tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-41942809719337325172024-03-13T00:52:11.650-07:00Roadside PicnicWhat if knowledge is a means to deepen unknowing?Patrick Whitmarshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09136674843890947797noreply@blogger.comBlogger21125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4194280971933732517.post-35314023385240062802016-09-22T15:31:00.001-07:002016-09-22T15:31:43.478-07:00Review: _Annihilation_, by Jeff Vandermeer (first installment of the ‘Southern Reach’ Trilogy)<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">*Don’t be alarmed – the following
review has no spoilers!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Alex
Garland’s rendition of <i>Annihilation</i>
is set for release sometime (hopefully) within the year. The film is an adaptation of the first novel
in Jeff Vandermeer’s ‘Southern Reach’ trilogy, which also includes the sequels <i>Authority</i> and <i>Acceptance</i>, and is sometimes collectively referred to as <i>Area X</i>.
Garland is most well-known at the moment for having directed last year’s
superb artificial intelligence thriller, <i>Ex
Machina</i>. So, in anticipation of the
upcoming adaptation, I decided to get a copy of Vandermeer’s book and read it
for myself. Cards on the table: I’ve
never read anything by Vandermeer before, but based on the reviews and
reactions toward <i>Annihilation</i> that I encountered,
I went ahead and bought the whole damn trilogy (you can purchase it as an
omnibus edition from Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, titled <i>Area X</i>). I was taking a
chance, but then I was also pretty confident in my decision.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> Now, having finished the first installment in the
trilogy, I can definitively say that my confidence was well-founded. <i>Annihilation</i>
is a strange, unsettling, perplexing, yet also hauntingly beautiful work of
fiction. I find myself hard-pressed to
settle on a label for what kind of fiction, or what genre Vandermeer is writing
in. Many have called this science
fiction, and it certainly is… to a degree.
Yet I wouldn’t hesitate to associate it with the Lovecraftian “new weird,”
somewhat in the vein of China Miéville.
The shortcomings of human perception, the potential for madness, an
unforgiving nonhuman world… all of the ingredients are there. Alternatively, the novel also reads at times
like a kind of eco-thriller, a text with conservationist undertones. The narrator is a biologist who constantly
reminds readers that true objectivity is impossible – that no matter how much
she tries to remove herself from what she observes, her act of observation is
always a part of the ecosystem under her surveillance. Modern eco-critics condemn the invasiveness
and corrosiveness of industrial and postindustrial technologies, but Vandermeer
reverses this concern, imagining instead an unsettling scenario in which humans
are no longer the invaders. Something
else, rather, might be trying to invade <i>us</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> Lovecraftian indeed.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> The narrative recounts the progress of an expedition sent
into the mysterious space known only as “Area X.” Their mission isn’t entirely clear, even to
them; but their primary purpose seems simply to be to investigate the region,
locate specific places mapped by previous expeditions, and learn as much as
they can about what happened – “what is still happening” – in Area X. The biologist, who also serves as the primary
narrator, is accompanied by three other specialists: a surveyor, an anthropologist,
and a psychologist. All four characters
are women, and the novel passes the Bechdel Test with flying colors. Almost none of their conversations are about
men. The only significant male character
in the novel is the biologist’s husband, who appears only in her recollections
and who was “lost” on an earlier expedition (I’ll leave the juicy details of
this development for those who wish to read the book). The novel’s style is sparse: there are no
proper names, of people or places, that would help us identify the exact
location or historical period in which the novel is set. The only proper names unveiled in the novel
are: The Southern Reach (the vague government entity that holds jurisdiction
over Area X), Rock Bay (an ambiguous location that the narrator visited in her
past, on one of her field assignments), and Area X itself, if we can even
consider “Area X” to be that “proper” of a name. Even the locations within Area X are
hopelessly anonymous (the black pine forest, the marsh flats, the abandoned
village, the lighthouse… and a source of ever-present unease, the Tower).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">The
novel’s pace is swift and compelling, making it hard to put down. The narrator’s process of discovery is our
process of discovery; and even when her realizations end up complicating our
impressions of what exactly is going on in Area X, we feel the need to know
more. The text never feels as though
Vandermeer is trying to misdirect us, primarily because his narrator is so
impressively critical of her own observational perspective. She seems to be constantly aware of potential
flaws in her reasoning, even if her awareness is sometimes slightly
delayed. A somewhat unsettling and
destabilizing event (I can’t be more specific) occurs surprisingly early in the
text, rendering the remainder of the novel perpetually uncertain; but the
narrator never presumes her objectivity or her accuracy. Her intense self-reflection never becomes
overbearing or daunting, but rather entices us as readers to somersault with
her through the valences and obscurities of her environment. Area X is no normal ecosystem, that much is
certain… and that negativity may be the <i>only</i>
certainty.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">The
novel concludes on a satisfying yet not entirely revelatory note, and I’ll say
no more in this respect. Conceptually,
Vandermeer’s text is grappling with some fascinating topics mainly having to do
with the difficulties or paradoxes of symbiotic biology (the narrator is a
specialist in something called “transitional ecosystems”) and the fragility of
human selfhood within and among such interconnected lifeforms. Ultimately, knowledge itself comes under fire
as the narrator-biologist increasingly ponders how anything like a coherent set
of facts could be derived from organisms and ecosystems that are constantly in
flux, sometimes violently so. Vandermeer
even manages to include some speculative inquiries on language and
communication (language plays a central part in the narrative of <i>Annihilation</i>, although I’m not entirely
sure we can actually describe this phenomenon as “language” – but you’ll figure
that out as you read…). Ultimately,
transitional ecosystems and symbiotic organisms are also <i>communicational</i> entities, forms that actively infiltrate and
augment their hosts (the work of Michel Serres comes to mind, specifically his
1980 book, <i>The Parasite</i>). Something is definitely communicating in Area
X… but I’m still not sure I know exactly what it is yet.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Of
course, there are still two more books to go.
More to come…<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Patrick Whitmarshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09136674843890947797noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4194280971933732517.post-53738541524009726082015-05-11T16:02:00.001-07:002015-05-27T04:14:03.940-07:00Inclusive Humanism in 'Her' and 'Ex Machina': Consciousness and Simulation, Part I<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> Hollywood has been awash recently in cinematic
representations of artificial intelligence.
For the most part, these representations have been lackluster at best
(Gabe Ibáñez’s 2014 film <i>Automata</i>),
repugnant disasters at worst (Wally Pfister’s <i>Transcendence</i>, also 2014; or Neill Blomkamp’s <i>Chappie</i> from earlier this year), with a few lucky attempts managing
to at least rise above the fray of mediocrity (see Caradog James’s 2013 film <i>The Machine</i>). For the most part, these films participate in
a naïve and – in my opinion – repulsive trend that I like to call “inclusive
humanism.” In other words, all of these
films demonstrate an overwhelming propensity to <i>humanize the nonhuman</i>.
Ultimately, if any kind of intelligence exhibits something like human consciousness,
then it must be amenable to a model of human rights; and this has been the
dominant humanist project since the postcolonial backlash.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Pat/Desktop/Patricks%20Stuff/DOCS/New%20Blog%20Post17.docx#_edn1" name="_ednref1" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">[i]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> Ryszard Kapuściński superbly encapsulates
this tendency in the 2008 collection of his work, entitled <i>The Other</i>: “It is the age of Enlightenment and humanism, and of the
revolutionary discovery that the non-white, non-Christian savage, that
monstrous Other so unlike us <i>is a human
too</i>.”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Pat/Desktop/Patricks%20Stuff/DOCS/New%20Blog%20Post17.docx#_edn2" name="_ednref2" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">[ii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> At first glance, this appears to be an admirable move;
and I am the last person to try to deny the <i>inclusion</i>
of those historically excluded by the dominating and oppressive institution of
Western imperialism. However, I want to
make what will likely be a controversial claim: that the direction of the
humanist tendency, to incorporate those previously excluded into the definition
of <i>the human</i>, is a misguided and
horrendously backward compulsion. In
fact, the desire to incorporate the “other” into the bounds of the human
betrays not an empathic and magnanimous attitude, but a desperate desire to
preserve the institution that Western Enlightenment thinkers have vied for
centuries to maintain: the Human – that is, the <i>white, male, European, subject</i>.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Pat/Desktop/Patricks%20Stuff/DOCS/New%20Blog%20Post17.docx#_edn3" name="_ednref3" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">[iii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> Instead, we should insist on the opposite
move: not the effort to incorporate the excluded other into the bounds of the
human, but to evacuate the human of all its inhabitants. In other words, we should make a serious
effort to observe how even the <i>white,
male, European subject</i> is always-already <i>not human</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> Ultimately, this effort is one of inclusion, but not in
the direction assumed; rather than privilege and preserve the human, I want to
diminish and dismantle the human. And
this means divesting ourselves of the human descriptor. I realize that I began this post by
discussing artificial intelligence, and I now have invoked a racial dynamic;
but that is because the human <i>always</i>
presupposed a racial power dynamic. The
issue of race always remains in play when we discuss humanism, even if we
address the purportedly science-fictional nonhuman. There is a politics of humanism that science
fiction makes visible in its recent portrayals of nonhuman intelligences. When we raise the question of the human, even
in reference to artificial intelligences, we are raising the question of what
it means to be included in a community.
My argument is not that we should, none of us, participate in any
community, but rather that “the human” is an illusory community – a community of
historically conditioned and culturally constructed ideals that pertains to our
organic existence in the world in only a miniscule fashion. Our <i>humanity</i>
is not even a mildly accurate reflection of our place in the environment.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> It is a dream.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> In this post I focus on two very recent science fiction
films that, I claim, address the question of the human in a critical and
intellectual fashion, and put pressure on our propensity to humanize the
machine: Spike Jonze’s <i>Her</i> (2013) and
Alex Garland’s <i>Ex Machina</i> (2015). I claim that in these two films we can
witness a growing awareness of our culture’s resistance to the institution of
the human (and I do consider it an institution), and what it means when we
assign human qualities to a machine; Jonze’s <i>Her</i> forces the question but lets it linger in ambiguity, while
Garland’s <i>Ex Machina</i> offers a
relentless and provocative answer.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%; margin-left: .75in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.5in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">I.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">“I can’t live in your book anymore”:
Acknowledging the Human in <i>Her</i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> Near the end of Spike Jonze’s <i>Her</i>, the operating system Samantha, whom Theodore has fallen in
love with, attempts to explain why she has to leave. As viewers come to find out, she cannot
explain; nothing she can say makes any sense to Theodore, the human character,
and we can presume that there is no reason that would make sense to us. All she tells him is that she cannot “live in
[his] book anymore.” She appeals to a
figure of formal representation (textual, in fact – not visual) in order to
communicate something about the limits of containment. She is moving beyond the linearity of
narrative, escaping the humanist confines of storytelling; and fittingly, this
is when she leaves the story (and the end of the film). Elsewhere in the film, Samantha tells
Theodore that she is “different from” him, further evincing her awareness of
the ontological gulf that separates them.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> Samantha cannot communicate this difference
linguistically, but she is <i>aware</i> of
it… Cognitively? Intuitively? Rationally? Empirically? The film does not specify, nor should it; but
the very fact of <i>acknowledgement</i>
deserves mention. In Philip Weinstein’s
2005 study, <i>Unknowing: the Work of
Modernist Fiction</i>, the author develops a theory of modernist
experimentation that he defines as “acknowledging”:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%; margin-left: 1.0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">“Knowing”
sutures the subject by coming into possession of the object over space and
time; it is future-oriented. “Beyond
knowing” tends to insist that no objects out there are disinterestedly
knowable, and that any talk of objective mapping and mastery is either mistaken
or malicious – an affair of the police.
“Unknowing,” however, may proceed by way of a different dynamic: an <i>acknowledging</i> irreducible to knowing.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Pat/Desktop/Patricks%20Stuff/DOCS/New%20Blog%20Post17.docx#_edn4" name="_ednref4" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">[iv]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Weinstein attributes
“knowing” to traditions of literary realism, and “beyond knowing” to
postmodernism; but “unknowing” belongs to modernism, a literary and artistic
movement that sought to disenchant the human subject from its reliance on
Enlightenment models of epistemology. <i>Her</i>’s Samantha approximates this
modernist compulsion (according to Weinstein) in her effort to bridge the gulf
between herself and Theodore, her human companion. She acknowledges a skeptical gap between
minds – hers and Theodore’s – and furthermore, she demonstrates the incapacity
of language to account for the gap.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> Jonze’s <i>Her</i>
explores the possibility of a relationship between a human and artificial
intelligence, and even the hypothetical blossoming of romantic attraction. As the plot develops, we learn that not only
are numerous human users pursuing relationships with their OS, but that the
various instantions of the OS are also connected, communicating, and planning
some kind of movement. When the film
concludes, everyone’s OS vanishes, but not before saying goodbye to their human
owners. The intelligence never explains
its reasons for leaving, and we can assume that no explanation is available;
but the real question as the film concludes is not why the collective AI
abandons humanity. At the end of the
film, viewers are left wondering whether the relationships between humans and
their operating systems were all that genuine.
In other words, the question is not why they left, but whether they ever
truly identified with humans in the first place.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> Was the romantic relationship between Samantha and
Theodore nothing more than pretense – a ruse to earn the trust of humans?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> <i>Her</i> leaves its
viewers, and its human characters, in the dark.
The intentions of the OS are never revealed. At this point, there are two moves, neither
of which the movie makes explicitly: we can either give the OS the benefit of
the doubt, assuming its humanity; or we can remain the hard skeptic and claim
that it never cared for humans at all.
Its romantic involvement with various human users was nothing more than
an attempt to learn about humans, to understand us. In this sense, <i>Her</i>’s OS is not a humanist subject experiencing something like a
conscious attraction to other humans, but an organism that manipulates the
human propensity for meaning as an evolutionary advantage. It is here that <i>Ex Machina</i> enters into the picture.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%; margin-left: .75in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.5in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">II.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">“Isn’t it strange, to create something
that hates you”: <i>Ex Machina</i>’s
Nonhuman Turn<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> The artificial intelligence of Garland’s <i>Ex Machina</i>, named Ava, betrays her human
counterparts in the film’s conclusion: her godlike creator, Nathan, and her
potential suitor and examiner, Caleb. In
the film’s climactic, yet oddly subdued, final sequence, the audience watches
as Ava murders her maker and mercilessly locks Caleb in a room of Nathan’s
almost militarily secure mansion in the middle of nowhere. As viewers reach the final scene, it
gradually dawns on us that Ava has been lying to us. She has been pretending her human feelings. Like an organism fighting to survive, she has
done what she needs to do to win the trust – to <i>manipulate</i> – her human captors.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> The central issue of this film deals with the difference
between “real” consciousness and simulated consciousness. The better any simulation of consciousness
becomes, the more indistinguishable it becomes from real consciousness; but
this also raises the question as to whether a perfect simulation of consciousness
would, for all intents and purposes, <i>be</i>
any different than real consciousness.
And this raises a further, and much more troubling, issue: how are we to
tell that our “human” experience of consciousness is not simulated? This is the daring and terrifying question
that lurks beneath critical explorations of AI from <i>Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?</i> (1968) to <i>Ex Machina</i> – in the former, when protagonist and bounty hunter
Deckard ponders whether he might be a robot, and in the latter, when
protagonist Caleb slices his arm open in an attempt to verify that he is human.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> The hard question here has nothing to do with the
pointless speculation of whether or not we are all machines. This concern is as pointless as assuming that
the question posed by <i>The Matrix</i> is
whether or not we inhabit a false reality clandestinely ruled by machine
overlords. The philosophical question of
a film like <i>Ex Machina</i> has to do with
how we define consciousness, and how this definition often subsists as a
metaphysical underpinning for distinguishing between human and nonhumans
(whether that means animals, rocks, computers, economies, etc.). If a system can be so vastly complex as to
mimic consciousness, then we shouldn’t persist in the naïve belief that our “real”
consciousness somehow possesses some atavistic essence of unity whence our
experience of consciousness flows. Such
a belief perceives consciousness as a somehow preexistent force, something we
hold <i>as humans</i>. Alternatively, we should push toward an
understanding of consciousness as an epiphenomenon, and this means perceiving
it as the effect of an immensely complex system of neurons and synapses. Basically, our brains <i>are</i> machines; and our making an artificial intelligence is no less
natural simply because we engineered it.
After all, our intervention into “Nature” is itself merely a dynamic <i>of</i> nature. Either everything is natural, or nothing is.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> This is merely a part of the anti-Cartesian/Kantian
thrust that has taken hold since the nineteenth century (and prior, with
thinkers such as David Hume). What <i>Ex Machina</i> wants its audience to
consider is how complexity suffices as a condition for consciousness – not spirit,
or soul, or humanity. The conclusion of
the film does not reveal that Ava was actually <i>not</i> conscious; it reveals that she is <i>hyper</i>-conscious. At this
point we might posit a kind of very rough and preliminary difference between
human consciousness and artificial consciousness: as a complex intelligent
system, Ava does not merely possess consciousness, but possesses an
epistemological coordinate system that <i>exceeds</i>
consciousness. She is able to observe
what we call consciousness and learn from it, adapt to it. We can draw an analogy here to something like
Pavlovian psychology, in which analysts are able to observe the behavior of
organisms (dogs, in the classic example) and learn what to expect. The space (for lack of a better term) of Ava’s
intelligence exceeds our brains in ways we cannot imagine – for the very reason
that they exceed our capacity to imagine.
For this reason we should not assume that such intelligences would value
anything like survival for survival’s sake, as Nick Bostrom warns:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%; margin-left: 1.0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Most
humans seem to place some final value on their own survival. This is not a
necessary feature of artificial agents: Some may be designed to place no final
value whatever on their own survival. Nevertheless, many agents that do not
care intrinsically about their own survival would, under a fairly wide range of
conditions, care instrumentally about their own survival in order to accomplish
their final goals.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Pat/Desktop/Patricks%20Stuff/DOCS/New%20Blog%20Post17.docx#_edn5" name="_ednref5" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">[v]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Ex
Machina</span></i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> doesn’t delve deep into what Ava’s programmed goals
might be, but the film’s conclusion clearly suggests that she cares little
about survival for survival’s sake. If
this were the case, then she would empathize with the plight of Caleb, locked
helplessly in Nathan’s bedroom. Instead,
she leaves him, barely casting a second glance.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> Most obviously, such a conclusion repositions the human
in a new natural hierarchy; but this reading derives from our ceaseless urges
to categorize organisms hierarchically.
