Three Days of the Condor’s temporal position as one of Paramount’s major releases of 1975 is significant: this is one of the first cultural products to cognitively map this crucial moment in the transmogrification of the world economic system, significantly coming only a year after the oil crisis of 73-74, and at the dawn of wide-spread financialization, speculization, and informationalization of capital. Gopal Balakrishnan has recently suggested that we are still trying to recover from this mutation in capitalism: “The last three decades of neo-liberal capitalism can be characterized as a prolonged, unsuccessful attempt to transcend the world economic crisis of the 1970s” (“Speculations on the Stationary State,” New Left Review, Sep/Oct 2009, p.10). The crisis gave rise to what Balakrishnan calls “The long 1970s,” a decade that has lasted 30-plus years—one which we are still mired in. The collapse of 2008 is part and parcel of this long 70s logic: “The implosion of the American-centered financial and real-estate bubble is the end of the line for a whole period of gravity-defying account imbalances, asset bubbles and debt creation” (Balakrishnan, p. 11). Condor, then, stands as an important document for tracing the topology of the inception point of our long neoliberal nightmare.
The growing prominence of the technical prostheses that would make this world-made-information possible, at least in the lives of the bourgeois middle-management and intellectual laborers of the intelligence apparatus, are everywhere on display in the world of our hero, Joe Turner (Robert Redford), an researcher-analyst for a New York City satellite of the CIA. The way that Redford navigates this new system of (mis)communication and control makes up the bulk of the film: in classical Hitchcockian mode, we follow this wrongly accused man as he seeks to clear his name, solve the mystery of who is really pulling the strings, and get the girl (Faye Dunaway) in the process. But unlike in Hitchcock, where the movement of our hero is still largely confined to the transportational networks built in the 19th century (e.g. North by Northwest’s train voyage across the American mid-west), in Condor, Redford moves among these visible, pedestrian networks of the of bodies and vehicles (there are several nondescript cutaways to exits on the I-95 corridor to serve as establishing shots of Washington D.C and northern Virginia), as well as the invisible networks of information and capital flows. In Fredric Jameson’s brilliant essay on this cycle of 70s conspiracy films, he highlights the role that the new conjunctions of technology and capital play in the world of the film—one that clearly maps the real world of its day:
Communicational and informational technologies—the scientific machineries of reproduction rather than of production (which, however, then trail the latter in their wake and turn it inside out, as their misunderstood predecessor)—foreground and dramatize [the] transformation of the object-world like its material idea. But they themselves have become magical only when grasped as the allegories of something else, of the whole unimaginable decentered global network itself. The new ingredients are already registered in the opening credits of Three Days of the Condor (Pollack, 1975), elegantly telexed in stylish computer graphics. (The Geopolitical Aesthetic, p. 13) [Well, “stylish” for 1975 anyway.]
It is precisely this “unimaginable decentered global network” that the film attempts to imagine, to make figural. To try to discursively come to terms with this same aporia—the attempt to imagine the unimaginable—Jameson focuses on one sequence of the film in particular: a privileged site in which the material substrate of the imbricated grids of capital and espionage are momentary revealed. All of Redford’s spying skills, gleaned from reading alone—as he protests at one point, “I’m not a field agent; I just read books!”—are brought to bear on trail of the assassin who murdered all of his co-workers. In the bravura sequence in question, Redford sneaks into the phone-bank of a large metropolitan hotel to make contact with the killer and surmise who is operating him; Redford then goes to the headquarters of the New York Telephone company, which the signage in front tells us is “Part of the Nationwide Bell System,” and taps into their massive mainframe of lines which presumably is a central hub for telecommunications on the east coast. It is here, in this quasi-cortical figuration of the inner workings of world system, that the rasion d’etre of this type of film is articulated most cogently. Jameson again:
[The] promise of a deeper inside view is the hermeneutic content of the conspiracy thriller in general, although its spatialization in Condor seems somehow more alarming than the imaginary networks of the usual suspects: the representational confirmation that telephone cables and lines and their interchanges follow us everywhere, doubling the streets and buildings of the visible social world with a secondary secret underground world, is a vivid, if paranoid, cognitive map, redeemed for once only by the possibilities of turning the tables, when the hero is able to tap into the circuits and bug the buggers, abolishing space with his own kind of simultaneity by scrambling all the symptoms and producing his messages from all corners of the map at the same time. (The Geopolitical Aesthetic, p. 15)
Here Jameson is referring to the fact that the CIA—who believe that Redford has “gone into business for himself,” “turned around,” “gone rogue,” as Sarah Palin would say—trace the call that Redford places to them from within the Bell System mainframe; but when they finally get a mark on his location, it suddenly changes on their (comically primitive) analog display screen: Redford has wired together numerous phones with ease from within this communicational “brain,” scrambling signals and locations with the same plasticity that exists in the always-individuating synapses of the encephalon (see Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?). Thus, the integrated system of espionage and capital—working towards exactly the same ends—sees the dangers of the transition from “energetics to informatics” (Steven Shaviro, “The Bitter Necessity of Debt,” p.3), which, as we know, takes place at precisely this post-Fordist moment when “control is based on floating exchange rates” (Deleuze, Negotiations, p. 180). When the methods of both capitalists and spies are virtualized, made immaterial, they become more easily usurped, especially when one can gain access to the “inside” as Redford does, and as we have seen recently with Julian Assange: WikiLeaks has bugged the buggers.
