Ghosts, Holobionts, and Superorganisms: Towards a Holographic Theory of the Political

This was a planned seminar for the Society for Cinema and Media Studies annual conference, which was canceled due to the pandemic (it was scheduled for April of 2020). This idea stemmed from a collaboration with seminar co-leaders Dan Wang and Tien-Tien Jong.

From Tupac at Coachella to Maria Callas on tour, from 3D dinosaurs to Princess Leia, the hologram is a figure that promises to be more than life, to “[bring] life back to the stage.” Such are the claims of companies like Base Hologram, which capitalize on art corporations’ fear of dwindling revenue by promising to deliver an “ultra-realistic experience where fantasy becomes reality.” How does the hologram’s ephemeral embodiments invite us to think differently about identity, presence, celebrity, and capital in the first quarter of the twenty-first century?

For instance, while the hologram offers economic optimism in an era of audience bleed, it has also become a recurrent metaphor for thinking about the object-ness of race, beside the biological and the cultural. Witness the ending of Ghost in the Shell (2017), in which the “ghost” turns out to be a sort of racial “holobiont”: a Japanese woman inside the shell of Scarlett Johansson’s more recognizable and marketable body. Elsewhere, the internet has declared Orono Noguchi, lead singer of the band Superorganism, to be not a biological but a holographic entity.

This seminar invites participants to think about how modern holograms, ghosts, holobionts, and superorganisms reshape the material bases of film theory, including (but not limited to) the political value of representation and embodiment. For example, to what extent is our investment in the idea that films “reflect” minority experience grounded implicitly in the flatness of screens? How might our political imagination of what is possible change if we envision different surfaces, different uses of light, and different realizations of a “flesh”? A holographic theory of the political may get us closer to what Laura Mulvey, in her analysis of the phantasmatic screen body, called “the thrill that comes from leaving the past behind without rejecting it.” How might her focus on “mechanisms, not meaning” allow us to better comprehend the holographic star image?