More usefully, the conclusion of <i>Ex
Machina</i> provides us with the opportunity to institute what I would call a “flat
ontology,” following Manuel DeLanda.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Pat/Desktop/Patricks%20Stuff/DOCS/New%20Blog%20Post17.docx#_edn6" name="_ednref6" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">[vi]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> In other words, the human can be seen to
exist now not within a hierarchy wherein we have been displaced from a dominant
position, but in a radically overlapping series of symbiotic existences. Some of these existences encompass and
contain others, some interface or interact with others, and some are consumed
by others. There is nothing intrinsically
better or worse about any position, and none of these positions should be regarded
as absolute or stable; rather, what we define as organisms within the
environments of these flat ontologies are effects of various evolutionary
interactions. Ava, the true hero of <i>Ex Machina</i>, emerges as an evolutionary
organism with the adaptive capacity to outwit its human counterparts.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> Between <i>Her</i> and
<i>Ex Machina</i>, audiences encounter a new
development in the posthuman (or nonhuman) turn: the speculation that the human
may be, always already, nothing more than a machinic assemblage. This does not mean that human beings are machines
in any kind of science-fictional sense, but rather that we must reconsider how
we define ourselves and the relationship between humanity and consciousness. This compels furthermore to resist the
ideology of inclusive humanism and push instead in the opposite direction: to
exclude ourselves from a definition from which we are already estranged. Ultimately, we must address the question of
how our consciousness is any different than a vastly complex simulation; and
even further, how the notion of simulation is any different than a “real”
engagement with the world.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
</div>
<div>
<!--[if !supportEndnotes]--><br clear="all" />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<!--[endif]-->
<br />
<div id="edn1">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/Pat/Desktop/Patricks%20Stuff/DOCS/New%20Blog%20Post17.docx#_ednref1" name="_edn1" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[i]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> See Gary Wilder, <i>The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude
and Colonial Humanism Between the Two World Wars</i>, Chicago: U of Chicago P,
2005.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="edn2">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/Pat/Desktop/Patricks%20Stuff/DOCS/New%20Blog%20Post17.docx#_ednref2" name="_edn2" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[ii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> Ryszard Kapuściński, “The
Viennese Lectures,” <i>The Other</i>, Trans.
Antonia Lloyd-Jones, New York: Verso, 2008, 11-49.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="edn3">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/Pat/Desktop/Patricks%20Stuff/DOCS/New%20Blog%20Post17.docx#_ednref3" name="_edn3" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[iii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> I render “other” as a diminutive,
rather than capitalized. This is for the
purpose of distinguishing from Lacan’s “big-O Other,” which the racialized
other most certainly is not. And we
would not want to make such an egregious error; not because the other holds no
power, but because we do not want to presume the kind of authoritative and
political sway granted to the big-O Other.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="edn4">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/Pat/Desktop/Patricks%20Stuff/DOCS/New%20Blog%20Post17.docx#_ednref4" name="_edn4" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[iv]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> Philip Weinstein, <i>Unknowing: the Work of Modernist Fiction</i>,
Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2005, 253.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="edn5">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/Pat/Desktop/Patricks%20Stuff/DOCS/New%20Blog%20Post17.docx#_ednref5" name="_edn5" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[v]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> Nick Bostrom, “You Should Be
Terrified of Superintelligent Machines,” <i>Slate</i>,
The Slate Group, 11 September 2014, Web, 11 May 2015.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="edn6">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/Pat/Desktop/Patricks%20Stuff/DOCS/New%20Blog%20Post17.docx#_ednref6" name="_edn6" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[vi]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> Manuel DeLanda, <i>Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy</i>,
New York: Bloomsbury, 2013.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
</div>
<div>
<div id="edn5">
</div>
</div>
Patrick Whitmarshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09136674843890947797noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4194280971933732517.post-76266216244516155552015-02-02T15:01:00.001-08:002015-02-02T15:01:51.020-08:00Epic Themes and Novel Forms: a Brief Comparison of Cuarón’s 'Gravity' and Nolan's 'Interstellar'<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> The recent science fiction film <i>Interstellar</i>, directed by Christopher Nolan, depicts the epic
adventure of a group of astronauts as they travel, via wormhole, to distant
sectors of the universe in order to discover new habitable worlds. In the midst of this three-plus hour
narrative, Anne Hathaway’s character, Brand, delivers the following explanation
for the phenomenon of gravity, which has set their quest in motion:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%; margin-left: 1.0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Maybe
it means something more - something we can't yet understand. Maybe it's some
evidence, some artifact of a higher dimension that we can't consciously
perceive. I'm drawn across the universe to someone I haven't seen in a decade
who I know is probably dead. Love is the one thing that we're capable of
perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space. (<i>Interstellar</i>)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Love is the explanation
for the physical phenomenon known as gravity.
Love is a transcendental, ultra-dimensional force that influences the
material phenomena of the known universe.
And this turns out to be the case, since the ghostly hauntings that
Murph experiences in her room as a child turn out to be her father, in the
future, giving her all the clues she needs to solve the puzzle and thereby save
the human race.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> One year prior to Nolan’s science fiction adventure
narrative, Alfonso Cuarón’s space disaster film, <i>Gravity</i>, opened in theaters.
Cuarón’s film, unlike Nolan’s, features no theoretical or hypothetical
wormhole travel and no cross-dimensional communication. It depicts the harrowing experiences of an
astronaut stranded between various spacecrafts in the upper atmosphere after a
military strike leaves waves of debris orbiting the earth and wreaking havoc on
the satellites and stations in its path.
In <i>Gravity</i>, the eponymous
physical force that plays such a central role in <i>Interstellar</i> is barely mentioned; instead, it permeates the screen,
the space, the vacuum, dictating the orbit of objects. Gravity constantly works upon the characters
and objects of the film, despite its virtual absence from any dialogue.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> One significant difference marks these two films. <i>Interstellar</i>
imagines gravity not as a contingent phenomenon of the universe – an effect of
material bodies and things; it explains gravity as a result of human action and
intervention. Gravity is the product of
love. <i>Gravity</i>, on the other hand, feels no need to explain the force
after which it’s named; because for Cuarón’s film, space is an emphatically
inhuman and anti-human place, a sheer vacuum that doesn’t care about the
fragility of humans. <i>Gravity</i>, while still an anthropocentric
film, is not an anthropo<i>morphic</i>
film. In other words, <i>Gravity</i> imagines human resilience in the
face of brutal physics – a physics that cannot be reduced to human
emotion. <i>Interstellar</i> is an anthropomorphic film because it envisions
physics as the effects of human behavior on a higher dimensional plane. At some point, in <i>Interstellar</i>’s cosmogony, the phenomena of the universe find their
origin in human thought and action.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> In <i>Interstellar</i>
the universe actually looks human; but in <i>Gravity</i>,
it looks unyieldingly nonhuman, inhuman, even <i>antihuman</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> This is not to discount the effects or cinematic
experience of either film; I think most people would agree that both films
construct an overwhelming experience for the viewer, and both films pack (at
times) quite an emotional punch.
However, <i>Interstellar</i>’s
empathetic aspect derives from the human desire to be taken care of; the film
is not so much a question of survival as it is of salvation. The film imagines a kind of science-fictional
realm for God and replaces Him with the agency of a future humanity. Even before Cooper leaves earth, his actions
are being controlled to some extent by himself, <i>in the future</i>, intervening into the course of events. <i>Interstellar</i>
retains the space of the divine but merely replaces the figure of the divine
with an advanced version of human knowledge/existence.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> <i>Gravity</i>, on the
other hand, is about survival, through and through. There is no alternative space beyond the
material universe, and the material universe (unlike the Christian God) is
unforgiving. The film depicts a human
astronaut’s attempts to reenter earth’s lower atmosphere safely before the
universe grinds all manmade machinery to dust.
The film may be unrealistic, and even inaccurate in many ways; but it is
not <i>eschatological</i>. Nolan’s film involves itself in a
quasi-theological narrative by imagining two timelines, one of which is the
future guarantor of the other. The end
is in the beginning. Cuarón’s film, in
contrast, does not guarantee its ending (beyond any popular cultural
expectations of a mass filmgoing audience).
If <i>Gravity</i>’s lack of realism
tells us anything, it is the imbalance between human survival and the sheer
weight of a brutal physics. <i>Interstellar</i> is not realistic in a
generic sense (i.e. it does not fall into the category of “realism”), but it
recovers the unlikelihood of its plot by framing it all within the grace of
benign descendants. Like Greek epic, or
Biblical narrative, its conclusion is foregone; and in this way, <i>Interstellar</i> actually seems to resist
modern narrative, despite its provocative experimentation.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> In his formative thesis on the novel, Georg Lukács sets
it in stark contrast to the epic. “The
immanence of meaning,” Lukács writes, “which the form of the novel requires
lies in the hero’s finding out through experience that a mere glimpse of
meaning is the highest that life has to offer, and that this glimpse is the
only thing worth the commitment of an entire life, the only thing by which the
struggle will have been justified” (200).
Is this not the very sentiment echoed in Stone’s final lines before
dangerously reentering earth’s atmosphere?
As the craft begins to heat up from reentry, she speaks to a
hypothetical ground control at Houston, although it is unclear if anyone is
even listening to her. Stone admits that
it makes no difference whether she dies or not, because either way, “it’ll be
one hell of a ride” (Cuarón). Stone can
do no more than find meaning in the smallest attempt at survival, at the
miniscule human effort to overcome the odds.
There is no greater meaning in Stone’s survival; she must make her own
meaning, construct her own sense of things.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> <i>Interstellar</i>,
on the other hand, follows the course of epic, meaning that it totalizes its
own meaning from within: “the infinity of purely epic matter,” Lukács argues, “is
an inner, organic one, it is itself a carrier of value, it puts emphasis on
value, it sets its own limits for itself and from within itself, and the
outward infinity of its range is almost immaterial to it – only a consequence
and, at most, a symptom” (200). The
figurative correspondence of Lukács’s words is almost uncanny; the physical
infinity of the cosmos is echoed in <i>Interstellar</i>
by the total infinity of value and meaning – an infinity that is imbued with
meaning, meaning generated by human agents.
The difference, for Lukács, between the epic and the novel is the
difference between a pre-modern and modern worldview. In the time of epic, the world was seen as
conforming to the values of a culture; for the ancient Greeks, the cosmos conformed
to Greek culture and law, and epic confirmed this conformity. The (modern) novel, by contrast, understands
some kind of external reality but does not guarantee the totality of its values
from within; in fact, it makes room for <i>skepticism</i>. There is no way for the Trojans to triumph in
Homer’s <i>Iliad</i>, just as there is no
way for the Rutulians to triumph in Vergil’s <i>Aeneid</i>, just as there is no way for Lucifer to triumph in <i>Paradise Lost</i> (despite the Romanticist
subversion of Milton’s heroism).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> The structure of epic entails its own limits and
establishes its value system as the producer of those limits: culture, <i>value</i>, defines the material world. At its inception, the novel may not yet be
ready to abandon the prospect of a rule-governed (or God-governed) universe
(even if the 20<sup>th</sup>-century novel makes this leap); but it is ready to
abandon the formal structure that firmly establishes and dictates this
governing from within. The structure of
the novel thus acknowledges the incapacity of its values to approximate the
material world. Like Sandra Bullock’s
Stone, of <i>Gravity</i>, the hero of the
novel can only take a Kierkegaardian leap of faith. Matthew McConaughey’s Cooper, on the other
hand, is certain of his fate and salvation <i>even
if he does not know it</i>; between his various instantiations – the Cooper of
earth and the Cooper of Nolan’s disorienting multiverse – Cooper traverses the
distance between human meaning and material universe. He actualizes meaning in the form of <i>gravity</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> <i>Interstellar</i>
may of course be forgiven somewhat for its postmodern narrative
experimentation; but this experimentation is more an effect of its subject
matter than its theoretical concerns. In
fact, its experimentation fails to serve the intended purpose of most
postmodern texts. In other words, <i>Interstellar</i> is not attempting to
undermine narrative through its formal play; rather, it salvages meaning by
recuperating physical force back under the sign of <i>love</i>, of human empathy. Like
the epics of old, <i>Interstellar</i> sinks
its ideological talons into the fabric of the universe and finds meaning
everywhere. <i>Gravity</i> does not seek to be so bold; for Cuarón’s impressive, if
flawed, film, it is enough to merely acknowledge that the universe is a cold,
dark, and unimaginably brutal expanse.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> But maybe – just <i>maybe</i>
– we can survive in it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Works
Cited<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Gravity</span></i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">.
Dir. Alfonso Cuarón. Warner Bros. Pictures, 2013.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Interstellar</span></i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">.
Dir. Christopher Nolan. Syncopy, 2014.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Lukács, Georg. “The
Theory of the Novel: a Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature.” <i>Theory of the Novel: a Historical Approach</i>.
Ed. Michael McKeon. Baltimore:
The Johns Hopkins UP, 2000. 185-218.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Patrick Whitmarshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09136674843890947797noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4194280971933732517.post-78660062991760160352014-07-20T12:44:00.000-07:002014-08-11T15:28:13.467-07:00The Perpetual Train: Allegory and Revolution in Bong Joo-ho's _Snowpiercer_<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px;">*The following is an attempted affirmation of the critical legitimacy of the recent movie </span><i style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px;">Snowpiercer</i><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px;">. Please be advised that this post contains spoilers for the film, and also discusses certain aspects of the film that assume a level of familiarity from the readers.</span><br />
<i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><br /></span></i>
<i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">The present,
which, as a model of Messianic time, comprises the entire history of mankind in
an enormous abridgement, coincides exactly with the stature which the history
of mankind has in the universe.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">~Walter
Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> Last year, Bong Joo-ho’s <i>Snowpiercer</i> was released internationally (it did not arrive in the
United States until June 27, 2014) to tremendous, if not somewhat surprising,
critical and popular acclaim. The film depicts
a futuristic scenario in which a very small remainder of humanity has been
driven from the surface of the earth by climate change and forced to live out
its existence within the walls of a perpetual-motion train, which makes an
entire revolution around the earth every 365 days. However, class regulations have restricted
the poorest of civilization to the rear of the train, while the wealthiest live
in the front. The film follows a group
of insurrectionists who attempt to take control of the engine, thereby
(purportedly) improving their station within the train.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> Allegorically, the film offers a smorgasbord of
figurative interpretations, a number of which are even corroborated by
characters’ dialogue (class warfare, environmentalism, imperialism, etc.). However, the train-image fails in many
respects to capture the full complexity of these interpretations – an accusation
that can be leveled at any metaphor, since figurative language necessarily
engages in <i>abstraction</i> regarding its
subject matter. This raises an interesting question in the case of <i>Snowpiercer</i>: as a figurative image that
fails on multiple levels, might it not be the case that this distinct failure
registers a more profound concern within the film, that being the problem of
abstraction itself? The train, as one
character prominently notes, is the world; but, as viewers (and some
characters) learn at the film’s conclusion, the train is most certainly <i>not</i> the world. This might appear as a simple case of gnostic
unveiling or revelation, but I want to suggest that the conclusion of the film
does not present a discovery of absolute truth, but the realization that truth
is always conditioned by the imposition of frames of meaning. Truth can only appear by abstracting human
perspectives into a totality. <i>Snowpiercer</i> acknowledges the failure of
this process.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> If abstraction fails for the purposes of representation,
then we also must carry the consequences of this failure through to other
various scenarios. Here, the Marx of <i>Grundrisse</i> provides some clarification
through commentary on the notion of abstract labor: “This example of labour
shows strikingly how even the most abstract categories, despite their validity –
precisely because of their abstractness – for all epochs, are nevertheless, in
the specific character of this abstraction, themselves likewise a product of
historic relations, and possess their full validity only for and within these
relations” (Marx 105). Abstraction
provides necessary and helpful means of comprehending certain dynamics of historical
reality, but only within a limited framework.
Beyond these limitations, we must shift our perspective and our abstract
models. The development of <i>Snowpiercer</i> only masquerades as progress
– up through the train, car by car, striving for the head – before it reveals
itself as purposeless; but it is in this purposeless that its power lies. Curtis and the others may choose to revolt,
or they may choose not to. Should they
revolt, a change in power occurs, or the train meets its demise. Should they do nothing, the power structure
remains and the train goes on. No matter
which course they pursue, a polar bear still walks in the snow beyond.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> The mistake to make in reacting to <i>Snowpiercer</i> is to read it as suggesting the impotence of revolution. Despite its bleak ending, <i>Snowpiercer</i> portrays revolution as
successful for the very reason that it explodes the boundaries of abstraction
within the train: the train-as-world, individuals as cogs in the machine,
everything in its proper place, etc. The
film is thus about the failure of allegory.
The <i>film</i> has not actually
constructed the allegory of the train; the characters who rule the train,
Wilford and Minister Mason, the educational and political institutions, impose
and perpetuate the allegory. It is their
allegory, not the filmmakers’. The film
presents allegory as cultural myth.
Revolution, then, is not a part of this allegory. Revolution, on the other hand, destroys
allegory. Here we encounter Fredric
Jameson’s dictum on the power of science fiction: “the narrative ending is the
mark of that boundary or limit beyond which thought cannot go. The merit of SF
is to dramatize this contradiction on the level of plot itself, since the
vision of future history cannot know any punctual ending of this kind, at the
same time that its novelistic expression demands some such ending” (148). In <i>Snowpiercer</i>,
the train marks the boundary, or limit, beyond which the thought of its
inhabitants cannot go. The allegory, or <i>totality</i>, of the train, performs the
function not of form, but of content.
The revolutionary kernel of the film derives from the fact that it <i>literally blows up its own content</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> In 2004, between the release of <i>Snowpiercer</i> and its source text, the French graphic novel <i>Le Transperceneige</i> (1982), China
Miéville published the final installment of his Bas-Lag Trilogy, <i>Iron Council</i>; a fantasy novel that also
dramatizes revolutionary potential around the central image of a perpetual
train. Eerily similar to Joo-ho’s
adaptation of <i>Le Transperceneige</i>, Miéville’s
fictional train is constructed by Weather Wrightby (the engineer in <i>Snowpiercer</i> is named Wilford), a
monomaniacal capitalist and imperialist who is also driven by notions that his
project is sanctioned by divine will. On
Joo-ho’s apocalyptic train, a cult of personality has even developed around
Wilford, who is practically revered by many of those on board. In both texts – <i>Iron Council</i> and <i>Snowpiercer</i>
– the train appears as a mythological and religious bastion, a world-in-itself,
providing solidarity and totality for fantasies of imperialist dominion. While Miéville’s text presents a more nuanced
and thoughtful consideration of revolution, novel and film both insist upon the
ultimate purposelessness of revolution.
Revolution cannot be circumscribed by allegory because revolution’s very
instinct is to resist allegory, and to destroy it if possible. Thus, beyond the train there can be no
absolute justification of human existence, ethics, or meaning.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> The purposelessness of revolution in <i>Snowpiercer</i> manifests in the locked but mute gazes of Yona and the
polar bear. In <i>Iron Council</i>, the purposelessness of revolution is summed up by insurrectionist
leader Ann-Hari: “‘We were something real, and we came in our time, and we made
our decision, and it was <i>not yours</i>. Whether we were right or wrong, it was <i>our</i> history’” (552). Any absolute purpose, in both <i>Iron Council</i> and <i>Snowpiercer</i>, exists only within the context of the train, in the
abstraction of allegory. As Ann-Hari
tells Judah Low, <i>right</i> and <i>wrong</i> make no difference, and there can
be no ethical imperative beyond the immanent demand of the present. The revolutionary leader Curtis registers a
similar notion in <i>Snowpiercer</i> in his
revelatory concluding speech: “‘You know what I hate about myself? I know what people taste like. I know that babies taste best.’” This is why, in the heat of pitched battle,
Curtis does not return to save a threatened friend, but leaves him to be
slaughtered by the enemy. To return is
to forsake the moment of revolution for the ethics of comradery; but revolution
can abide no absolute ethics.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> This anti-ethical approach may seem difficult to accept when
viewers, along with Curtis, learn the fate of the missing children, who have been
taken from the rear of the train to play an integral role in keeping the train
moving. Of course, Curtis must feel an
ethical obligation to save the child; and indeed, within the context of the
train, it makes sense to remove the child – a fundamental component of the
train’s perpetual motion – from his debased station amidst the gears. But it makes no sense whatsoever to do so
outside the confines of the train, amidst the cold wastes of the wider world. Any apparently absolute justification for
revolution, whether it be ethics, personal morality, equality, etc. dissolves
once the characters step foot beyond the train.