The other side of this informatic dynamic is dramatized in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008), in a scene in which Batman taps the phones of literally everyone if Gotham City, clearly stepping outside of the bounds of the law. While we can endorse Redford’s hijacking of the system to his own advantage—a kind of telecommunicational détournement—as the actions of a wrongly-accused man against a global network of imperial sovereignty; in the case of Batman, he is the (self-appointed) sovereign. The power he yields is the power of the sovereign; as Carl Schmitt famously puts it, “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception” (Political Theology, p. 5). Here we can clearly see Giorgio Agamben’s thesis from Homo Sacer at work: the figures of sovereign (Batman) and the bandit (Redford’s Joe Turner) are intimately linked by both being excluded—banned—from the juridical force of the law (see esp. Agamben’s chapter “The Ban and the Wolf” in Homo Sacer, where he writes: “The ban is the force of simultaneous attraction and repulsion that ties together the two poles of the sovereign exception: bare life and power, homo sacer and the sovereign. Because of this alone can the ban signify both the insignia of sovereignty . . . and expulsion from the community” pp. 110-111). For the neocon louts at the Wall Street Journal, this scene—in one of the most financially successful films ever made—proved that the people supported extraordinary security measures en masse. As one Andrew Klaven put it at the time of the film’s release:
There seems to me no question that the Batman film The Dark Knight, currently breaking every box office record in history, is at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past. (“What Bush and Batman Have in Common,” The Wall Street Journal, July 25, 2008)
But, of course, unlike in The Dark Knight, Bush’s state of exception has not been rolled back; indeed, it has continued unabated under Obama. The “virtual wars” of what James Der Derian calls the “Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment network” rage on. I would briefly like to consider a different sense of “virtual war” than the one that Der Derian emphasizes, however, by returning to Three Days of the Condor and its power denouement, a scene that has to now be counted among the most prescient in film history. Der Derian tells us that “’Virtual,’ from the Latin virtualis, conveys a sense of inherent qualities that can exert influence, by will . . . or by potential” (“Virtuous war/virtual theory,” p. 780). It is virtualization as potential that operates at the conclusion of Condor.
Redford has turned up a secret CIA plot to invade an undisclosed Middle Eastern country in order to acquire oil reserves; his discovery is what sets the whole plot into motion. In the final scene, Redford confronts Higgins (Cliff Robertson), the deputy director for the New York section of “the company,” demanding: “Do we have plans to invade the Middle East?” Higgins replies: “We have games. We play games. What if? How many men? What would it take? Is there a cheaper way to destabilize a regime? That’s what we’re paid to do.” It is literally the CIA’s job to plan virtual wars, potential wars; and they are good at it, as Higgins says, “The fact is, there was nothing wrong with the plan. The plan would have worked.” Redford’s discovery of the plan stops the virtualization from becoming actualized. Had he not turned it up, however, it’d be a “different ballgame,” as Higgins puts it. The fact that the plan was not actualized, that it remained virtualized, that it remained as potential, is part of the very structure of imperial sovereignty of the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment network (or as Hardt and Negri call it, simply “Empire”). The potentiality comes first, and retains an autonomous ontological status even when actualization occurs. Agamben’s account of the primacy of potentiality, which he develops from Aristotle, is critical for understanding his project and for how “political philosophy” becomes “first philosophy” as depicted in Condor. Agamben is worth quoting at length on this score:
[E]very authentic understanding of the problem of sovereignty depends on how one thinks the existence and autonomy of potentiality. According to Aristotle’s thought, potentiality precedes actuality and conditions it, but also seems to remain essentially subordinate to it. Against the Megarians, who (like those politicians today who want to reduce all constituting power to constituted power) affirm that potentiality exists only in act (energe monon dynasthai), Aristotle always takes great care to affirm the autonomous existence of potentiality—the fact that the kithara player keeps his ability [potenza] to play even when he does not play, and that the architect keeps his ability [potenza] to build even when he does not build. What Aristotle undertakes to consider in Book Theta of the Metaphysics is, in other words, not potentiality as a merely logical possibility but rather the effective modes of potentiality’s existence. This is why, if potentiality is to have its own consistency and not always disappear into actuality, it is necessary that potentiality be able not to pass over into actuality, it is necessary that potentiality constitutively be the potentiality not to (do or be), or, as Aristotle says, that potentiality be also im-potentiality (adynmania). (Homo Sacer, pp. 44-45).
In this case, for the CIA, discretion was the better part of valor, but we are left with the question of: “for how long?” When will the potential not to become a (perceived) necessity to? As Higgins says, “It’s simple economics. Today its oil, right? In ten or fifteen years, food, plutonium, maybe even sooner. What do you think the people are going to want us to do then?”
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