that of disgust/fascination. In the end, Delacroix's attempt to conquer, aestheticize and commodify his disgust proves unsuccessful, because the disgusting, despite its many abstractions, remains intolerable. Much like a child consuming its own feces, no matter how much artificial flavoring you put on it, the body rejects it and becomes sick from within. As Mantan continues its success, Delacroix’s psyche starts to spiral with hallucinations of animate piggy-banks and a megalomaniacal need to dominate any-and-all of his African-American staff. It becomes clear that he is not the breaker of slave-mentality that brings African-American culture into the new millennium as he purports, but rather he becomes what he revolts against: the exploiter, the colonizer, the abhorrent. And he pays the price for it, with his life but most importantly with his being. Thus, the disgusting does not allow itself to be consumed, processed and made pleasurable, but rather it tears the faculties apart from the inside, rejecting the colonial dialectic.
But why? How? As Ngai writes, “there is a sense in which the disgusting is ‘the true Kantian sublime’—more sublime than the sublime itself”,[41] because it is as Derrida explains “the absolute ‘other’ of the system of taste”. [42]It can’t be consumed by all our senses. It goes beyond our imagination’s capacity to represent it as a whole simply because it is too intolerable to ponder. It demands exclusion, and it demands it instantly. In an epoch where the cultural logic, is built on pluralism and the unrestricted freedom of the market, disgust’s demand for instant exclusion becomes a negation of this ontology.
It presents the one aesthetic that won’t allow itself to be subsumed, appropriated, colonized, commodified, as pleasurable, desirable or profitable. In this sense, it might present the one artistic means left for ontological and epistemological disruption. If the Capitalist Realist ontology Mark Fisher[43] details is true – where it is near-impossible to conceive of a world outside of the very historically contingent power structures of neoliberal late-capitalism – disgust, by demanding exclusion, rejection, still has the power to jolt one into awareness of their role in a subject/object, self/other, consumer/product relation and the historical nature of this relation. As one tries to rationalize the feelings of displeasure of witnessing the disgusting, one can’t help but become aware of the historic and cultural totality which breeds this revolt – ultimately eliciting a kind of postcolonial sublime.
“The feeling of the sublime is thus a pleasure that arises only indirectly, being brought about by the feeling of a momentary check to the vital forces of the body and a consequent stronger outflow thereof, and it is thus a movement of the mind which, in the judgment of the reason, displays its superiority over nature by virtue of a certain ability to think a totality or absolute magnitude.”[44]
However, unlike Kant’s sublime, the disgusting never manages to become fully pleasurable, because – as Kant himself says – the object can’t be ”distinguished from the nature of the object itself in our sensation.”[45] Thus, our rationalization of the repugnant does not allow itself to reach a stage where it becomes pleasurable or desirable and further appropriated or commodified. It remains repugnant because what it represents is too repugnant for aesthetic representation.
In this way, disgust makes impossible the lack of historicity and erasure of history that Jameson and Fisher critique late-capitalist postmodernism for –
“The past as ‘referent’ finds itself gradually bracketed, and then effaced altogether, leaving us with nothing but texts”[46].
It also deals with what postcolonial thinkers, such as Fanon, critique its predecessor in modernity and imperialism for in regard to the colonized subject –
“Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native’s brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures, and destroys it.”[47]
By forcing us to rationalize the totality of our disgust, we are forced to reckon with the ideological, material, cultural and historical context which renders the disgusting, well, disgusting. In a sense, history, ideology, culture, become the very objects of aestheticization – and as such, through their portrayal as repugnant, they become un-negatable. Disgust thus emerges as perhaps the most politically direct and potent of aesthetics, always challenging notions of taste and revealing their relation to history, culture and ideology.
“In its intense and unambivalent negativity, disgust thus seems to represent an outer limit or threshold of what I have called ugly feelings, preparing us for more instrumental or politically efficacious emotions.”[48]
And Bamboozled wields disgust to reveal neoliberal late-capitalist project and its culture of postmodernism as a continuation of colonial modernity’s exploitative power relations and inequalities – with cinema and the entertainment industry as its bloodied tool, perpetuating these dehumanizing hierarchies.