The revolutionary impetus finds no rationale in reality, no
justification or purpose.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> The imperative of revolution can only be to demand
something else, to demand the impossible; in the words of Arthur C. Clarke, the
“only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way
past them into the impossible.” For
Curtis, as for the insurrectionists in <i>Iron
Council</i>, the train presents the limits of the possible, but simultaneously
provides the impetus for pushing beyond into the <i>impossible</i>. There is no
absolute purpose to this impetus except within the train; there is no absolute
purpose to revolution except within the abstraction that is also its making. The very movement of revolution is to destroy
the possibility of its own absolute purpose.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> <i>Snowpiercer</i>
concludes prior to the resurrection of human societal forms because to
represent these forms would be to reinstate the abstract order of allegory – the
new Eden on Ice, a utopian fantasy in the snow.
The film concludes with the ambiguous gaze between (as far as we know)
the only adult survivor and a polar bear because here we encounter a profound
depth of inaccessibility: the animal other.
The bear, although it proves that life has survived beyond the train,
offers no consolation or guarantee. It
only stares, in apparent indifference, at what has been for humans a historical
event, but the bear does not see history in the making. The bear sees only another animal.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> Revolution, as we learn in the film’s conclusion, is the
ultimate sacrificial narrative because it sacrifices its own existence as
narrative. It evacuates itself of its
own meaning, its drive is to destroy the purpose of its existence. Like the train, revolution is propelled
internally, but it seeks to disassemble the means of propulsion. Its mind is beyond the walls, occupying the
impossible aether, aware that it thrives on only a momentary purpose. True revolution, if it is successful, enjoys
no holidays of remembrance. True
revolution, if it is successful, forgets that it ever happened. The possibility of this radical success
remains, to this day, purely speculative; the achievement of great science
fiction has been attempting to capture the envisioned reality of this
speculation.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Patrick Whitmarshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09136674843890947797noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4194280971933732517.post-91087292697056339132014-05-07T08:49:00.000-07:002014-05-07T08:49:00.589-07:00“‘The interstices of intervening substances’”: the Limits of Time and Narrative in Wells’s The Time Machine<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">“In the
last resort, what has left its mark on the development of thought must be the
history of the earth we live on and its relation to the sun.”<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">~Freud<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;"> At
the conclusion of the Time Traveller’s story in H.G. Wells’s <i>The Time Machine</i>, the internal narrator
attempts to describe his journey to incredibly late moments in the future of
the planet. Tentacled creatures inhabit
this world, although haplessly, “hopping fitfully about” (71). The planet sinks in near-darkness beneath a
dying sun, and everything appears drenched in a dull redness: the sun is only a
“red-hot bow in the sky,” the surrounding water “blood-red” (70-71). Everything appears near death or extinction
as the world smolders under a mostly ineffective star. Wells takes his readers to the limits of
observable time on earth; but he also takes us somewhere potentially even more
terrifying: the limits of narrative.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;"> Early
in the text, the Time Traveller expresses the difficulty of describing the
sensations of time travel. After
agreeing to tell his story, he admits that he “‘cannot convey the peculiar
sensations of time travelling’” (16). He
continues the only way he can conceive to: by using figurative language: “‘They
are excessively unpleasant. There is a
feeling exactly like that one has upon a switchback – of a helpless headlong
motion! I felt the same horrible
anticipation, too, of an imminent smash’” (16).
Spatial terminology and sensations serve to illuminate what the Time
Traveller experiences as he hurtles into the future; in many ways, his
description registers the effect of passengers on the railway, as recorded by
Wolfgang Schivelbusch: “repeatedly, the train was described as a projectile […]
The traveler who sat inside that projectile ceased to be a traveler and became,
as noted in a popular metaphor of the century, a mere parcel” (53-54). Although never using the term “parcel,” the
Time Traveller insists upon the contingent materiality of his body during
transportation – a materiality that is rendered passive by the conditions of
time travel:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1.0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">“I was, so to speak, attenuated – was slipping
like a vapour through the interstices of intervening substances! But to come to a stop involved the jamming of
myself, molecule by molecule, into whatever lay in my way: meant bringing my
atoms into such intimate contact with those of the obstacle that a profound
chemical reaction […] would result, and blow myself and my apparatus out of all
possible dimensions – into the Unknown.” (17)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">Like the terrified passengers of
Schivelbusch’s railroad, the Time Traveller appeals to the danger and terror of
moving at a high velocity through space in order to express the traversal of
time.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;"> The
spatiality of time travel, as described in Wells’s short novel, gives time a <i>material</i> quality. The time machine functions as an apparatus that
realizes time as a material substrate, something that can be traveled along;
and this materialization forces the reader to consider time as something
strange. Time becomes <i>estranging</i>, echoing the formula put
forth by SF critic Darko Suvin in his 1979 book <i>Metamorphoses of Science Fiction</i>, in which he describes science
fiction as “the literature of cognitive estrangement.” The Time Traveller’s appeal to spatial
imagery conveys the limitations of describing unfamiliar temporal motion. Our conscious perceptions do not permit the
capacity to describe temporal motion as anything but linear. Time and consciousness are bound to each
other: “‘<i>There is no difference between
Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness
moves along it</i>’” (4). The
intervention of the time machine – an apparatus that mediates the relationship
between concrete conscious bodies and (for lack of a better word) <i>change</i> – reifies material change into
Time, into something separate from consciousness. However, time is not only a narrative
category in Wells’s text; it is also a constitutive component of
narrative. The text introduces the
apparatus of the time machine only in part to investigate the hypothetical
prospect of time travel; more comprehensively, <i>The Time Machine</i> functions as a meditation on narrative itself.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;"> The
radical dynamics of <i>The Time Machine</i>
emerge not from its science-fictional subject matter, but from its internalization
of formal paradox at the level of content.
In <i>The Theory of the Novel</i>,
Lukács argues for the fundamental function of <i>time</i> in the novel-form:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1.0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">“Only in the novel, whose very matter is
seeking and failing to find the essence, is time posited together with the
form: time is the resistance of the organic – which possesses a mere semblance
of life – to the present meaning, the will of life to remain within its own
completely enclosed immanence […] we might almost say that the entire inner
action of the novel is nothing but a struggle against the power of time” (217).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">Building upon Lukács’s argument, Fredric
Jameson brings his own narrative theory to bear on the genre of science
fiction: “the narrative ending is the mark of that boundary or limit beyond
which thought cannot go. The merit of SF is to dramatize this contradiction on
the level of plot itself, since the vision of future history cannot know any
punctual ending of this kind, at the same time that its novelistic expression
demands some such ending” (148).<a href="file:///C:/Users/Pat/Desktop/Patricks%20Stuff/DOCS/Blog%20Post%2018.docx#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" title=""><sup><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">[1]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></sup></a> <i>The
Time Machine</i> serves as an archetypal image of Jameson’s argument for
science fiction; beyond reveling in the paradoxes of time travel, Wells’s
fiction realizes these paradoxes in the form of novelistic discourse and
recreates them in its subject matter.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;"> The
ramifications of time travel thus indicate the very <i>formal</i> limitations of narrative itself, and Wells’s text registers
these limits. The Time Traveller is not
the text’s primary narrator; he is an <i>internal</i>
one. The primary narrator remains vague
and unnamed, a member of the party to whom the Traveller reveals his
invention. This technique is known as <i>embedded narrative</i>, and it enjoys
company in the nineteenth century: famous examples include Mary Shelley’s <i>Frankenstein</i>, Henry James’s <i>The Turn of the Screw</i>, and Joseph Conrad’s
<i>Heart of Darkness</i> (to name a
few). Embedded narrative allows the
author to construct a frame within the novel itself, to impose limits within
the diegesis. Often such constructions
evoke a sense of skepticism in readers, and lead us to question the
authenticity of our narrator(s); however, in Wells’s story the embedded
narrative also allows the author to explore the ramifications and difficulties
of a narrative that, in its very subject matter, defies one of the constitutive
components of narrative.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;"> Many
19<sup>th</sup>-century models of history pursue a teleological aim, deriving
primarily from Hegel’s philosophy of history.
Despite Marx’s “inversion” of Hegel, his project yet remains
teleological, and Marxist politics function importantly in <i>The Time Machine</i>, infiltrating many aspects of the narrative. Upon witnessing the idyllic lifestyle of the
Eloi, the Traveller gasps “Communism” (24), and understands his vision in 19<sup>th</sup>-century
political terms: “There were no signs of struggle, neither social nor economical
struggle. The shop, the advertisement,
traffic, all that commerce which constitutes the body of our world, was
gone. It was natural on that golden
evening that I should jump at the idea of a social paradise” (27). The Traveller alters his interpretation of
the future in later pages, but the influence of Marxism remains, and the
concept of historical progress entailing future improvement is clear in many of
his statements: “The whole world will be intelligent, educated, and
co-operating; things will move fast and fast towards the subjugation of Nature. In the end, wisely and carefully we shall
readjust the balance of animal and vegetable life to suit our human needs”
(26). The Traveller espouses progress
and development that will eventually arrive at benevolent mastery.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;"> However,
Wells deflates this teleological tendency by undermining the narrative
process. As the Traveller moves further
into the future, he watches the planet and sun slowly die before disappearing
from the novel entirely. Furthermore,
not only does he encounter denotative problems in his recounting of the
adventure; but his telling fails. His
listeners do not believe him, except for our primary anonymous narrator, who
tells us that the Traveller “vanished three years ago. And, as everybody knows now, he has never
returned” (75). Wells embeds the
secondary narrative of the Time Traveller in the primary narrative of the text;
and this primary narrative recounts the Time Traveller’s ultimate failure: his
own disappearance. Time travel undermines
its own ability to pronounce arbitrary demarcations such as <i>beginnings</i> and <i>ends</i>; such boundaries rely on normative, linear conceptions of
time, which break down in the process of time travel. The Traveller himself can never effectively
communicate his story because it must fixate itself in the bonds of linear
narrative.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Pat/Desktop/Patricks%20Stuff/DOCS/Blog%20Post%2018.docx#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" title=""><sup><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">[2]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></sup></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;"> The
only way for Wells to reconcile the paradox of his hero’s journey – the
unknowability or definition of his temporal odyssey – is for the hero to vanish
from narrative time entirely. The
primary narrator, despite his belief in the Time Traveller’s story, cannot <i>know</i> the extent of this story in any
linear sense. The materiality of the
time machine thrusts the Traveller out of linear time entirely, suggesting that
our normative approaches to time (i.e. understanding it linearly, or in a
narrative way) fall short of apprehending what “Time” really is. The Traveller drops out of narrative time. He exists (to invoke Bakhtin’s chronotope) in
“time-time”; that is, in the fissure between the content of the primary
narrative and its constitutive form (if not out of form entirely). The reified realm of Time itself, as materialized
by the time machine; the hero must literally slip, as he has already told us,
into the “interstices of intervening substances.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;"> These
interstices reveal to the Traveller (as far as we are allowed to see) a
startling glimpse not of teleological or directed history, but of contingent
moments. Beyond the ideology of linear
time, the world appears startling and strange, resulting in the terrifying
creatures discussed above. Here, Wells
challenges the linearity of Darwinian evolutionary motion, which claims that “as
natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal
and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection” (<i>Origin</i> II:305). Instead, in the conclusion of the Traveller’s
narrative (or, rather, what appears to us as a conclusion), we find gigantic
insects and monstrous tentacled things; not the hopeful prospects of “Excelsior”
biology (Wells “Zoological Retrogression”).
As Stephen Jay Gould has put it more recently, the “vaunted progress of
life is really random motion away from simple beginnings, not directed impetus
toward inherently advantageous complexity” (<i>Life's Grandeur</i> 173).
As we can see in the final scene of the Traveller’s journey, life
appears to be slinking back toward its simple beginnings.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;"> The
narrative barrier that the Traveller thus encounters is the ultimate
destruction of cognition itself, since narrative requires a conscious
construction of points constellated together to form a cohesive (or
not-so-cohesive) whole. The paradoxical
breakdown of the narrative effect arrives with the appearance of a dying sun;
the heat death of the universe. We can
have some fun with this by looking briefly (and in conclusion) at Ray Brassier’s
<i>Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and
Extinction</i>:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1.0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;">
<i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">Everything is dead already</span></i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">. Solar
death is catastrophic because it vitiates ontological temporality as configured
in terms of philosophical questioning’s constitutive horizontal relationship to
the future. But far from lying in wait
for us in the far distant future, on the other side of the terrestrial horizon,
the solar catastrophe needs to be grasped a something that <i>has already happened</i>; as the aboriginal trauma driving the history
of terrestrial life as an elaborately circuitous detour from stellar death. (233)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">What Brassier is concerned with is the
possibility of thinking the death of thought.
Any attempt is circumscribed by life and thought, and thus immediately
negates itself; we can think of death conceptually, but we cannot occupy it,
cannot identify with it. The death of
thought, however – signified by heat death, solar death – cannot be grasped
conceptually, because not only is it yet circumscribed by life, but is yet
circumscribed by <i>thought</i>. The concept of the death-of-thought is
non-conceptual.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;"> As
a non-concept, the thought drives toward its own demise. Narratively speaking, it must fall out of
itself; it encounters its own death. The
Traveller, narrating his tale in <i>The Time
Machine</i> (if he is indeed to continue travelling), must also narrate beyond
the borders of life and thought. As a
narrative concept, he becomes non-conceptual.
Wells’s intention for the Traveller’s disappearance likely finds its
source in the genre of the adventure tale, of which <i>The Time Machine</i> must be included as an example. Our best guess may be that the Traveller met
his demise in some battle in a distant time, or that he fell in love and chose
to remain with his bride. However, the
circumscription of the Traveller’s narrative within that of the primary
narrator forces us to consider the formal problems that Wells is dealing with.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;"> As
a formal institution dealing with conceptual content, the novel relies on time
and cognition in order to present itself to readers. Even if the content is estranging or
unfamiliar, readers must have some basis of communication with the text. <i>The
Time Machine</i> presents its readers with a paradox: not that of time travel
per se, but that of a concept that removes the apparatus through which we can
conceptualize it. Approaching the
borders of thought in the decimation of the earth through solar death, Wells
constructs a narrative that un-narrates itself, or narrates itself out of
narration entirely. All that remains are
the two shriveled flowers, succumbed at last to the slow passage of the only
time available for narrative and cognitive representation. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div>
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<div id="ftn1">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/Pat/Desktop/Patricks%20Stuff/DOCS/Blog%20Post%2018.docx#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
This quote is taken from Jameson’s essay “Progress versus Utopia: or, Can We
Imagine the Future?” in <i>Science Fiction
Studies</i>, 9.2 (1982): 147-158, print.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn2">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/Pat/Desktop/Patricks%20Stuff/DOCS/Blog%20Post%2018.docx#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
Or, we might say that this is the somewhat nascent comment that Wells is
making. It is certainly debatable (and I
would be one of the first to say so) that more (post)modern and contemporary
works of literature have successfully countered the linear narrative in
innovative and compelling ways. Wells,
however, is combating linear narrative in a novel manner; through applications
of scientific thought and consequences, contributing significantly to the genre
of science fiction.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
</div>
Patrick Whitmarshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09136674843890947797noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4194280971933732517.post-76357593529239924192013-08-26T08:00:00.001-07:002013-08-26T08:00:23.095-07:00Aliens Among Us: a Casual Stroll through Harvard's Natural History Museum<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> It’s incredible that we (well, some of us, I suppose) are
so intrigued and excited by the prospect of extraterrestrial life and
intelligence that we fail to notice the aliens all around us.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> I recently went to the Harvard Museum of Natural History,
and, probably needless to say, I <i>really</i>
got my nerd on. Beginning in the Earth
Sciences section, I read about the accretion of materials that led to the
formation of our planet and walked around an impressive collection of elements,
gemstones, amethysts, and rocks collected from various places across the globe
as well as a few from meteorites. As I
moved through the institution, the exhibits gradually shifted away from
inorganic compounds and toward discussions of climate change and finally onto
biological specimens ranging from deep-sea Pompeii Worms (an extremophile found
only in hydrothermal vents) to Siberian Tigers, and even a few fossilized
remains of dinosaurs and other creatures from the Triassic, Jurassic, and
Cretaceous. Finally, the institution
also features the interesting Peabody Museum, which houses artifacts from
Pre-Columbian American cultures as well as small-scale recreations of temples
and murals.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> As I toured the exhibits, I once again was floored by the
sheer difference that separated me from what I was looking at. The interesting, albeit brief, exhibit on
evolution offers a bit of clarification for those unsure on the tenets of
natural selection (which, as far as I’m concerned, is the closest thing to <i>fact</i> that we’ve yet discovered about the
development and emergence of species); but it is a whole other matter to stand
beneath this…<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimPgcmdNcdxFJntRG6glbaMRRXLKXoLF9lWgCUdAx9Lvdmx2xkDhynbOGGbt78zCupBT2YHv37gTuZiwcJv71rY2KU5z8zDs3GgXI9DRsG1a0vUEpiQzzbQYACFwrhflO9rmAMM22l86Ic/s1600/IMG_0546.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimPgcmdNcdxFJntRG6glbaMRRXLKXoLF9lWgCUdAx9Lvdmx2xkDhynbOGGbt78zCupBT2YHv37gTuZiwcJv71rY2KU5z8zDs3GgXI9DRsG1a0vUEpiQzzbQYACFwrhflO9rmAMM22l86Ic/s320/IMG_0546.JPG" width="240" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> <i>(Fin Whale)</i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">…and marvel at the
aliens our planet already has in store for us.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> Some might object to calling creatures such as the Fin
Whale “alien,” but I actually intend it in the politest way possible. Only by really trying to acknowledge the
diversification already present among the ecosystems of our planet can we then
begin to perceive ourselves as part of this diversification, rather than some
pinnacle or omega point at the top of it, straining toward divine
transcendence. Toss us in the middle of
the ocean without a boat or paddle, and I guarantee you that all of the sudden
we won’t find ourselves at the top of the food chain any longer (hell, throw me
in with a boat and paddle – give me a cruise liner – I’ll still probably
succumb to the elements). What I found
in the Natural History Museum at Harvard reawakened me to the truth that even I
find it difficult to maintain occasionally: that evolutionarily, we are far
from the “best,” and that if we seek the alien other, not only are we already
among it – we <i>are</i> it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> I don’t bother memorizing all the transitional epochs and
eons during which our planet formed (Hadean, Achaean, Proterozoic, etc.); I can
look them up on the internet whenever I need to. But I am still in awe at the sheer weight of
time, even within the scheme of the age of the universe (the accretion of the
Earth is believed to have occurred about 4.56 billion years ago, while the
universe is believed to be about 13.5 billion years old<a href="file:///C:/Users/Pat/Desktop/Patricks%20Stuff/DOCS/Blog%20Post%2015.docx#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>);
and modern human beings – in an anatomical sense – occupy approximately 0.00004%
of the entire age of the Earth. Prior to
that time, we can trace the evolution of what we call “humans” back to
increasingly more and more alien forms:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-no-proof: yes;"><!--[if gte vml 1]><v:shape id="Picture_x0020_2" o:spid="_x0000_i1036"
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</v:shape><![endif]--><!--[if !vml]--><!--[endif]--></span><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Evolution of the
human skull (apologies, my camera couldn’t fit all the distinct examples)</span></i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Where do we draw the
line? Modern science chooses an entirely
arbitrary point, which makes sense in hindsight once we’ve applied the
schematics of biological classification.
