ABSTRACT
Political desire is tricky for us moderns. We want the sovereignty of publicness and the impunity of privacy both without sacrificing either and thus suffer—or exploit—their contradiction. Driving the oscillation back and forth between our collective and individual selves is the idol of imagination, the great measure of what it means to be “liberal” in all its many hues. Paul Strand’s and Charles Sheer’s 1921 experimental film Manhatta gave expression to that idol in a high modernist form that would establish a template for city films to come including Dziga Vertov's 1929 Man with a Movie Camera. This chapter considers the implications of such idolatry in light of the pressing question of political subjectivity today.
