Over the past 30 years, political theorists have turned increasingly to the arts—mainly to literature and film, but also to the visual and bodily arts, architecture, and music—to consider political problems, a turn important to the discipline’s continued vitality and ability to speak to our changing times. Two new books, Joshua Foa Dienstag’s Cinema Pessimism: A Political Theory of Representation and Reciprocity and Michael Shapiro’s Punctuations: How the Arts Think the Political, continue to stage these encounters. Although pitched to different audiences—Dienstag’s book speaks to theorists of representation and those who claim that film serves democratic ends, whereas Shapiro engages continental thinkers—and addressing different problems—Dienstag fears inequality and isolation, whereas Shapiro fears dogmatism—both authors agree that art has something to teach us if we’re smart about it.

Shapiro introduces the term “punctuation” to describe images, events, architecture, and musical elements that slow us down and invite us to react to the world differently. The term, which bears a family resemblance to Barthes’s punctum, Rancière’s dissensus, and Deleuze’s stutter, describes ways to organize meaning that can untether us from normative behaviors. This disruption can be politically radical because it can liberate us, if only momentarily, from knee-jerk ways of sensing and reacting to our world.

Although some punctuations reinforce oppressive norms—for example, “mall-punctuated,” consumer-driven landscapes (p. 96) and surveillance architecture for spying operations—Shapiro focuses on anti-normative punctuations that reveal contingency in our relationships and interpretations. In fact, political subversion often lies in what Shapiro calls “re-punctuations.” Re-punctuations disclose the contestability of the original punctuations or relational structures. It lies with artists, architects, skateboarders (who repurpose public handrails and stairways), and thieves (who repurpose banks) to re-punctuate—that is, to provoke disruptions—in our habitual behaviors. For Shapiro, politics is more than institutions, voting, parties, leaders, and followers. Politics is about how we think of ourselves and the communities we see ourselves belonging to. If we can think of ourselves differently and become more critical of ourselves and our communities, then less oppressive political relationships might take shape. Shapiro allows us to find politics in places we would not think to look: in composers’ deformation of form, in poets’ defiance of traditional punctuation rules, in filmmakers’ use of destabilizing colors.

Shapiro threads the needle effectively between different texts, different genres, different scholars’ voices, and his own past readings to show us how “alternative, nondogmatic communities of sense” (p. 13) are created through re-punctuations. Although Shapiro’s book is divided into chapters (on music, the city, architecture, the image, and the Holocaust), it reads more as a series of miniature pas de deux that he choreographs: between the films He Got Game and The Battle of Algiers, the film Symphony of a City and Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, and Dvořák and Tocqueville. He also recycles material for new mash-ups, bringing back Symphony of a City to pair it with Habana Suite.

Shapiro also re-punctuates the form of the academic book: there is no concluding chapter. After being taken up, down, in, and through so many various examples, it might have been nice to have reached a point of stillness or rest by the end. In refusing to say more after the Holocaust chapter, however, Shapiro emphasizes his point that there is no conclusion to, no final putting to rest, that event. What Shapiro creates are constellations, ephemeral gestures toward a synthesis he resists. Texts are pulled out and pushed against each other in aberrant, disjunctive, and daring ways, and Shapiro never stays in the expository mode for long. This squares with his stated aim of challenging normalized ways of understanding. Shapiro, who expresses his disdain for goal-oriented activities, perhaps does not want his book to deliver us to any final destination.

I enjoyed Shapiro’s examples of emancipatory re-punctuations, but I hesitated to follow him wholeheartedly on two small points: his celebration of citizens with camera phones and of anarchist musicians. Contesting incorrect government accounts of events is essential, but so is investigative reporting by mainstream newspapers like The Washington Post—which gave Woodward and Bernstein the time, resources, and access to uncover and expose federal crimes. We need both: a well-funded, free press working in tandem with citizens on the streets with cameras. I felt similarly about a rage/boredom-inspired re-punctuation of the city of Stockholm against “fee-demanding venues” like symphony halls (p. 79). In a time of decimated funding for the arts, I would say that now is the time to support our local orchestra.

Finally, perhaps as a result of the sheer multiplicity of examples, some felt unjustified. I wondered why the 1927 film Symphony of a City is set against Beethoven’s Pastoral. Why go to this symphony about a walk in the country to read a film about urban life? Is it because both are divided into five movements? Is it because Beethoven stands at the gateway between the Classical and Romantic periods? Shapiro likens Beethoven’s fourth movement, the storm (although Shapiro repeatedly refers to the storm as the third movement), to a turbulent moment in the film when a woman kills herself; he admires the combination of “extramusical” (bird calls and other countryside elements) and “absolute” (structural) elements. But why turn to Beethoven to exemplify musical disruption? If one wants an example of “unexpected tonal punctuation that challenges musical reception” (p. 58), why not Stravinsky, whose Rite of Spring’s premiere provoked riots? Or the opening eight bars of the development section of the fourth movement of Mozart’s Symphony in G Minor, which create ambiguity, unease, and anxiety by pulling the almost Schoenbergian trick of using all 12 chromatic notes except the tonic, the point of stability? I felt like I missed something in the choice of Beethoven.