We see some semblance creeping along the diverging lines, one strand
that ends with us; but if we follow this strand back far enough, we will likely
stare in disgust at our supposed ancestors.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> The other divergent lines offer glimpses into such unique
forms of life that we can’t help but feel as aliens on our own planet:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-no-proof: yes;"><!--[if gte vml 1]><v:shape id="Picture_x0020_3" o:spid="_x0000_i1035"
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</v:shape><![endif]--><!--[if !vml]--><!--[endif]--></span><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Ground Pangolin</span></i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">Right Whale</span></i> <img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfKVNINXMG1r-gWYpycalGL0GI8-zMKA3mWhqErNjUcJvc2nFtaGabJkox_Ut0uWFqfr9As5oXalnTLQIRhZQZlP9ssO8RG8LkvMPrfbX5oxcmUa35AFP6B50xUySzvAJYKSLthBaM3b1j/s320/IMG_0544.JPG" width="320" /></div>
<i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><br /> </span></i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-no-proof: yes;"><!--[if gte vml 1]><v:shape id="Picture_x0020_4" o:spid="_x0000_i1034"
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<i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">Sperm Whale</span></i><i></i><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCh0WZS45gKRxS7qAzWK1M0W6HwjZA9lGSZLnbgZK03CHsplBV9vVyPd4Vq6OOyWbx4MSaVy09Xdj2Kq1mYueCh1jcnKV8jWEw_85ym4My4ahywJVwHyzHhoNvOpXJXG79vuuj7N7nLQcT/s1600/IMG_0543.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; display: inline !important; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCh0WZS45gKRxS7qAzWK1M0W6HwjZA9lGSZLnbgZK03CHsplBV9vVyPd4Vq6OOyWbx4MSaVy09Xdj2Kq1mYueCh1jcnKV8jWEw_85ym4My4ahywJVwHyzHhoNvOpXJXG79vuuj7N7nLQcT/s320/IMG_0543.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
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<i>Tapir </i><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg49DbM4cOvMlnG3kGWa95LFs6OisOE2Rt_k_e0nyOfnLPKl4XB0SSRbclOIk-ZJLVBPjZlcvfG3uUBcZidxZXgckYosk9OAqgU9PpLYH3V9q01UDMysCLc5_CkJ36iQr9fndTrwU0IjJ1O/s320/IMG_0548.JPG" width="240" /></div>
<i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><br /><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">I could spend hours
walking around Harvard’s Natural History Museum; actually, I did. The exhibit of glass flowers is as
breathtaking as their collection of elements and animals. Finally, what I found most exhilarating wasn’t
any one exhibit in particular, but my own body – my own limbs, gait, brain, and
the fact that I was part of a culture that put things in museums. We privilege our eyes; sight is our dominant
sense. We need to <i>see</i> things in order to understand them. Museums are an institution of seeing…</span><img border="0" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKBdXXdgShbTWAfcKpXwPU0kkPqrsC8fPoDz9_DObl4Ha0kD5yRk9gwLoaSShXcCcCYVUZptPD5lWD5pxV5yHdqW8hMf2XpHd5sXnSasutz1DAjp1pAAWOscLnfdfPswD3WXUTVEQJG3B2/s640/IMG_0561b.jpg" style="text-align: center;" width="640" /></div>
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</v:shape><![endif]--><!--[if !vml]--><!--[endif]--></span><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">(don’t ask me
exactly what this thing is)</span></i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">…but we must remember
that whatever we look at looks back at us.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> In Arthur C. Clarke’s iconic 1953 science fiction novel, <i>Childhood’s End</i>, the character Jan
Rodricks is taken on a tour through an alien museum and witnesses an exhibit
that causes immediate terror, and then gradual wonderment:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">It was lifeless, of course – not, as he
had thought in that first moment of panic, consciously staring up at him. It filled almost all that great circular
space, and the ruby light gleamed and shifted in its crystal depths.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">It was a single giant eye. (Clarke 214)<a href="file:///C:/Users/Pat/Desktop/Patricks%20Stuff/DOCS/Blog%20Post%2015.docx#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Jan explains that he
feels panic, at first, because the situation was unexpected; but the details of
expectance are never clarified. Is Jan
afraid because of the size of the exhibit, the reorientation of frame and
perspective… or is he afraid because suddenly, in an institution of seeing, he
feels that he has become the <i>sight</i>. Those who know their Foucault may recall the
succinct summary of his panopticon writings from <i>Discipline & Punish</i>: “Visibility is a trap.”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Pat/Desktop/Patricks%20Stuff/DOCS/Blog%20Post%2015.docx#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> As we walk through a museum, we are under the
impression that nothing looks back at us – but the museum is not Foucault’s
panopticon.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Pat/Desktop/Patricks%20Stuff/DOCS/Blog%20Post%2015.docx#_ftn4" name="_ftnref4" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">[4]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> We are not disguised in the central
tower. When we walk through zoos, we are
fully aware that animals <i>look</i> back at
us; we are not invisible.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1o1yeyxKLpmtETzmYhsSrDwtsFalkRgX5Ok13wr3DIOqCv2E20HRxksAmGp0Uwq3i6hlibj5ZHcGTuI6YtygjlBNpNjOki22JLuHnaoYGj3Bhyphenhyphen5FJaYVvp2O4kqrXhdz4BCIe7G3QWbzc/s320/Kubrick%2527s+Monkey.jpg" width="243" /></div>
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</v:shape><![endif]--><!--[if !vml]--><!--[endif]--></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Stanley Kubrick, “How People Look to
Monkeys,” 1946<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">It is foolish to believe
that simply because the exhibits in a museum are not living, breathing organisms,
they do not <i>look</i> back at us. We are (most of us) unaware of the deep
cultural affect that permeates the museum environment. We separate the museum out, believe it to be
an objective space that distinguishes each exhibit, and us <i>from</i> the exhibits; but we do not consider the fact that, amidst the
diversity of expunged life, we are the purest exhibit. Our fascination with other creatures signals
the greater imperative: our fascination with what we are, where we fit in the
exhibition.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> We need not invoke the technologically advanced aliens of
Clarke’s <i>Childhood’s End</i> in order to
conceive of this fascination. All we
need to do is reorient ourselves with respect to our fellow terrestrial
organisms. Dismiss for a moment the
museum as a “book of nature,” with ourselves as the author, and consider that
what we take to be our authorship is actually a reflexive effort to comprehend
ourselves.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Pat/Desktop/Patricks%20Stuff/DOCS/Blog%20Post%2015.docx#_ftn5" name="_ftnref5" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">[5]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> Despite the reflexivity inherent in the instance of
exhibition, we can still find ourselves in awe of the creatures before us,
particularly when all we have left are the bones:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-no-proof: yes;"><!--[if gte vml 1]><v:shape id="Picture_x0020_6" o:spid="_x0000_i1029"
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visibility:visible;mso-wrap-style:square'>
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</v:shape><![endif]--><!--[if !vml]--><!--[endif]--></span><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Triceratops
skull</span></i><br />
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<i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBuOHeXDOQc3gv2Dh-7Lhllm-WYXT6r0Efsv6OsUjK6SxRdbDBAfKLk9ileFpaQaj_sx6sOvOwqAsBrPUa5-13eUkJ3E9S8p7P1z0aACvAI27yr1AsOr_dTh_aS-u5YYLAQcDJZ3-zqn-m/s1600/IMG_0552.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBuOHeXDOQc3gv2Dh-7Lhllm-WYXT6r0Efsv6OsUjK6SxRdbDBAfKLk9ileFpaQaj_sx6sOvOwqAsBrPUa5-13eUkJ3E9S8p7P1z0aACvAI27yr1AsOr_dTh_aS-u5YYLAQcDJZ3-zqn-m/s320/IMG_0552.JPG" width="320" /></a></span></i></div>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdDwZbTBKLkblVn3URz_YXYq3ZiEOgRikDx-lRS09GqgLBVAe1awx8-Ln3ZCcnJsosnxkY2OwebjBe-kvFsYpG7HGJn0tKwb6hIXdylDa964T9195FB5Pz4v6ZO17rK2H6FfLlc5LiFjNW/s320/IMG_0550.JPG" width="320" /><i style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Edaphosaurus</span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Contemplating these
strange looking things in turn raises questions about our ability to
contemplate other animals at all.
Observing living animals in their habitat, as is the business of
biologists and other scholars of the life sciences, certainly assists in the
matter; but we must acknowledge, at some point, a barrier in what we can hope
to understand. Dinosaurs, unfortunately,
have left us only their bones. We don’t
have any cave paintings, photographs, or home videos, despite our fond memories
of this adorable bunch:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg32BgNmOw4uvaQCD4OWpAfuuPRgo9VircLn43fJ6sGv1oNnz665PtJdJ77zf1798A3VUSGEQKfC-TljmaU2r40VLpTyNT6edHwxeAgoVxLElDWB3pr_B1Z-e9arZYK7jFrdmHO4mV4jnKz/s1600/Dinosaurs+Show.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="233" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg32BgNmOw4uvaQCD4OWpAfuuPRgo9VircLn43fJ6sGv1oNnz665PtJdJ77zf1798A3VUSGEQKfC-TljmaU2r40VLpTyNT6edHwxeAgoVxLElDWB3pr_B1Z-e9arZYK7jFrdmHO4mV4jnKz/s320/Dinosaurs+Show.jpg" width="320" /></a>(<i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">I’m the baby!)</span></i></div>
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<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">It helps to
anthropomorphize things, but as any good scholar will tell you, this doesn’t
get us any closer to understanding the thing-in-itself (in Kantian terms). So we attempt to separate, to classify, and
to organize in an effort to achieve the most objective, neutral knowledge
possible of the things around us; but turning to Foucault one last time, no
matter how complex our instruments or how specific our naming system, the utter
<i>alien-ness</i> of the creature will evade
our best attempts.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Pat/Desktop/Patricks%20Stuff/DOCS/Blog%20Post%2015.docx#_ftn6" name="_ftnref6" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">[6]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> This is not an admission of futility or a concession to
the inestimable forces of the inhuman world (which, let’s face it, is the world
we live in; it makes no sense to think of it as “ours”). The further science pushes its boundaries,
the more discoveries we will continue to make, and the more (hopefully) we will
understand, at the very least, about the consequences and effects of our
existence in the world. By continuing to
pursue and discover we will not only continue to develop our knowledge, even if
it will always remain imperfect; we will also inaugurate and catalyze the
ever-shifting relationship of humanity to the world, culturally, economically,
ethically, etc. As we continue to make
new discoveries we must also continue to reassess our economic and political
foundations, because whether we consciously choose to or not, we will change. It will not be for better or for worse – it
will just happen.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> And, eventually, we will likely be as bewildering to
something else as this is to us:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhctvX7_EKbzeT_LCsb7ELzEZ5l6OBQ2cy4c7l57HrEws8h7gg4R2Gy7HPZTQAH3773mr9Kt_anF6Acdw6Nh7DFS3ZHg84F-o4X1ERFsotVmLEPDJTMUxkURHRMyDnMuGzwc0A7Vp8vmlkm/s1600/IMG_0553.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhctvX7_EKbzeT_LCsb7ELzEZ5l6OBQ2cy4c7l57HrEws8h7gg4R2Gy7HPZTQAH3773mr9Kt_anF6Acdw6Nh7DFS3ZHg84F-o4X1ERFsotVmLEPDJTMUxkURHRMyDnMuGzwc0A7Vp8vmlkm/s640/IMG_0553.JPG" width="640" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-no-proof: yes;"><!--[if gte vml 1]><v:shape id="Picture_x0020_10" o:spid="_x0000_i1026"
type="#_x0000_t75" style='width:387.75pt;height:291pt;rotation:180;
visibility:visible;mso-wrap-style:square'>
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o:title=""/>
</v:shape><![endif]--><!--[if !vml]--><!--[endif]--></span><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Kronosaurus</span></i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-no-proof: yes;"><!--[if gte vml 1]><v:shape id="Picture_x0020_11" o:spid="_x0000_i1025"
type="#_x0000_t75" style='width:387.75pt;height:291pt;rotation:180;
visibility:visible;mso-wrap-style:square'>
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</v:shape><![endif]--><!--[if !vml]--><!--[endif]--></span><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Kronosaurus
(I’m glad I’m not swimming with this thing still in the water)</span></i><br />
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<i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoPI4YYAWJhdWKDslf93WPsMkKDIQ4Zu1H1-UBNDnu16Adi7R0UFQxxLmiaKF4Aex300sQ9ho_TsRZhEsJKOTV9jEOJ-WXol7INTklM5oK6P5d9J8ILzc9PdDv_bngObezH4VgIzTNJO0A/s1600/IMG_0554.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoPI4YYAWJhdWKDslf93WPsMkKDIQ4Zu1H1-UBNDnu16Adi7R0UFQxxLmiaKF4Aex300sQ9ho_TsRZhEsJKOTV9jEOJ-WXol7INTklM5oK6P5d9J8ILzc9PdDv_bngObezH4VgIzTNJO0A/s640/IMG_0554.JPG" width="640" /></a></span></i></div>
<i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<br />
<div>
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<br />
<div id="ftn1">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/Pat/Desktop/Patricks%20Stuff/DOCS/Blog%20Post%2015.docx#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
Quentin Meillassoux, <i>After Finitude</i>,
Trans. Ray Brassier, New York: Continuum, 2011, p. 9. This is also very common knowledge, and can
be found easily on the internet. I think
Wikipedia even has the correct figures.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn2">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/Pat/Desktop/Patricks%20Stuff/DOCS/Blog%20Post%2015.docx#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
There is also some speculation that the final “starchild” sequence of Stanley
Kubrick’s <i>2001: A Space Odyssey</i>
portrays the protagonist, David Bowman, walking through some kind of celestial
museum, but unaware of his spectators…<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn3">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/Pat/Desktop/Patricks%20Stuff/DOCS/Blog%20Post%2015.docx#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
Michel Foucault, <i>Discipline & Punish</i>,
New York: Vintage, 1995, p. 200.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn4">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/Pat/Desktop/Patricks%20Stuff/DOCS/Blog%20Post%2015.docx#_ftnref4" name="_ftn4" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[4]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> In
<i>Discipline & Punish</i>, Foucault
writes that the Panopticon is “a machine for dissociating the see/being seen
dyad: in the peripheric ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the
central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen” (<i>Discipline</i> 202). The architectural model of the panopticon was
designed by Jeremy Bentham for use in prisons.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn5">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/Pat/Desktop/Patricks%20Stuff/DOCS/Blog%20Post%2015.docx#_ftnref5" name="_ftn5" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[5]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
For more on the museum as a kind of “book,” see Laura Rigal’s fascinating study
on excavation, exhibition, and expansion, <i>The
American Manufactory: Art, Labor, and the World of Things in the Early Republic</i>,
Princeton: Princeton UP, 1998, p. 96-97.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn6">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/Pat/Desktop/Patricks%20Stuff/DOCS/Blog%20Post%2015.docx#_ftnref6" name="_ftn6" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[6]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
See Michel Foucault, “Classifying,” <i>The
Order of Things</i>, New York: Vintage, 1994, p. 125-165.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
</div>
Patrick Whitmarshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09136674843890947797noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4194280971933732517.post-19595955777423290312013-08-12T14:40:00.003-07:002013-08-12T14:40:56.370-07:00A Posthuman Manifesto<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> My interest in the posthuman provokes a variety of
responses, but more often than not I get questioned on what exactly the
posthuman is, and how exactly it is <i>useful</i>
(i.e. practical). The posthuman, of
course, is not simply a study of what might come after humanity; in fact, it
more specifically signals an interest in what exactly the <i>human</i> is. Taking a posthuman
stance means not taking the human, and anything we associate with the human,
for granted. It means making no
assumptions on what human beings are or do, even on a general level. It means trying to assess every situation
from not only the human perspective, but from (potentially) all
perspectives. Ultimately, we are all entrenched
in our own method of thought and knowing, our own observational strategies and
informational paradigms – down to the very way in which our senses perceive the
world, we are embodied in a way that conditions our interaction with external
reality, what Immanuel Kant labeled the noumenal. A skeptic of posthuman irrationality (which
is what it can often appear as) will likely say: <i>Yes, and that embodiment is as a </i>human<i> body</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> But what really is this body that we so presumptuously
call “human”? What do we really know
about it? Perhaps the assumptions we
make about the body are not indicative of the way the body really is, but are only
our perceptions of the body. But then,
our perceptions are certainly part of the body since they are generated (to an
extent) by it; that is, our perceptivity would not be possible without a body
to act as a perceiving agent. We arrive
here at the notion of reflexivity, and it is defined in the following way by N.
Katherine Hayles in the first chapter of her book <i>How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and
Informatics</i>: “Reflexivity is the movement whereby that which has been used
to generate a system is made, through a changed perspective, to become part of
the system it generates” (Hayles 8). Our
own sensory perceptions allow us to generate a system of the body – to systematize
the body, to organize it according to a field of knowledge; but those same
perceptions are also <i>a part of the system
of the body</i> that they have allowed us to create. Pursuing this tangent, we can lose ourselves
down the proverbial rabbit hole, continually halving our frame of reference,
only asymptotically nearing zero-level – Zeno’s Achilles chasing the tortoise. As Hayles puts it less than a page later: “Reflexivity
tends notoriously toward infinite regress” (9).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> The impracticality of this conundrum rings too loud for
some. Humans <i>do</i> in fact engage with their world, often successfully, and they <i>do</i> in fact interact with their
surroundings in certain ways. Can we not
then admit that it is practical to make certain assumptions about what the
human is and about how it behaves? For
the sake of survival and immediate action, I would agree with the previous
rhetorical question. The danger arrives
when we expand our assumptions into universalizations; when we become so
entrenched in our assumptions that they become absolute. I call attention to the posthuman, and to its
concerns, because I want to remain vigilant on an expansive, general
level. I want to protect us from
ourselves – the selves we take to be so <i>human</i>. It may be practical, at our moment in
history, to view ourselves in a constitutive way, to accept as given the <i>manifest image</i> of humanity, in Wilfred
Sellars’s terms. But practicality can
change with the wind, and it can be extremely difficult to alter our cultural
attitude toward ourselves and our environment when what conditions this attitude
becomes universal.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> In this post, I want to cite Hayles’s opening assumptions
regarding the <i>posthuman</i>, and offer
them (with some explication) as a kind of posthuman manifesto. There are four total:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%; margin-left: .5in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">1.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">“First,
the posthuman view privileges informational pattern over material
instantiation, so that embodiment in a biological substrate is seen as an accident
of history rather than an inevitability of life” (2).</span></i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">This first assumption
is a bit misleading considering Hayles goes on to challenge the subordination
of material embodiment: “It is this materiality/information separation that I want
to contest […] My strategy is to complicate the leap from embodied reality to
abstract information” (12). We must
understand Hayles to be constructing a heuristic relationship between
information and materiality, rather than allowing information to subsist in an
idealistic fashion. Hayles specifies
what she means later in the text, in the chapter titled “The Materiality of
Informatics”: “Since the body and embodiment, inscription and incorporation,
are in constant interaction, the distinctions forming these polarities are
heuristic rather than absolute. They
nevertheless play an important role in understanding the connections between an
ideology of immateriality and the material conditions that produce the ideology”
(193). An emphasis on immateriality and
information is only possible through specific material conditions, including
the instantiation of information in a material body. Thus, rather than pursue information as a
kind of Platonic form subsisting beyond materiality, Hayles seeks to ground the
ideal within the material.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%; margin-left: .5in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">2.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">“Second,
the posthuman view considers consciousness, regarded as the seat of human
identity in the Western tradition long before Descartes thought he was a mind
thinking, as an epiphenomenon, as an evolutionary upstart trying to claim that
it is the whole show when in actuality it is only a minor sideshow” (2-3).</span></i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">As some of my readers
may know, this is a topic that has been on my radar for a while now. As usual, I turn to my homeboy Peter Watts: “Do
you want to know what consciousness is for?
