The Underside of Power (Algiers): On W/Hole people, missing masses and dispositions of politics in popular cinema

Abstract

Abstract This article explores the relationships between popular film and politics of popular empowerment, especially in anti-colonial and anti-racist contexts. I am placing concepts from political theories in dialogic relationships with scenes from films. A basic tenet of this approach is that there is insight into movies, especially where orthodox scientific/philosophical discourses would not expect it (in genre cinemas, action film, horror movies, etc). So, my arguments are not made about films, but at their respective sites of insights. Conceptually, I take off first from the W/Hole of the people the popular as a totality necessarily haunted by incompleteness that figures in social struggles and dissensual film images; second, from the missing of masses as the people in an improper amount, a basic mistake in the counting of the social; and third, from dis-positions regarding power relations, also positionings on ‘sides’ (e.g., ‘undersides of power’) and on sites in social space, and dis-positioning in time, a.k.a. history.