Whereas Shapiro argues that critical cinema can awaken thoughtfulness, Dienstag focuses on how commercial cinema (and political representation) more typically puts to sleep important democratic sensibilities like mutuality and the loving bonds of political community. Dienstag’s title, Cinema Pessimism, refers to a pessimism not only about the role of cinema in democratic life but also about representation’s democratic aspirations. Freedom—Dienstag means positive freedom, namely self-knowledge and self-enactment—and representation “do not mutually support one another without remainder” (pp. 12–13). Representation, Dienstag fears, is a swelling monster, casting its shadow over more and more aspects of our lives: AI, film and entertainment, politics. It is a monster we need have no choice but to feed. And yet, Dienstag asks, what are the reasons why the representative relationship can never feel fully satisfying?

Dienstag structures each chapter around a film or set of films. The love story in Her shows the temptations of representative relationships. Unfortunately, Dienstag points out, illusory relationships are often more pleasant and less risky than relationships with other human beings. With Blade Runner, Dienstag asks whether replicating humans—“biologically, filmically, or politically” (p. 54)—is consistent with democratic values. Being entertained by other human beings, using them as an object for our delight, even rewarding them with our unrequited empathy, weakens the mutual acknowledgment of each other’s subjectivity necessary for strong democratic bonds. Dienstag advances this criterion to take the measure of our representative institutions: Do they support citizens’ “mutual regard”? This above all: “whatever representative institutions we tolerate must be, at the very least, floated on a warm sea of mutual regard and directed by its currents” (p. 55). The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence is a lesson in the casualties of founding a modern democratic state. The price of civic freedom—the exclusion of the polity’s outsiders—is too high to ever pay in full. No one would want to be a representative if they properly reckoned with the loss involved in the enterprise. Even the winners, those elected to representative government, are losers, because the representative must give up his or her own sense of self.

Dienstag’s final two chapters show what representation has to offer a democratic people: evil-consciousness and time-consciousness. “Representation,” Dienstag says, “can improve on direct democracy not by filtering evil out of a population but, paradoxically, by accentuating it or, at least, by bringing it clearly into view and focusing our attention on it” (p. 106). Here Dienstag admires Lars von Trier’s Rousseauian suspicion of representation and his faith in film to show us parts of the world that we resist seeing. Von Trier evolves from an idea that evil will appear if you simply point a camera at it to an understanding of evil as the absence of good, in which case the filmmaker needs special effects to show it. Dienstag’s final chapter focuses on the Up series, which documents a group of girls and boys as they grow up. Here we have films that try to capture human lives as accurately as possible, over time, and yet the subjects in them do not feel adequately represented. What is revealed in these films is surprise: one man is careening toward doom, and then, suddenly, his wheel of fortune turns and he is elected town councilor. Dienstag writes, “The surprise of the unexpected future is a powerful indicator of the unknown substance of individuality—we are much more than our hopes and expectations, and it would be incredibly limiting if we were not capable of exceeding our own imaginations” (p. 126). Representation can say more than subjects could say about themselves by imagining future possibilities beyond any one subject’s ken or ability to articulate. Good representation, then, can force us to see ourselves as we evolve over time—both our past and our future, in wide picture.

Writing in a linear style, Dienstag carries the reader sequentially through the films with brevity, clarity, and enviable elegance. He guides us through key scenes in the films, pointing out clues in the form of dialogue, cinematography, the look on an actor’s face; by the end of each chapter I felt certain Dienstag had solved the case. This is a book I will carry with me—indeed, already have. While teaching a film that Dienstag does not discuss—Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life—I found myself giving my students a very Dienstagian reading of Sirk’s ironic “happy ending.” Dienstag’s warnings about the lure of optimism are especially prescient in our current political moment, when vacuous happy talk, blatant lies, and willful blindness are dangerously afoot.

I did push back at Dienstag’s rigid division between consumers and producers. Whereas Rousseau’s “let the spectators become an entertainment to themselves” seems to undo that division or holds out hope for another kind of entertainment, Dienstag never acknowledges that we might be inspired by our entertainment or representatives to later participate in entertainment-making or representation ourselves, as Dienstag himself was in representing these films to us through his interpretations.

Both books are excellent in showing us how artistic works can open our field of vision to things we could not see before. For Shapiro, a Cézanne painting “situates viewers and challenges the phenomenology of subjective perception” (p. 126). Perception becomes unstable as the viewer’s easy expectations are foiled by being forced to view a Cézanne slowly in order to understand what it is that he or she is seeing. Dienstag similarly says the best representation “would be like a cubist painting where the different perspectives framed on a single canvas referenced different temporal frames as well as different spatial ones” (p. 145). Art can help us see reality again, to use a wonderful James Baldwin line. Both books are lively and engaging user’s guides to start us on that journey.