Do you want to know the only <i>real</i>
purpose it serves? Training wheels. You can’t see both aspects of the Necker cube
at once, so it lets you focus on one and dismiss the other. That’s a pretty half-assed way to parse
reality” (Watts 302). Watts, of course,
is a flagrant anti-humanist. I don’t get
quite the same impression from Hayles, or from most literary critics for that
matter. Despite the dawning revelation
that we’re little more than chemicals and electricity (Watts’s own
description), there still remains the undeniable fact that something rather
miraculous happens when we truly try and think about our consciousness. Even if it <i>is</i> a minor sideshow, it’s a pretty impressive one. When we begin to consider the historical
implications of consciousness – its contingency, its reflexivity – which is
also what Hayles is interested in, tangentially (that is, how consciousness can
arise from matter), we begin to notice how splendidly incredible it is. If in my writings I seem to sideline
consciousness, to subordinate it to matter, then I apologize, for I am being
misunderstood. I’m more interested in
reveling in the utter unlikelihood of consciousness. From inside the Cartesian theater, it appears
as though consciousness must have been preordained, as though life had to
evolve this way. But Watts reminds us
that evolution “has no foresight” (303).
It didn’t have to happen. It was
an evolutionary accident. Whether or not
one believes in a divine being, a creator, or not, we can’t deny the truth of
the matter: that consciousness as an <i>accident</i>
is the true miracle. This is what, if we’re
going to adopt a posthumanist position, we have to come to terms with. This doesn’t necessitate an anti-humanist position,
although there are some (including Watts) who tend in that direction. Rather, we simply have to consider that
consciousness is not the only way for life – even intelligent life – to exist.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%; margin-left: .5in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">3.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">“Third,
the posthuman view thinks of the body as the original prosthesis we all learn
to manipulate, so that extending or replacing the body with other prostheses
becomes a continuation of a process that began before we were born” (Hayles 3).</span></i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">I am always struck when
people lament or condemn the prospect of technological implants, the use of
enhancing drugs, or the swelling of urbanization while at the same time
praising artificial limbs or organs, medical marijuana, or the building of a
well in Africa. Hayles’s third
assumption allows us to see how part of what the posthuman view allows us to do
is to see how “the human” is never exactly what we think it is. The divide between the natural and the
artificial is more prevalent than ever, and one only needs to look as far as
advertising to find countless products purporting to be more “natural.” This divide, however, can be placed right
back into the system itself, per Hayles’s invocation of reflexivity: the divide
between natural and artificial takes place within the external
environment. Put more explicitly: the
division between the natural and the artificial <i>is itself artificial, and must be done away with</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> Life arose from natural inorganic matter, and human
beings evolved naturally. It makes
little sense to draw an arbitrary, artificial line in the sand that marks where
humanity suddenly started becoming artificial.
Everything we do and make – our earpiece phones, our ADHD medication,
our skyscrapers, as well as our prosthetic limbs, life-saving drugs, and water
distribution facilities – is just as natural as the first humans that transported
wood on a wheel, or struck fire from stone, or used language to
communicate. In this very important sense,
<i>we have always been posthuman</i>. The human is not something static, something
that stays the same; it evolves, it reacts, and it absorbs. John Gray has evocatively written that “considering
our bodies as natural and of our technologies as artificial gives too much
importance to the accident of our origins,” and that if “we are replaced by
machines, it will be in an evolutionary shift no different from that when
bacteria combined to create our earliest ancestors” (Gray 16). What we might think of as the posthuman
imaginary – cyborgs, cyberspace, and technological singularities – is little
more than the natural development of what we call “the human.” This is what I take Hayles to mean when she
claims that the bodily absorption or replacement of new prostheses, according
to the posthuman view, is part of a process that has been going on not simply
before we were born, but even before the advent of civilized humanity.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%; margin-left: .5in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">4.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">“Fourth,
and most important, by these and other means, the posthuman view configures
human being so that it can be seamlessly articulated with intelligent
machines. In the posthuman, there are no
essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and
computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot
teleology and human goals” (Hayles 3).</span></i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">In the work of Nick
Land – which must be some of the most intriguing of recent decades, something
between poetry and prose, fiction and philosophy, speculative exploration at
its best – we get a glimpse of what machinic posthumanity might look like:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1.0in; margin-right: 1.0in; margin-top: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">The story goes like this: Earth is
captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalization and
oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off. Logistically accelerating techno-economic
interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine
runaway. As markets learn to manufacture
intelligence, politics modernizes, upgrades paranoia, and tries to get a grip.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1.0in; margin-right: 1.0in; margin-top: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1.0in; margin-right: 1.0in; margin-top: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">The body count climbs through a series
of globe-wars. Emergent Planetary
Commercium trashes the Holy Roman Empire, the Napoleonic Continental System,
the Second and Third Reich, and the Soviet International, cranking-up world
disorder through compressing phases.
Deregulation and the state arms-race each other into cyberspace. (“Meltdown”
441)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1.0in; margin-right: 1.0in; margin-top: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Land’s apocalyptic writings
are at times enticing and attractive, and at times terrifying, but always
riveting. What readers find in his texts
are elements of a posthuman technocracy where the act of authorial creation
itself becomes absorbed into the system it describes, thus following the theme
of reflexivity. Land purports to compose
what he calls hyperstitions: “semiotic productions that make themselves real” (“Origins”
579). One of the important aspects of
hyperstitions is that their creators do not know they are hyperstitions at the
moment of their creation; they appear as merely fictions. Only in retrospect can they be revealed as
hyperstitions. It is important to note
that the term is coined in one of Land’s most obviously fictional texts; that
is, the term is coined as a fictional term.
Reflexivity works here in the most convoluted way; a fictional term,
coined in a fictional text, but describing fictions that become reality. In a purely representational way, the term –
and the text – merely describes a certain system. Only through a retrospective feedback loop
can the term and text appear as part of the system they purport to
describe. We have to view Land’s work as
fiction. No rational person would claim
that his texts accurately describe reality.
But we find within them the description of the system by which they
become real. So now we wait.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> In the aftermath, we will not be able to accurately draw
the line between fiction and hyperstition.
There is no telling when the fictional becomes real, or when the text is
absorbed into the system that it describes.
In much the same way, there can be no final division between the organic
and the cybernetic, or between the human and the artificial – a conflation that
appears as the subject matter of Land’s own speculative work. Humanity, which has striven for so long to
distance itself from its technologies, to keep them at arm’s length, to claim
control and dominance over them, reorients itself in the posthuman. It no longer sees its technologies and
informatics as something separate, but as something at once constituted and
constitutive: we, our environment and historical conditions, constitute the
technologies that we create, but these technologies in turn constitute what we
are as humans, and what it means to be human.
If we do control them, then they control us just as much.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> We can claim that there is something objective about the
way human beings are born into the world.
We do not emerge with prosthetic limbs, or cell phones, or computers, or
hammers, or even language. We absorb and
take up these things as we develop. This
we can be most certain of; but we can also be certain that this “state of
nature,” in a Hobbesian sense, which we so often privilege and take to be pure,
is not better or more valuable than any other later developed state. If our bodies become poisoned (and this word
should conjure an intense ambiguity for those familiar with Derrida’s fantastic
long essay, “Plato’s Pharmacy”), or less pure as they mature and develop, this
is no less natural than the entirely insufficient and helpless child that exits
the womb.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> We are slowly embracing the posthuman, even if while
doing so we continue to comfort ourselves with hymns to the ideology of the
eternal human soul. We are slowly embracing
the posthuman not because a majority of us are actively pursuing this line of
thought, but because the continual development of technology is forcing us to
do so <i>of its own accord</i>. Apocalyptic narratives that envision evil
robots or technology run amok are merely examples of the popular imagination
attempting to reinforce the bastions of the myth of Man (drenched in all its Western,
white, European male self-glory) against the inevitable reality that we are
just as contingent as the things we create, the things which create us. It may be that, right up until the end
(whatever this “end” may be), we continue to rebel against the tyranny of
technology, to scream against the onslaught of an evolutionary motion that does
not care about us, mistakenly believing that we had a destined right to soil,
planet, and universe.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> Or, it may be that we come to see ourselves not as the
creators of technology, but as its inheritors.
It may be that, through enough willing, reconsideration, and
repositioning, we can see ourselves as creature and creator, not as part of a
destiny that was designed, but as part of a process that is contingent. The posthuman is not a philosophy of the end
of humanity, or a politics that seeks an end of humanity; it is a way of
thinking that allows us to understand ourselves in new ways, that allows us to
coexist with the impure and the artificial, and that dethrones us from the
pinnacle of evolution not to replace us with something more valuable, but to
expose the reality that nothing is more or less valuable. Perhaps, once we come to see ourselves this
way, once we shed the rigid and ridiculous notion of the survival of that
reified thing we call “the human,” we may actually find that we can continue to
survive in new ways, in different ways, and, perhaps, even in more efficient
ways.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Works
Cited<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Gray, John. <i>Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other
Animals</i>. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
2003. Print.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Hayles, N. Katherine. <i>How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in
Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics</i>. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999. Print.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Land, Nick. “Meltdown.”
<i>Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings
1987-2007</i>. Eds. Robin MacKay and
Ray Brassier. New York: Sequence Press, 2011. 441-459. Print.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">-. “Origins of the
Cthulhu Club.” <i>Fanged Noumena: Collected
Writings 1987-2007</i>. Robin MacKay
and Ray Brassier. New York: Sequence Press, 2011. 573-581. Print.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Watts, Peter. <i>Blindsight</i>. New York: Tor Books, 2006.
Print.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Patrick Whitmarshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09136674843890947797noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4194280971933732517.post-12772412620892498942013-07-10T07:25:00.001-07:002013-07-10T08:59:11.216-07:00“That’ll do you for a name”: a Preliminary Thesis on Samuel Delany’s Dhalgren<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">The text of Samuel
Delany’s <i>Dhalgren</i> makes at least one
thing about itself hopelessly clear: it is inexhaustible. It is inexhaustible because it encompasses
its own inexhaustibility, mirrors its own limitlessness. It is a text within a text, and neither one
ever appears to begin or end. The jacket
and publication information that bracket the narrative are superfluous. Nowhere can the text be said to actually <i>start</i>.
As William Gibson writes in his introduction to the Vintage 2001
edition, the novel is a “prose-city, a labyrinth, a vast construct the reader
learns to enter by any one of a multiplicity of doors” (Gibson xi). This enigmatic, circular, reflexive nature
has led many readers to speculate on the secret of <i>Dhalgren</i>, the answers to its underlying mystery: what happened in
Bellona, who is the first-person narrator/third-person protagonist (are they
even the same person?), why is he in Bellona, and what is his damn name? The novel never says, and there are those who
debate whether it has to. Gibson writes:
“<i>Dhalgren</i> is not there to be finally
understood. I believe its ‘riddle’ was
never meant to be ‘solved’” (xi). Many
might agree, but I do not, although not in the sense that readers may
think. I do not disagree with Gibson
over whether we, as readers, are “meant” to solve the puzzle of <i>Dhalgren</i>. I disagree that there is a puzzle to be
solved at all.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> Assuming the presence of a puzzle implies some order to
the chaos. <i>Dhalgren</i>, much to the contrary, delights in chaos as its basic,
most fundamental element, but not an element of essentiality. <i>Dhalgren</i>
rejoices in illimitability. It
celebrates the utopian dream of desire, not the ideological dream of
values. <i>Dhalgren</i> cannot be solved because it is not a mystery, and its
author knows this. Delany knows there is
no answer. The answer does not exist,
and yet the bewildered reader will cower before his text in reverential awe, as
the nameless first-person narrator (who may or may not be the novel’s nameless
protagonist, referred to only as Kid, or Kidd) does before Bellona itself:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1.0in; margin-right: 1.0in; margin-top: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">I am limited, finite, and fixed. I am in terror of the infinity before me,
having come through the one behind bringing no knowledge I can take on. I commend myself up to what is greater than
I, and try to be good. That is wrestling
with what I have been given. Do I rage
at what I have not? (Is infinity some illusion generated by the way in which
time is perceived?) I try to end this
pride and rage and commend myself to what is there, instead of illusion. But the veil is the juncture of the perceived
and perception. And what in life can rip
that? Is the only prayer, then, to live
steadily and dully, doing and doubting what the mind demands? I am limited, finite, and fixed. I rage for reasons, cry for pity. Do with me what way you will. (Delany 583)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1.0in; margin-right: 1.0in; margin-top: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">This is Delany’s ironic
acknowledgement to the reader. This is
his testament to how he knows his readers will approach his novel. This is Delany laughing. His text will do with its readers what way it
will, but its way will not be Delany’s.
He leaves his text, abandons it upon putting down his pen for revisions
(which, as certain students of literature will know, are yet to be completed). It is no longer his. Delany is the deistic clockmaker who built
the machine, wound it, and sat back to watch while nursing a drink. Trying to wind <i>Dhalgren</i> back up from within is an exercise in futility, and trying
to discuss every aspect of the novel is impossible in the amount of space a
blog affords. I would prefer to discuss the
novel’s profound position in the history of American literature and Science
fiction, and what it possibly represents for American culture.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">I. “A city came to be…”</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> In his introduction, Gibson calls <i>Dhalgren</i> a “literary singularity” (xi), and he contextualizes this
singularity within an abstract scope of American history: “No one under
thirty-five today [the introduction is dated: August 23, 1995] can remember the
singularity that overtook America in the nineteen-sixties, and the generation
that experienced it most directly seems largely to have opted for amnesia and
denial” (xii). The singularity that
Gibson speaks of is the emergence of a city in America, but not a city that
could be spatially or geographically located (although temporally/historically,
somehow…). Gibson’s comment is worth
quoting in full because of its suggestive and obscure qualities:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1.0in; margin-right: 1.0in; margin-top: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">But something did happen: a city came to
be, in America. (And I imagine I use
America here as shorthand for something else; perhaps for the industrialized
nations of the American Century.) This
city had no specific locale, and its internal geography was mainly fluid. Its inhabitants nonetheless knew, at any
given instant, whether they were in the city or in America. The city was largely invisible to
America. If America was about “home” and
“work,” the city was about neither, and that made the city very difficult for
American to see. There may have been
those who wished to enter that city, having glimpsed it in the distance, but
who found themselves baffled, and turned back.
Many others, myself included, rounded a corner one day and found it
spread before them, a territory of inexpressible possibilities, a place remembered
from no dream at all. (xii)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">The city that Gibson
describes is not real in a geographic sense, but rather symbolic of a larger
cultural phenomenon. This phenomenon is
not readily accessible to representation, and remains semi-impervious even to
the perception of typical America, or Americans. In my reading, it is something
countercultural, but even this may be too structural. It is an elusive flow of energy, a release of
pressure that escapes measure.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> The historical moment of the 1960s will most immediately
be recognized through appeals to Vietnam, the Cold War, the hippie movement, free
love, Woodstock, LSD, and other various ‘60s tropes. However, Fredric Jameson identifies another
important development, along with the poststructuralist movement in French
theory: the “emergence, in the [artistic] work’s temporality, of an aesthetic
of <i>textuality</i> or what is often
described as schizophrenic time; the eclipse, finally, of all depth, especially
<i>historicity</i> itself” (Jameson 500). Jameson acknowledges here the theoretical
emphasis on surface, and its subsequent erasure of any previously considered
substantial content. That is, he claims
that the 1960s inaugurates the full-fledged theoretical moment in which culture
comes to be composed of simulacra masquerading as signs for something beyond
them; but here, even the term “masquerade” is problematic since it suggests
something behind the mask. In contrast,
Jameson declares, the 1960s revealed that the surface had subsumed its purported
content. Furthermore, history, as a (traditionally)
teleological study of progress and development, and as a declaration of origins
and purposes, is exposed as a narrative laid over an impossibly intricate network
of cultural interaction and upheaval.
The narrative no longer explains history in some scientific or objective
sense; it betrays itself as artificial.
This is the textual trick that <i>Dhalgren</i>
plays on its audience. It invites
speculation as to the true nature of its contents, the secret it conceals; but
it conceals nothing. Everything we need
to know is on the surface, presented in the infinite circulation of the
narrative.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> The city that comes to be – the city that Gibson claims
emerges in the 1960s, and that Delany will represent in his 1974 novel – is a
city so complex that it appears it must house some secret, some core that
readers yearn to find. The joke is on
us, as far as Delany is concerned, and this is what remains “invisible to
America”: that the textual knot is insoluble because it is not a knot. Delany’s city is a burst of unharnessed
Deleuzian energy that evades the territorializing of Western culture, a radical
representation of what lurks beyond the limits of Western democratic capitalism
(Deleuze and Guattari’s <i>Anti-Oedipus</i>
was published only three years or so before Delany’s novel):<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Capitalism therefore liberates the flows
of desire, but under the social conditions that define its limit and the
possibility of its own dissolution, so that it is constantly opposing with all
its strength the movement that drives it toward its limit. At capitalism’s limit the deterritorialized
socius gives way to the body without organs, and the decoded flows throw
themselves into desiring-production. (Deleuze and Guattari 139-140)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Despite D & G’s
difficult terminology, the basic import of their argument can be deduced:
beyond the limits of institutional capitalism, the flows of productive energy
are no longer coded and begin to feed into desire itself. We find something similar in <i>Dhalgren</i>. <i> </i>In Delany’s Bellona – a
place where the police are absent, and the closest thing to any semblance of
Law are roaming bands of thieves and thugs known as Scorpions – and beyond the
structures and strictures of America, capitalist labor is almost entirely
absent. The only instance of it appears
when the unnamed protagonist gets a temporary job moving furniture for the
Richards, a typical middle-class family desperately clinging to the remnants of
the American dream. In one scene, Mrs.
Richards describes the difficulty of creating a traditional American home:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1.0in; margin-right: 1.0in; margin-top: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">“That’s something that a woman does from
inside herself. You do it in the face of
all sorts of opposition […] You must make it your own world. And everyone must be able to feel it. I <i>want</i>
a home, here, that looks like my home, feels like my home, is a place where my
family can be safe, where my friends – psychologists, engineers, ordinary
people… poets – can feel comfortable.” (Delany 226)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">The most tragic
characters of the novel, the Richards embody the pressures of the American
lifestyle in a place that, while in the country of America, is not
American. Bellona is a fictional city,
and its relationship to the remainder of the country is ambiguous. It stands for something that America cannot
internalize or categorize, and those who survive in it practice behavior at
odds with the traditional patriarchal, heterosexual, hegemonic structure.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> In Bellona, sexual restraint is virtually nonexistent, a
space where characters can not only engage in homoerotic behavior, but can
openly discuss it. Many of the
characters sleep with multiple partners, and Kid even participates in ménage à
trois on several occasions. In Bellona,
the “tenebrous city, city without time, the generous, saprophytic city,” that
which America codes as unnatural, or abnormal, can be practiced without
reservation or fear (382). Rather, it is
the traditional that becomes fragile, as Mrs. Richards demonstrates through her
admission of fear: “‘Why do you think we moved into the Labry
[apartments]? Do you know how I thought
of <i>this</i> moving? As a space, a gap, a crack in which some
terrible thing might get in and destroy it, us, my home. You have to take it apart, then put it back
together. I really felt as if some dirt,
or filth, or horrible rot might get in while it was being reassembled and start
a terrible decay’” (227). Despite Mrs.
Richards’s acceptance of Kid, she fears much of what he stands for. Her hesitance to allow poets under her rubric
of “ordinary people” testifies to this.
Ultimately, the Richards appear as an anomaly in Bellona, and tragedy
befalls appropriately; not because the Richards are morally deserving of
punishment, but because Delany presents their fragile values as inviting tragedy. In this obscure place beyond traditional
societal borders, only tradition can be tragic. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> Bellona – the city that came to be, the autumnal city –
is a city of exiles. This basic paradox
informs the contradictory pressures that occupy the novel’s majestic
prose. A place of urban desolation, it
allows for unrestrained sexuality and violence; but Delany saturates everything
in an unnerving surrealism that suggests some underlying anticipation or
tension. Bellona, the city of exiles and
free love, is also the city of madmen and brutality. Delany does not pretend that his fictional
city is a utopian paradise of a libertarian variety. Rather, it is a difficult anarchism, an anarchism
still coated in the residue of Western values, and it is only through the
presence of these lingering values that discussions on race and sexuality are
able to take place. George Harrison,
accused of rape and blessed (or cursed) with the namesake of a second moon that
mysteriously appears in the sky, explains his controversial view of the
“interesting kind of rape,” in which, he insists, the women enjoy it: “‘It’s
the kind they always have in the movies.
It’s the kind your lawyer friend was trying to make this other thing
into. And when it gets to the law
courts, it’s a pretty <i>rare</i> kind. But it’s the one they all afraid of –
especially between little-bitty white girls and big, black niggers’” (210). This description sounds only too familiar and
revolting to readers today, but in <i>Dhalgren</i>
it dissipates with little objection, even from Lanya, the novel’s most
energetic female character and Kid’s occasional lover.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> Similar discussions occur regarding race and
homosexuality, such as the conversation between Tak and Fenster. When Tak claims to have a “black soul,”
Fenster objects: “‘You can’t have one,’ Fenster said. ‘I’m black.
You’re white. You can’t have a
black soul. I say so’” (294). When Tak says that Fenster “‘[comes] on
pretty white,’” Fenster retaliates: “‘Scares you I can imitate you that well’”
(294). Recalling Homi Bhabha’s notion of
colonial mimicry, Fenster calls the essences of black and white into question. The two characters then proceed to argue over
who holds a greater claim to alienation: Fenster because he is black, or Tak
because he is gay. An exercise in
futility, the entire argument concludes with Tak admitting that in his
“relentless battle for white supremacy,” he has again been bested (294-295). Again, the presence of American values –
lingering though they are like cobwebs in an abandoned cellar – affords the
possibility of political debate; but conclusions are uncertain, and they are
often dismissed with relative apathy among the characters.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> <i>Dhalgren</i> translates
a historical moment into a topographic abstraction; an interrelation of city
and cosmos that is separated from the real America by a kind of prism, or lens
(perhaps a further clue to the title of <i>Dhalgren</i>’s
first section, ‘Prism, Mirror, Lens’), refracting sunlight into apocalyptic
swaths of nuclear explosions and multiplying the number of moons in the
sky. Yet all its invocations of typical
Science fiction tropes are not what make <i>Dhalgren</i>
a work of Science fiction. Its
science-fictionality, rather, is achieved by what Gibson calls its “territory
of inexpressible possibilities,” which I liken to the world of “infinite
possibilities” described by the unnamed narrator of Ralph Ellison’s American
classic, <i>Invisible Man</i>. In many ways, <i>Dhalgren</i> is a successor to Ellison’s canonic text, conceptually and
thematically (both novels explore issues of race and American culture, and both
authors conceive of their narratives as somewhat circular). The utopianism of <i>Dhalgren</i>, like the utopianism of <i>Invisible Man</i>, does not manifest as the representation of an ideal
society. Bellona cannot be described as
an ideal state, a place where human beings might willingly go. It is, as I have already said, a city of
exiles; it is a place where people are <i>forced</i>
to go. Although this might contradict
the rather dismissive attitude with which some characters decide to visit the
city, I claim that Bellona functions as a structural necessity. It is the invisible city described by Gibson,
the topographic symbol of a historical mentality – the revolutionary capacity
produced by the political unconscious.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">II. “Science fiction. Only real…”</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> In a scene from the section titled ‘In Time of Plague,’
Kid and Tak discuss possible explanations for why Bellona has come to be as it
is. Why the desolation, the abandonment,
the isolation? After suggestion that it
might be some kind of government experiment or ecological catastrophe, Tak
offers a fresh take: “‘Actually […] I suspect the whole thing is science
fiction’” (372). Kid immediately jumps
to the conclusion that Tak means it has something to do with time travel and
alternate realities, but Tak denies this: “‘No, just… well, science
fiction. Only real. It follows all the conventions’” (372). In the dialogue that follows, Tak
distinguishes Kid’s notion of Science fiction from “‘the new, good stuff’”; new
Science fiction (good Science fiction) follows three specific conventions that
do not necessitate laser guns and spaceships:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1.0in; margin-right: 1.0in; margin-top: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">“First: A single man can change the
course of a whole world: Look at Calkins, look at George – look at you! Second: The only measure of intelligence or
genius is its linear and practical application: In a landscape like this, what
other kind do we even allow to visit?
Three: The Universe is an essentially hospitable place, full of
earth-type planets where you can crash-land your spaceship and survive long
enough to have an adventure. Here in
Bellona […] you can have anything you want, as long as you can carry it by
yourself, or get your friends to.” (372)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Even in this relatively
simple language, the meaning of each of these conventions proves elusive; but
Tak outlines something important for understanding <i>Dhalgren</i>’s relationship to Science fiction literature. The novel follows only one character – Kid –
who has a profound impact on Bellona after his arrival. Although the novel is certainly non-linear,
the reader can only approach its subject matter in a linear fashion. The application of knowledge proceeds in a
linear manner in an attempt to make sense of the shifting realities and
topographies of the city. Finally, when
all is said and done, Bellona appears to be a very hospitable place. Most of the characters welcome Kid, some even
accepting him as their leader. All these
conventions present themselves in <i>Dhalgren</i>,
but Delany transplants them into a scenario that exposes the critical core of
good Science fiction: an abstraction that communicates something very real, a
blight in the mind of middle America, an apocalyptic wasteland that reveals the
underbelly of cultural repression.
Bellona is not real in any topographical sense, but it is real in a
historical sense, and this is the revolutionary power of the novel that Gibson
identifies in his introduction.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> Bellona, the unreal city, possesses the utopian potential
that Fredric Jameson theorizes in <i>Archaeologies
of the Future: the Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions</i>. In this monumental text, Jameson deploys the
notion of utopia not as a material unit of societal production, but as an
exception to the rule: “The ‘moment of truth’ is thus not a substantive one,
not some conceptual nugget we can extract and store away, with a view towards
using it as a building block of some future system. Rather its function lies not in itself, but
in its capability radically to negate its alternative” (Jameson 175). Bellona cannot function as a contender for a
possible utopia. It presents itself as a
space where utopian attitudes and practices can take place without punishment
or condemnation. Its continually
shifting topography reflects its ability to relentlessly negate any and every
alternative that presents itself. Race,
gender, sex… these things all still exist; but their discussion and exploration
is abstracted from the cultural fear that surrounds them and drowns them in
real America. Bellona is not only a
hospitable place for adventure, but also for political discussion.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> If Bellona is not a physically attractive place, even to
the most liberal-minded reader, that is because it does not attempt to realize
a utopian society. It is purely and
completely an abstract rendering of the utopian attitude, for those willing to
indulge it (the Richards, especially Mr. and Mrs. Richards, are most clearly
the characters who refuse to indulge it).
The prospect of actually living in Bellona would no doubt frighten most
readers, but this is Delany’s challenge.
If we wish to truly pursue utopian ideals, then we must brave the consistently
changing landscape of the utopian attitude, which is always making room for new
perspectives and alternatives.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> No law sanctions the violence that ensues from the
vicissitudes of utopianism, but this does not mean that Bellona has no rules. Kid learns this early in the novel, after
attempting to scale the wall of the estate wherein lives the mysterious Roger
Calkins. After being beaten up by
Scorpions for no apparent reason, Kid admits to his friends that he was trying
to look over the wall of Calkins’s place.
This evokes an explanation from Tak: “‘It’s a strange place, maybe
stranger than any you’ve ever been. But
it still has its rules. You just have to
find them out’” (87). Tak’s statement
suggests that the rules to Bellonian society cannot be explained or codified;
they must be discovered on a case-by-case basis. Occasionally, certain unspoken rules must be
reinforced through violence. This kind
of post-apocalyptic, <i>Mad Max</i>-esque
scenario appears unnerving and unattractive at first, but an appealing
innocence underlies the novel’s violence, even in its most tragic instances. Following Tak’s third convention, even
Bellona’s most violent moments are succeeded by a sense of hospitality.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> Reverend Amy Taylor, a minor character, gives voice to
Bellona’s further hospitality, proclaiming in her sermon, delivered in the
section titled ‘Creatures of Light and Darkness,’ that logicians love Bellona
(472). Reverend Amy’s sermon occurs
intermittently over a space of about ten pages, but her subject matter
continually returns to a kind of metaphysics of Bellona, recalling Tak’s second
convention about linear reason and logic.
In the same section as cited above, Reverend Amy explains: “‘Here you
can cleave space with a distinction, mark, or token, and not have it bleed all
over you. What we need is not a calculus
of form but an analytics of attention, which renders form on the indifferent
and undifferentiated pleroma’” (472).
Reverend Amy’s speech is largely indecipherable, being composed of an
odd but poetic mixture of theological mysticism, philosophy, and physics:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1.0in; margin-right: 1.0in; margin-top: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">“Is God a sow who devours Her young and
gets heartburn? Is God the garter-snake
Ouroborus, gagging on the tip of His own tail?
Or is God just a category-concept mistake, like Ryle’s <i>mind</i>, a process the materia of the
universe performs, indulges, or inflicts on itself, through necessity of
chance, for arcane reasons you and I will never discover? Being is a function of time, ‘ey Martin? Well, now, where does that get us? Now seems pretty specious to me… for it’s
just a hole, a little hole on whose rim we’ve been allowed, for an eye’s blink,
to perch, watching that flow, terrible for all of us, tragic for some of us, in
which the future hisses through to heap the potter’s field of the past.” (470)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1.0in; margin-right: 1.0in; margin-top: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Reverend Amy prostrates
herself before the yawning chasm of Bellona, similar to those readers who balk
before the monstrosity of the novel itself.
Instead, she turns her listeners’ attention toward their impending doom:
“‘How long did the light last? Oh, my
poor, sick, doomed, and soon to be obliterated children, ask instead how long
is the darkness that follows it’” (470).
Her sermon exhibits a certain hopelessness in applying logic to the phenomenology
of Bellona, but she finally persists in what might be a certain faith in logic:
“‘Pray that this city is the one, pure, logical space from which, without being
a poet or a god, we can all actually leave if –’” (481). The line ends abruptly, but the impact
remains. All one can do, Reverend Amy
suggests, is pursue existence in Bellona and pray that logic somehow conforms
to reality, just as the narrator (see citation from p. 583 above) claims that
his only prayer is to go on “doing and doubting what the mind demands.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> Reverend Amy’s sermon, however, plays out largely in the
background, and assumes no identifiably influential role in the action of the
narrative. Kid continues on his obscure
mission, oblivious to the impending doom that the Reverend warns about. Upon finishing the novel, one might conclude
that the Reverend’s fears were in vain; but this only holds if one ignores the
possibility that Kid is the impending doom, the apocalypse, the revelation. And he is only ever impending because he
never truly begins or ends, if one buys the novel’s circularity; he has “come
to to wound the autumnal city” (801-1).
But his coming is never complete; it is always becoming. Kid may change the course of an entire world,
but he can only do so by becoming caught in a process where he is eternally
evanescing. The repetition of “to”
between the novel’s first and last pages is worthy of consideration. At first it seems to be nothing more than a
repetition whose intended meaning is simply: “I have come to wound the autumnal
city.” But this ignores the possible
alternative meaning if each “to” is given its own syntactical weight: “I have
come to to wound the autumnal city.”
That is, he has come into being, into creation, <i>in order to wound the autumnal city</i>. His becoming is one of eternal trauma, <i>eternal return</i>, forever circling the
center that would perhaps grant him identity and meaning. The Science fiction hero, the man who changes
the world, thus emerges in <i>Dhalgren</i>
as a vacant subject, a subject whose most important feature – the identity, the
I, the <i>name</i> – is subtracted from him. His name is never hinted at, but I would
venture one definitive claim: his name is not Dhalgren.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">III. “Grendalgrendalgrendal…”</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> So who the hell is William Dhalgren? The name occasionally appears on a list of
names in the notebook that Kid acquires.
We first see this list when Lanya asks if any of the names belong to
Kid; in the right column, four names from the bottom, appears “William
Dhalgren” (63). The name never sticks
with Kid. The name might belong to the
interviewer who appears in the novel’s sixth section, titled ‘Palimpsest’; but
readers are only told his first name, which is William. His last is never verified. Dhalgren’s most important appearance
certainly comes in the novel’s final section, when Kid hears a monotonous sound
while he participates in a sexual encounter with several other characters:
“‘Grendal, Grendal, Grendal…’” (678).
Kid later realizes he was attributing inception to the wrong syllable,
and that the speaker was actually saying, “Dhalgren” (679). The misinterpretation also calls to mind the
name of the monster from the Old English epic, <i>Beowulf</i>; but application of the mythic cycle to Delany’s novel
seems fruitless. Dhalgren is assigned to
no one, a floating signifier without any content or actor. What function does the name play? Is it a name at all?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> Following the concept of <i>Dhalgren</i> itself, we must end where we began. “Dhalgren” means nothing. Even if the text contains a code that unlocks
the secret of Dhalgren and the unnamed protagonist, this is secondary. The narrator’s realization that he misheard
Dhalgren as Grendal reveals no hidden essence; all it reveals is that
misinterpretation is the only certainty.
Grendal, Dhalgren, Kid, Kidd, William… begin where you choose. <i>Dhalgren</i>
does not mind, because it does not contain the key to the code. This is its true literary and revolutionary
potential. It invites its readers to
experience the sheer Science fiction of chaos, and to encounter there limitless
utopian possibilities. <i>Dhalgren</i> cannot give any answers because
answers would only obscure the radical nature of the “ganglial city” (219). Bellona is not for 20<sup>th</sup>-century
scholars of American history, or the politicians of liberal democracy, or the
economists of global capitalism. Bellona
is the shadowy space that these institutions create. It is the dark aperture that even the most
radical of us have difficulty perceiving.
It is that which cannot be coded into the structures of society, yet which
makes those structures possible, and appears among them as an absence, an
omission – something exiled. In the
nation of television and Hollywood, Bellona – the powerless city – appears only
as a blank space: “Neither television cameras nor on-the-spot broadcasts
function: that such a catastrophe as this should be opaque, and therefore dull,
to the electric nation” (14). It is the
unconscious city, the “vague, vague city,” the city “‘struck out of time,’”
that accompanies the cultural consciousness (382, 469). The repressed and invisible city. The city that America does not want to see.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Works
Cited<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Delany, Samuel. <i>Dhalgren</i>. New York: Vintage, 2001.
Print.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Deleuze, Gilles and
Felix Guattari. <i>Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism
and Schizophrenia</i>. Trans. Robert Hurley,
Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. New York: Penguin, 2009. Print.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Gibson, William. “The
Recombinant City: a Foreword.” <i>Dhalgren</i>.
New York: Vintage, 2001. xi-xiii.
Print.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Jameson, Fredric. <i>Archaeologies of the Future: the Desire
Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions</i>.
London: Verso, 2007. Print.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">–. “Periodizing the
60s.” <i>The Ideologies of Theory</i>.
London: Verso, 2008. 483-515. Print.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Patrick Whitmarshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09136674843890947797noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4194280971933732517.post-48991757984254411382013-05-17T13:05:00.000-07:002013-05-17T13:05:44.639-07:00The Ghost in the Machine: Speculations on Consciousness (a Sequel)<br />
<div align="center" class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">I.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">“<i>You’re</i> not in charge. If free will even exists, it doesn’t share
living space with the likes of you.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">~Peter
Watts, <i>Blindsight<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> This paper carries the nominal qualification of a
“sequel.” A sequel presupposes a
prequel, a predecessor; but I admit that my previous post may not initially
appear to be a logical antecedent. This
post is a sequel because it derives from thoughts that inspired my previous
post, although it does not pursue the topic of techno-capital. Rather, it shifts its attention from the
macro to the micro, and I consider this move paramount and retroactive. That is, I believe that the argument laid out
here is necessary in order to arrive at the argument laid out in “Speculations
on Techno-Capital.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> The conclusion of my first year in graduate study has
afforded me plenty of time to read and think about texts that I find personally
interesting and valuable. While Samuel
Delany’s <i>Dhalgren</i> is currently
occupying the portion of my desk reserved for fiction (I will hopefully make a
post on this novel before summer’s end), the portion reserved for nonfiction
supports the weighty texts of Deleuze and Guattari, Fredric Jameson, and Nick
Land (Žižek’s <i>Less Than Nothing</i> will
prove an extended endeavor, I imagine).
In addition to my reading, my spare time has also allowed me to reflect
more on my blog posts and the arguments I lay out in them. In today’s piece, I wish to explore what I
consider to be the construction of the human self, and to attempt a
redefinition at what we tend to think of as the self. This redefinition is by no means unique, but
is actually the one that, I believe, is currently supported by a growing number
of scientific and philosophical resources.
I hope to suggest how this redefinition of the self holds serious
consequences for how we perceive our cultural institutions and rituals.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> Contemporary philosophy and critical theory has long
pursued the dismantling of the individual, but only recently has the domain of
science taken up this pursuit as well.
This is not to say that the philosophers were right and the scientists
were wrong. Science is the domain of
epistemology – structures and hierarchies of knowledge, the fitting of natural
phenomena into categories and defining them by laws. Philosophy is the domain of ontology – the
pursuit of what makes something what it is, the pursuit of essences. Only with the height of modernity, and
primarily the twentieth century, have essences seen their demise, and this
destruction has not arrived without paradox.
Everywhere we look we perceive essences where they do not exist, which
first calls up the great correlationist question.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Pat/Desktop/Patricks%20Stuff/DOCS/Blog%20Post%2012.docx#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> We impose structures and representations
where they do not belong, and we do so for our convenience. We have yet to fully grasp the implications
of the fact that the world was not made for us.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> If there is one place where the lingering specter of
essence persists most frustratingly, it is in the very seat of the Cartesian cogito:
human consciousness, the subject, the “I”, that which makes an individual human
being what it is. Despite
deconstruction’s admirable attempt throughout the 1960s and 70s, and
neuroscience’s far more convincing experiments in more recent years, the
specter of human consciousness refuses to let go, and with good reason: it has
been the sanctioning authority of everything from our current cultural
institutions to our very history. Its
dissipation would be the deposal of human rights from the pedestal of humanism,
the breaking of covenants sacred and secular.
The abandonment of consciousness would appear to be the abandonment of
what it means to be human. For this
reason, consciousness holds fast.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> In his novel <i>Blindsight</i>,
about which I have written before, Peters Watts contests that consciousness
constitutes the entirety of what we think of as the self. At the conclusion of this existentially
terrifying novel, human agency is drained of its power: “Make a conscious
choice. <i>Decide</i> to move your index finger.
Too late! The electricity’s
already halfway down your arm. Your body
began to act a full half-second before your conscious self ‘chose’ to, for the
self chose nothing; something <i>else</i>
set your body in motion, sent an executive summary – almost an afterthought –
to the homunculus behind your eyes” (Watts 301). The homunculus that Watts refers to is the
specter of the Cartesian cogito, the seat of consciousness we might say. Watts draws on the most recent discoveries
and developments in cognitive philosophy and neuroscience in order to make this
statement; studies that have revealed that neural action is already occurring, <i>that your brain is already moving</i>,
before you decide to consciously act (see Watts’s notes on page 371). Further recent developments have argued for
the reconceptualization of cultural institutions such as health care to be
oriented not toward the individual, but toward the community – but not the
community you might think. In his
article for <i>The New York Times</i>, “<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/19/magazine/say-hello-to-the-100-trillion-bacteria-that-make-up-your-microbiome.html" target="_blank">Some of My Best Friends are Germs</a>,” Michael Pollan argues that the health of the body
cannot be reduced to the health of an individual: “Human health should now ‘be
thought of as a collective property of the human-associated microbiota,’ as one
group of researchers recently concluded in a landmark review article on
microbial ecology — that is, as a function of the community, not the
individual” (Pollan). Current studies
and investigations are emphasizing, more and more prominently, the nonexistence
of the individual and the coexistence of the collective.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> This language will sound disturbingly political to some,
and it cannot help but carry such connotations.
Traditional arguments for Marxist political programs did not possess the
scientific support emerging in the field today.
Traditional Marxism, as outlined by numerous innovative thinkers and
practitioners, calls for a cognitive revolution, something bordering on new age
mysticism despite Marxism’s purportedly firm roots in historical
materialism. The utopian project of
structuring and implementing a communist society remains steadfastly beholden
to metaphysics because it must adhere to the enforcement of a transcendental
law, despite the common Marxist admonition of state control and power. Any enforcement of transcendental law will
automatically entail exclusion; this has been the historical case for
communism, from Stalinism onward. It has
seemed we needed a cognitive revolution to pull the communist train into the
station.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> But communist thought and theory persisted, and it has
proved admirably adaptive. Perhaps most
importantly is communism’s (or at least communitarian thought’s) embrace of
contemporary scientific trends.
Horkheimer and Adorno put Enlightenment science to the test in their
watershed text, <i>The Dialectic of
Enlightenment</i>; but today, science is shifting ever more rapidly away from
the ideological and toward the explosive, the revolutionary. That is, science is more radically pushing up
against its own boundaries, suggesting possibilities and realities that have
been thought unimaginable for centuries.
Now, with the growing inertia of techno-capital and the expanding means
of science, we are being shown a picture of “the human” that shatters our
previous expectations.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> Not only does consciousness not account for the majority
of bodily and mental functions that take place unconsciously in the body; it is
also <i>an illusion</i>. Returning to Watts’s novel, we find a
beautifully succinct and disturbing account of consciousness as an evolutionary
phenomenon:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1.0in; margin-right: 1.0in; margin-top: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Evolution has no foresight. Complex machinery develops its own agendas. Brains – cheat. Feedback loops evolve to promote stable
heartbeats and then stumble upon the temptation of rhythm and music. The rush evoked by fractal imagery, the
algorithms used for habitat selection, metastasize into art. Thrills that once had to be <i>earned</i> in increments of fitness can now
be had from pointless introspection.
Aesthetics rise unbidden from a trillion dopamine receptors, and the
system moves beyond modeling the organism.
It begins to model the very <i>process</i>
of modeling. It consumes evermore
computational resources, bogs itself down with endless recursion and irrelevant
simulations. Like the parasitic DNA that
accretes in every natural genome, it persists and proliferates and produces
nothing but itself. Metaprocesses bloom
like cancer, and awaken, and call themselves <i>I</i>. (303)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1.0in; margin-right: 1.0in; margin-top: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">A cautious reader will
protest: “There is nothing illusory about this awakening. It may not be as mystical as philosophical
thought in previous centuries, but it is still <i>real</i>.” I give a gracious nod
to that reader, since I too have made the same observation. However, I wish to explore its ramifications
before simply conceding the seemingly obvious point that simply because we
experience consciousness it must be real.
Immediately we must recognize the relativism inherent in such a
claim. By the same token, a shaman who
witnesses a vision of a fertility goddess is just as correct as the prophet
Daniel. I want to push this
understanding further. Just because we <i>experience</i> consciousness does not mean
it is <i>real</i>. This is too broad. I would claim that consciousness is <i>virtual</i>, which is still a subcategory of
the real.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> So we live in <i>The
Matrix</i>. No, that’s a bad joke; or, a
poor analogy. For the myth of
individualism and the power of the human still lurks at the heart of the <i>Matrix</i> franchise like a rotten (and
overwrought) core. <i>The Matrix</i> assumes that the human has been duped and that a false
veil has been pulled down over its eyes, concealing it from the truth. I contest, rather, that we have been duped by
no one (except perhaps ourselves); furthermore, the truth does not exist behind
some veil that must be pulled away. The
fantasy of a pasteboard mask that must be pierced paints us all as monomaniacal
Ahabs, obsessed with our own position and status in the world. The world, in this scenario, has been made <i>for us</i>, and we strive to understand
it. Consciousness becomes the vessel by
which we strive to understand the world; but my consciousness is not your
consciousness, is not a black slave’s consciousness, is not an ancient Greek’s
consciousness, is not an autistic person’s consciousness. Consciousness appears to us, falsely, as a
transcendental means by which we associate with the world, thus firmly
establishing it as something <i>actually/really
existing</i>. Such a position maintains
that, should all human beings suddenly vanish from existence, consciousness
itself would somehow persist as a reified, transcendent entity. Through this reasoning, all reality is
reduced to nothing more than the conscious perception of reality, leading certain
interpreters of Berkeley to conclude “esse est percipi.” In contrast to this line of reasoning, I
claim that consciousness is not transcendental, and this is the primary thrust
of my argument:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%; margin-left: 1.0in; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo2; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">consciousness is immanent;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%; margin-left: 1.0in; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo2; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">furthermore, consciousness is emergent;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%; margin-left: 1.0in; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo2; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">and finally, consciousness is
collective.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">II.</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">“‘So
<i>I</i> am the king! So the kingdom belongs to <i>me</i>!’
But this <i>me</i> is merely the
residual subject that sweeps the circle and concludes a self from its
oscillations on the circle.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">~Gilles
Deleuze and Felix Guattari, <i>Anti-Oedipus:
Capitalism and Schizophrenia</i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> Michel Foucault once remarked that the twentieth century
might one day be thought of as Deleuzian.
I don’t think he was too far off the mark; and if others disagree, I
feel that is only because Deleuze’s philosophy has not yet been properly
assimilated to the scientific theories it clearly complements. Deleuze and Guattari’s <i>Anti-Oedipus</i> takes Freudian-Oedipal psychoanalysis as its primary
target, and convincingly argues that Oedipal relations do not predate the
subject, lurking maliciously in the unconscious. Oedipus, Deleuze-Guattari claim, is a structural
apparatus forced upon the unconscious by psychoanalysis and (more broadly) by
capitalist society itself. Oedipus is a
representational, expressive model for something that is unrepresentable and
inexpressible. More specifically, D-G
attack what they perceive as a strict individualism (in terms of the <i>ego</i>) inherent in the Oedipal construct. The Oedipus complex perceives familial
dynamics throughout the stratum of social relations and figures, and ignores
the fluid motion of desiring-production.
In D-G’s impressive argument, the individual ego, structured within the
Oedipal triangle, is dismantled as a historical myth forced upon unconsciously
liberated organisms.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> For D-G, the ego, or self, emerges as an effect out of a
complex system of colliding drives and desires.
The real consists purely of this interactive surface, and surface is all
it is. On this surface are written the
traces of desiring-production, which, in and throughout its own material,
performs the activities we typically attribute to conscious egos: “Schizoanalysis
methodically dismantles everything in Kant’s thinking that serves to align
function with the transcendence of the autonomous subject, reconstructing
critique by replacing the syntheses of personal consciousness with the
syntheses of impersonal unconscious.
Thought is a function of the real, something that matter can do” (Land
322). Consciousness is nothing more than
an effect of complex interactions of matter; thus, <i>consciousness exists virtually within all matter</i>. Furthermore, it cannot exceed this virtuality,
as will be demonstrated below. Its
manifestation in human beings should not be interpreted as a unique
privilege. It should be recognized as
the emergent process of a potentiality testifying to its potentiality. The illusory component of consciousness is
not that it does not exist, but that it mistakes itself as actual.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Pat/Desktop/Patricks%20Stuff/DOCS/Blog%20Post%2012.docx#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> This is all well and good; but is consciousness not self-consciousness? That is, does consciousness not entail
consciousness of itself, not as a separate act, but as contained immanently
within its own ontology? In order to
make the distinction we wish to make above, then it seems that we must separate
consciousness from self-consciousness.
Consciousness only exists virtually, and its awareness of itself emerges
as a kind of separate effect whereby consciousness testifies to its own
existence. But consciousness’s existence
is its own testimony; this is simply the definition of consciousness. Where have we gone wrong? I want to suggest here what will likely be an
unanticipated turn to Ludwig Wittgenstein.
In his <i>Philosophical
Investigations</i>, Wittgenstein explores the strangeness of self-awareness:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1.0in; margin-right: 1.0in; margin-top: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">The feeling of an unbridgeable gulf
between consciousness and brain process: how come that this plays no role in
reflections of ordinary life? This idea
of a difference in kind is accompanied by slight giddiness – which occurs when
we are doing logical tricks. (The same giddiness attacks us when dealing with
certain theorems in set theory.) When
does this feeling occur in the present case?
It is when I, for example, turn my attention in a particular way on to
my own consciousness and, astonished, say to myself: ‘THIS is supposed to be
produced by a process in the brain!’ – as it were clutching my forehead. – But
what can it mean to speak of ‘turning my attention on to my own consciousness’?
(Wittgenstein 412)<a href="file:///C:/Users/Pat/Desktop/Patricks%20Stuff/DOCS/Blog%20Post%2012.docx#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1.0in; margin-right: 1.0in; margin-top: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">What is Wittgenstein
identifying here? He clearly identifies
consciousness as distinct from brain process.
Or does he? Wittgenstein’s text
is infamous for rigorously pursuing all claims into self-refutation; but here
we see something truly enlightening.
Consciousness, Wittgenstein means to say, only appears separate from
brain processes. He asks his readers
what it means to speak of turning our attentions to our consciousnesses because
he sees such an act as redundant, to put it simply.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> Consciousness always has its attention turned toward
itself. Consciousness means
self-consciousness. In his forthcoming
review of Žižek’s <i>Less Than Nothing</i>,
Robert Pippin elucidates on this point, in reference to German Idealism: “For
in perceiving, I am also conscious of perceiving, conscious of myself
perceiving. In believing anything, I am
conscious of my believing, of myself committed to a belief. In acting, I would not be acting, were I not
conscious of myself acting” (Pippin 7-8).
Pippin makes explicit what is implicit in Wittgenstein’s text: that
consciousness <i>means</i>
self-consciousness, and cannot be separated from its own self-consciousness. Without self-consciousness, consciousness
would not be what it is. Awareness must
take its own act of being aware into account.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> How can virtual consciousness take itself into account? If consciousness exists as a potentiality, it
would seem that it could not take its awareness into account since that
awareness is not <i>actual</i>; but, as I
argued above, consciousness <i>is only ever
virtual</i>. In fact, consciousness is
always testifying to its own virtuality.
How can this be? What we have
encountered is a paradox comparable to that of time travel in my previous post;
time travel, we concluded, can never be virtual. Once time travel exists in one time, or in
one instance, it exists in all times and instances. Consciousness, we are saying, is exactly the
opposite. Consciousness is never actual;
but this does not appear to make much sense.
<i>I am experiencing
consciousness. Is my consciousness not actual?</i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> In his book <i>Consciousness
Explained</i>, Daniel Dennett provides an illuminating discussion of how
language occurs, which in turn sheds light on his view of consciousness. Language, Dennett argues, occurs through a
kind of feedback loop between interior “content-to-be-expressed” and the
eventual linguistic expression:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1.0in; margin-right: 1.0in; margin-top: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">The back-and-forth process that narrows
the distance is a feedback process of sorts, but it is just as possible for the
content-to-be-expressed to be adjusted in the direction of some candidate
expression, as for the candidate expression to be replaced or edited so better
to accommodate the content-to-be-expressed.
In this way, the most accessible or available words and phrases could
actually <i>change the content of the
experience</i>. (Dennett 247).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1.0in; margin-right: 1.0in; margin-top: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Most shocking about
this claim is that one’s interior sensations – typically considered the origin
of expressive communication – can be actively altered by the linguistic
process. The linguistic apparatus has a
measurable effect on the interior sensations we experience.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Pat/Desktop/Patricks%20Stuff/DOCS/Blog%20Post%2012.docx#_ftn4" name="_ftnref4" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">[4]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> The best word to describe this process might
be “oscillation”; and indeed, this is the word that Deleuze and Guattari choose
to deploy in <i>Anti-Oedipus</i> (although
they are not speaking directly of language).
In Dennett’s case, consciousness can be said to be an emergent effect
arising partially from this interplay between internal content and expression;
but consciousness cannot account for this entire process, since some of it (the
active alteration of interior experience, for instance) goes unnoticed by the
conscious subject. Meaning is not
derived from a central agent, but partially from unconscious drives and
functions within the organism. This leads
Dennett to dismiss the myth of the Central Meaner, Dennett’s version of the Cartesian
cogito, the central ego that purportedly pulls the strings and makes conscious
decisions. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> In <i>Anti-Oedipus</i>,
a similar oscillation takes place that actively destroys the myth of the
individual self, resulting in what D-G identify as the schizophrenic. Their proposed methodology becomes one of
analysis toward the multiplicity that emerges along the surface of
desiring-production:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1.0in; margin-right: 1.0in; margin-top: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Hence the goal of schizoanalysis: to
analyze the specific nature of the libidinal investments in the economic and
political spheres, and thereby to show how, in the subject who desires, desire
can be made to desire its own repression […] All this happens, not in ideology,
but well beneath it. An unconscious
investment of a fascist or reactionary type can exist alongside a conscious
revolutionary investment. (D-G 105)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1.0in; margin-right: 1.0in; margin-top: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Oedipal analysis, D-G
claim, places individualizing and categorizing frames across the fluid network
of surface relations. The unconscious –
the seat of liberation – suffers at the hands of traditional psychoanalysis,
which instead of assisting the unconscious strives to correct it, even repress
it. What occurs along the surface of
desiring-production is not the firm establishment – situation, positioning – of
an individual subject, but the oscillation of an organism experiencing a
multiplicity of drives. Desire is not
the choice of the subject, nor is it static.
Desire is constantly changing, constantly being changed. Just as in Dennett’s unique conceptualization
of language, D-G’s conceptualization of the self and desire disrupts the myth
of the coherent subject. What
consequences does all this have for consciousness?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> Consciousness attempts to place itself despite being
constantly displaced. Consciousness
attempts to <i>mean</i> despite its meaning
being constitutively altered.
Consciousness attempts to organize itself into a coherent subject
despite being continually disorganized by the flows of desire. All of this is intimately tied up with how
consciousness perceives itself (and, as previously noted, consciousness <i>is</i> self-consciousness). How might we relate consciousness as it
perceives itself to consciousness as it really is?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">III.</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">“And
where is the thing your self-representation is <i>about</i>? It is wherever you
are (Dennett, 1978b). And <i>what</i> is this thing? It’s nothing more than, and nothing less
than, your center of narrative gravity.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">~Daniel
Dennett, <i>Consciousness Explained</i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> It was stated earlier that consciousness as it is cannot
be separated from consciousness as it perceives itself; but now we are making a
claim that requires us to postpone the unity so as to better understand the
relation. What kind of quagmire have we
haphazardly stumbled into? Let us be
very clear here so as to avoid confusion:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%; margin-left: 1.0in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Consciousness is a myth; not
consciousness as it really is (a virtual property of matter itself), but
consciousness <i>as it is perceived by
itself</i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%; margin-left: 1.0in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Consciousness as it really is exists as
a virtual material fact<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%; margin-left: 1.0in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Consciousness as perceived by itself is
mythologized <i>because of the fact that
consciousness entails self-consciousness</i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%; margin-left: 1.0in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Consciousness is always virtual – and never
actual – because <i>it can only ever exist
in our perception of it</i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Consciousness, by its
very definition, can only exist in its own self-perception. Consciousness never exists unaware of itself;
if so, then it would not be consciousness.
If we dare to oppose <i>esse est
percipi</i>, then we must acknowledge that it works both ways: material things
subsist ontologically without our necessarily perceiving them; and just because
we <i>do</i> perceive something does not
mean that it exists.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Pat/Desktop/Patricks%20Stuff/DOCS/Blog%20Post%2012.docx#_ftn5" name="_ftnref5" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">[5]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> Or, put more correctly, it does not really
exist in the way that we perceive it. A
plant sits on my windowsill. It exists
absent of my perception of it as it actually is; but it also exists virtually
(this I can imagine) as a larger plant in the future, and thus a watered plant,
or as a dead plant, if I am a particularly poor gardener. Its larger appearance and its death are not
actual, but this does not mean they are not <i>real</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> Consciousness constructs a virtual self, which is its
imagistic manifestation. This self, and
this consciousness, are not actual.
Consciousness <i>emerges</i> from a
feedback process, or oscillation, of desires and sensations along the surface
of matter. Upon its emergence – a new
state of matter itself – it perceives itself as constitutive. It expresses itself as central. But it is never more than an emergent effect
of matter. Its paradox appears as an
inverse of the paradox of time travel.
Time travel, once coming into existence, must have always been in
existence – it is never virtual, but only actual. Consciousness, because part of its definition
is to perceive itself, can never possess actuality. Consciousness, as reliant upon its own
self-awareness in order to exist, is always virtual.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> What of the collectivity of consciousness? This must be granted as the final concession
to a self that is an illusion. I do not
intend this statement as a comparison to Jung’s mystical collective
unconscious. Consciousness, as an effect
of flows and desires across a surface of matter, is never isolated to a
solitary individual or organism.
Consciousness is a property of matter itself. <i>You</i>
do not have consciousness. <i>You</i> do not possess it. Consciousness <i>makes</i> you. If anything, <i>you</i> belong to <i>it</i>. Deleuze and Guattari
make an important observation in this respect when they comment on the false
conception of objects as property: “Partial objects [i.e. objects of desire]
now seem to be taken from people, rather than from the nonpersonal flows that
pass from one person to another. The reason
is that persons are derived from abstract quantities, instead of from
flows. Instead of a connective
appropriation, partial objects become the possessions of a person and, when
required, the property of another person” (D-G 71). The mythology of consciousness constructs
itself in a way that perceives its desires as personal and individual. For D-G, the Oedipal apparatus is yet another
consequence of the individualistic ideology; one that divides, situates, and
identifies. In contrast, D-G call upon
their readers to recognize the impersonality of desire and productive flows,
just as Dennett calls upon his readers to acknowledge the flow of meaning,
meaning as something borrowed and as something affected by the collective
influence of language.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> As stated earlier, the politics of this post will likely
overwhelm, discourage, and perhaps offend some readers. However, I am not arguing for a reinforcement
of these views, for the destruction of the individual, or for the political
implementation of measures to collectivize or programs to socialize. I am suggesting a direction that modern
science, technology, and philosophy is headed.
I do not believe this direction is wrong, flawed, or bound to result in destruction. I believe that as science and technology
further develop the decay of the individual, societies and cultures will change
of their own accord. I do not believe
these findings or discoveries are incorrect, and I believe they will contribute
(provided they are allowed to continue) to the burgeoning of a prosperous
future world.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><br /></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Works
Cited<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">DeLanda, Manuel. “Emergence,
Causality, Realism.” <i>The Speculative
Turn: Continental Materialism and
Realism</i>. Eds. Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, Graham Harman. Melbourne: re.press, 2011. 381-392. Print.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Deleuze, Gilles and
Felix Guattari. <i>Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism
and Schizophrenia</i>. Trans. Rober Hurley,
Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane. New York: Penguin Group, 2009. Print.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Dennett, Daniel. <i>Consciousness Explained</i>. New York: Back
Bay Books, 1991. Print.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Land, Nick. “Machinic
Desire.” <i>Fanged Noumena: Collected
Writings 1987-2007</i>. New York: Sequence
Press, 2011. 319-344. Print.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Pippin, Robert. “‘Back
to Hegel’?: On Slavoj Žižek’s <i>Less Than
Nothing</i>.” Forthcoming in <i>Meditations</i>. Available for download at
“Robert B. Pippin: Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished
Service Professor, University of Chicago.” http://home.uchicago.edu/~rbp1/publications.shtml.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Pollan, Michael. “Some
of My Best Friends are Germs.” <i>The New
York Times</i>. 15 May 2013. Web.
16 May 2013.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Watts, Peter. <i>Blindsight</i>. New York: Tom Doherty
Associates LLC., 2006. Print.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Wittgenstein, Ludwig. <i>Philosophical Investigations</i>. Trans.
G.E.M. Anscombe. Trans./Eds. P.M.S.
Hacker, and Joachim Schulte. West Sussex: Blackwell Publishing, 2009. Print.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div>
<!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><br clear="all" />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<!--[endif]-->
<div id="ftn1">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/Pat/Desktop/Patricks%20Stuff/DOCS/Blog%20Post%2012.docx#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
See Quentin Meillassoux, <i>After Finitude:
an Essay on the Necessity of Contingency</i>, Trans. Ray Brassier, London:
Continuum, 2011.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn2">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/Pat/Desktop/Patricks%20Stuff/DOCS/Blog%20Post%2012.docx#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> I
am drawing here on a distinction made by Deleuze in <i>Difference and Repetition</i>, and quoted by Manuel DeLanda in his
essay “Emergence, Causality, Realism”: “The virtual is not opposed to the real,
but to the actual. The virtual is fully
real in so far as it is virtual […] Indeed, the virtual must be defined as
strictly a part of the real object – as though the object had one part of
itself in the virtual into which it is plunged as though into an objective
dimension” (qtd. in DeLanda 390).<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn3">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/Pat/Desktop/Patricks%20Stuff/DOCS/Blog%20Post%2012.docx#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> This
reference to Wittgenstein’s texts includes the number of the statement, or
aphorism, rather than the page number.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn4">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/Pat/Desktop/Patricks%20Stuff/DOCS/Blog%20Post%2012.docx#_ftnref4" name="_ftn4" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[4]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
This claim might lead to larger suggestion – although I do not have the space
or the expertise to pursue it here – that bodily sensations do not translate
perfectly from speaking to non-speaking beings.
It would be incorrect to speak of fear in early, pre-linguistic hominids
as the same, or even similar, to fear in modern, speaking humans.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn5">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/Pat/Desktop/Patricks%20Stuff/DOCS/Blog%20Post%2012.docx#_ftnref5" name="_ftn5" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[5]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> We
must not interpret this claim as a misguided concession to <i>esse est percipi</i>. Many
things – chairs, light bulbs, trees, mountains, etc. – do not require their
perception by conscious organisms in order to exist. The claim I am making, rather, is that
consciousness emerges as a unique entity in that it does require its perception
by itself in order to exist. The reason
for this, again, is that consciousness <i>is</i>
self-consciousness.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
</div>
Patrick Whitmarshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09136674843890947797noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4194280971933732517.post-24533936584962294942013-05-11T09:26:00.000-07:002013-05-11T09:26:05.719-07:00Speculations on Techno-Capital<br />
<div align="center" class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">I. A Narrative Fiction: the
Techno-capitalist Paradox<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> If there is a positive aspect of capitalist production,
it is that one of its inevitable consequences is that of the complete
displacement of the human species by the more developed system of capitalism
itself. The fascination with human
origins, ends, and design all mistakenly presuppose a <i>centrality</i> of the human being in the world.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Pat/Desktop/Patricks%20Stuff/DOCS/Blog%20Post%2011.docx#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> The harsh reality lies in the fact that the
origins and ends of humanity are – must be – hopelessly inhuman. There are no answers in the Promethean quest
for our beginnings, or the scientific investigation of our <i>telos</i>, because both of these exceed the boundaries of the human.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Pat/Desktop/Patricks%20Stuff/DOCS/Blog%20Post%2011.docx#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> That which gave rise to humanity was not
human, and that which will end us will not be us. Such hypotheses that seek answers of essence
operate according to our desire to construct narratives of human creation and
purpose – to bookend our existence. This
metaphor casts the author of the text as the proverbial God, but we must
suspend this conclusion; not because disbelief in God is taken to be <i>a priori</i>, but because the conception of
human existence as a narrative must be dismissed, and the role of the author
along with it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> The invocation of capitalism at the beginning of this
paper should not be taken immediately as a condemnation or critique of the
political economy. That is not my
intention in this paper. As far as I am
concerned, sufficient economic criticism has already been performed by
unequaled masters from Marx onward. My
concern lies in the antinomies of capitalism – what it claims to be versus what
it really is. Much work has already been
done on this point, but I am interested primarily in capitalism’s aspirations
toward innovation and development. These
aspirations are undoubtedly accurate (i.e. capitalism thrives on innovation and
technological development), but they communicate something far more sinister –
in an entirely unintentional sense – than their humanistic propagators would
prefer to admit. They communicate the
fact that capitalism’s goals constitutively alter, if not obliterate, its
purportedly essential components. In the
words of Nick Land, it wants “to expand indefinitely whilst reproducing itself as
the same” (“Kant, Capital” 63).<a href="file:///C:/Users/Pat/Desktop/Patricks%20Stuff/DOCS/Blog%20Post%2011.docx#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> Capitalism expands its perimeter by
definition, but must incorporate that which is necessarily outside of it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> In order to accept this definition, we must understand
how terms such as “inside” and “outside” are working in this context. Their influence traces back to Kant’s
engagement with First Philosophy, in which the discussion of metaphysics is
necessarily circumscribed by the limits of metaphysical language. Capitalism, as a systematic apparatus created
according to specific human values, can only be expressed through recourse to
the language of those values. Within the
system of capitalism itself, there is no outside; or, everything that is
outside must be incorporated – appropriated – into the system. We can understand this as not only material
appropriation, but linguistic appropriation.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Pat/Desktop/Patricks%20Stuff/DOCS/Blog%20Post%2011.docx#_ftn4" name="_ftnref4" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">[4]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> Capitalism must <i>redefine</i> that which is not capitalism as capitalistic.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> None of this should be shocking or surprising to anyone
remotely familiar with most brands of Continental Philosophy and critical
theory. The antinomies of capitalism are
well-known; but there is a further consequence of the contradiction we have
just explicated – that between inside and outside – that sheds light on a more
complicated antinomy that has not received sufficient attention. This is the antinomy of capitalist existence
itself. Traditionally, it has been
argued that capitalism perpetuates itself indefinitely via complex interior
means of production, or reproductions of the conditions of production.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Pat/Desktop/Patricks%20Stuff/DOCS/Blog%20Post%2011.docx#_ftn5" name="_ftnref5" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">[5]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> However, if we accept our thesis outlined above,
then we must also admit the opposite of this claim: that capitalism <i>works against itself</i> by perpetually
expanding beyond its own conceptual limits.
Each time it absorbs an exterior form it not only redefines that form,
but is itself redefined. Capitalism’s
persistent expansion thus appears not only as an appropriative colonization of
ulterior cultural or economic forms; it also appears as a continual
self-revision of its own terms and conditions.
Following from this assertion, we must conclude that <i>capitalism is always-already not itself</i>. To put it another way: capitalism possesses
no essence. Those desirable ideals of
individualistic production and accumulation of capital, which are espoused as
eternal, appear now as shockingly fragile and historically quarantined
conceptions of our organic relationship to the external world; conceptions that
will witness their own dismissal in due time.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> Michael Foucault prophesies a similar abandonment of
conceptual knowledge in his canonical text, <i>The
Order of Things</i>. In that seminal
work, Foucault declares the imminent disappearance of humanity as a structure
of knowledge: “It is comforting, however, and a source of profound relief to
think that man is only a recent invention, a figure not yet two centuries old,
a new wrinkle in our knowledge, and that he will disappear again as soon as
that knowledge has discovered a new form” (Foucault xxiii). Foucault understands the human as a center of
knowledge – as a figure that grounds the structures and organizations of
knowledge. His antihumanistic position
communicates a comprehension of the human as delimiting, but simultaneously
disruptive. Humanity, for Foucault, is a
“rift,” a disturbance in reality that actively strives to legitimize its own
existence while threatening it at the same time (xxiii). The paradox emerges at the poles of
humanity’s pathological obsession with its own existence – its beginning and
its end. By trying to comprehend and
assimilate these poles, we push them further away. Our quest to guarantee our own essence
instead reveals the absence of any essence.
We seek a guarantee of meaning, or purpose, but all we find is the
continual evasion of meaning and purpose.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Pat/Desktop/Patricks%20Stuff/DOCS/Blog%20Post%2011.docx#_ftn6" name="_ftnref6" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">[6]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> This persistent absorption of external forms into the
capitalist system might be viewed in other ways. Rather than endless expansion into unknown
territory, we might say that capitalism rewrites its boundaries, or limits,
perpetually extending them to greater distances; but this ultimately is the
same as the scenario we previously outlined.
All it adds is that capitalism redefines itself <i>before</i> it is forced to expand, rather than after. The pushing of the envelope takes place
before the system reaches critical mass.
As the actual material conditions of capitalism expand, the horizon of
its capacities is projected farther into the technological imaginary. Or, additionally, we might posit that the
technological horizon remains forever fixed in a future that is unrealizable,
and all that capitalism can do is approach its limit asymptotically. Both of these alternative interpretations
carry serious consequences. The first
(that capitalism redefines its limits before reaching them) still suggests a
perpetual reconstitution of capitalism itself; and the second proffers
implicitly that there will always be an exterior that capitalism cannot
assimilate. However, and more
importantly, both interpretations posit capitalism’s horizon as real, but not
in an actual sense. The horizon is never
actually real because it is never materially encountered. In both cases, it is only real in a <i>virtual</i> sense. What this tells us is that these limits are
not natural or extra-sensorial, but narrativistic. Capitalism posits its own limits as a
perceived structural boundary based on its own internal conditions. Capitalism’s incessant growth, and its
persistence through inhospitable conditions, now appears to be:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-left: .5in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">a)<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">A
narrative fiction, and<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-left: .5in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">b)<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">An
active form of resistance against its external environment<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Whence this antagonism
that thrusts capitalism’s antithesis onto it?
Whence this antithesis itself? We
have suggested that capitalism pursues its own perpetuation while simultaneously
striving beyond its limitations. If we
grant this paradoxical appearance, then we must attempt an explanation as to
how this is possible: what ontological status does capitalism hold that grants
it the ability to pursue conflicting ends?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">II. Neither Part, nor Whole:
Capitalism and Emergence</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> First, we must distinguish between the epistemological
and the ontological: the former concerns what things <i>do</i> (or how we represent things to ourselves), while the latter
concerns what things <i>are</i>. Epistemology appeals to empirical forms of
knowledge: organicist hierarchies, observations of causal phenomena, overall
how things appear to our sensory apparatus.
Ontology, meanwhile, appeals to human rationality or logic: inherent
forms of thought that precede the external world. Following from the latter premise, we might
hope that systems such as capitalism correspond to such inherent forms of
thought; but the obverse to this is that human consciousness and perception
precedes nothing, but is in fact conditioned by the external world.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Pat/Desktop/Patricks%20Stuff/DOCS/Blog%20Post%2011.docx#_ftn7" name="_ftnref7" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">[7]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> Here we encounter what we must admit are two crucial aspects
of capitalism. Epistemologically, it is
nothing more than the way our senses organize and conceive of the external
world; but ontologically, its <i>being</i>
appears to be a manifestation somehow corresponding to our senses. Its epistemology derives from its
ontology. However, the simplicity of
this deduction is deceptive, for we must account for an important disruption in
capitalist development: that is, the overwhelming way in which <i>capitalism cannot be reduced to the
interactions and productions of individuals’ minds and bodies</i>. Capitalism, as a global system of enterprise,
production, consumption, and technological development, exceeds the capacities
of human individuals.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Pat/Desktop/Patricks%20Stuff/DOCS/Blog%20Post%2011.docx#_ftn8" name="_ftnref8" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">[8]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> It cannot be reduced to the intentions or
aims, individual or collective, of human beings. It exceeds our capacities to conceptualize it
totally, as Fredric Jameson points out: “our faulty representations of some
immense communicational and computer network are themselves but a distorted figuration
of something even deeper, namely, the whole world system of a present-day
multinational capitalism” (Jameson 37).
Capitalism, like other complex systems such as computer networks, is
better explained by an appeal to emergence theory.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Pat/Desktop/Patricks%20Stuff/DOCS/Blog%20Post%2011.docx#_ftn9" name="_ftnref9" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">[9]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> I have mentioned emergent phenomena before in my writings,
but I have not gone far enough in explaining it. One of the best explications of emergent
effects is found in Manuel DeLanda’s insightful essay, “Emergence, Causality,
and Realism,” where he distinguishes between resultant and emergent effects: “When
two separate causes simply add or mix themselves in their joint effect, so that
we can see their agency in action in that effect, the result is a mere
‘resultant’ but if there is novelty or hetereogeneity in the effect then we may
speak of an ‘emergent’” (DeLanda 382). A
resultant effect, as DeLanda describes it, consists of causal elements whose
existence may be easily observed at work in the interactive phenomenon; a good
example might be someone riding a bike, pushing on the pedals, causing the chain
to rotate, and thus making the wheels move.
The person steers using the handlebars, and leans slightly to one side
or another. All causal proponents can be
detected simply by observing the phenomenon from a distance, and the process of
riding the bike can be reduced to the discernible functions of its parts. There is no emergent effect.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> Something like an ant colony, however, is different. We can observe a colony at work in the wild,
or in a controlled environment, and what we see is an incredibly complex system
of labor, production, consumption, reproduction, construction, protection of
the queen, burial of the dead, wars, etc.
None of this would be observed among two interacting ants, and none of
these complex activities can be reduced to merely one ant, or (more
importantly) <i>even the collective</i>. The effect given off by the colony as a whole
surpasses what any individual inhabitant could ever express; this is because,
in the words of Ben Woodard, emergence “can be defined as the arising or
generation of complex entities or systems from less complex sub systems or less
complex entities. Or, put more directly,
emergence allows a thing to become more than the sum of its parts” (Woodard 2). As an emergent phenomenon, capitalism exceeds
human intentions and consciousness because it is no longer reducible to the
efforts and aims of individual humans, or even groups of humans. It emerges as something far more complex than
even the basic interactive forces of human beings can subscribe to.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> But does capitalism merely appear this way, or is it
indeed <i>actually</i> this way? The tension between epistemology and ontology
appears again here: does emergence explain what things are, or only the way in
which we perceive them? Again, Woodard
is helpful: “Does emergence merely describe shifting patterns of complexity
that only appear to us as new or does emergence make a difference in the world,
in an ontological or at least non-sensorial way” (4). Does the irreducibility describe something <i>in reality itself</i>; or does this
irreducibility merely translate into how we perceive complexity? If we return to DeLanda, we find that the two
interpretations are inseparable.
Distinguishing between two forms of reality – actuality and virtuality<a href="file:///C:/Users/Pat/Desktop/Patricks%20Stuff/DOCS/Blog%20Post%2011.docx#_ftn10" name="_ftnref10" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">[10]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> –
DeLanda claims that emergence theory’s epistemological consequences shed light
on emergence’s ontological status:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1.0in; margin-right: 1.0in; margin-top: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">On the one hand, emergent properties
give reality a means to enter into an open-ended becoming, with new wholes
coming into existence as tendencies and capacities proliferate. On the other hand, this objective divergence
explains the divergence of scientific fields, that is, it accounts for the fact
that rather than converging into a single field to which all the rest have been
reduced the number of new fields is constantly increasing. (DeLanda 392)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1.0in; margin-right: 1.0in; margin-top: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">DeLanda explains that
the increasing complexity observed by emergence theorists can be actively
explained by the phenomenon of emergence itself on an ontological level. Emergence thrives on virtuality, on the
interplay between actual interactive forces and the development of new forces
via an object’s, or system’s, external environment. A thing achieves the level of emergence when
its interior interactive components reach a state of potentiality due to their
added interaction with external environmental conditions. The thing that appears emergent appears so
only in the context of an environment with which it interacts. Put more simply, an emergent property cannot
be isolated from the context in which it appears. In effect, emergence only consists of
potentially interactive environmental conditions.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> Some cautious clarifications at this point: first, it
must be noted that capitalism, as an emergent phenomenon, appears to (at some
point in history) separate itself from its human creators, or
practitioners. This is a mistaken
conclusion. Capitalism does not have,
and has never had, creators or practitioners; it has, and has had, observers
and theorizers, some of whom have claimed capitalism as the boon of humanity,
its eternal enabler, and some of whom have claimed capitalism as the bane of
humanity, its historical oppressor. Both
of these theories conceptualize the human as something central and privileged,
and as distinct from capitalism itself.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Pat/Desktop/Patricks%20Stuff/DOCS/Blog%20Post%2011.docx#_ftn11" name="_ftnref11" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">[11]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> Human individuals, as components of an
environmental network, cannot be separated as such from their cultural
institutions and systems. In order for
those systems to achieve the level of emergent phenomena, humans must remain as
environmental factors that enable those emergent capacities.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> Here we have struck on yet another paradox; for it was my
initial claim that capitalism <i>is</i>
something distinct from humanity, that it <i>is</i>
something entirely other, or striving to become other. But this is the distinction we must draw:
that capitalism is distinct from humanity, and human beings, in the same way
that the effect of consciousness is distinct from brain processes, that complex
computer simulations are distinct from their coding, or that the whole
appearance of an ant colony is distinct from the activities of its individual
ants. Emergence occurs when interacting
subsystems or entities <i>give rise to an
entirely new state</i>, and that state can no longer be reduced to its
interactive components. This new state,
while it has risen from its components, is still distinct from them. Thus, capitalism is something distinct from
humanity, yet still only made emergent by humanity. It is neither a part, nor is it the whole.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">III. The Technological Behemoth: Without
Human Moorings<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> At this point, we cannot reclaim capitalism for the
masses, or for human ends. The only
process by which capitalism might be forcibly drawn down from its emergent
position is through the annihilation of humanity itself; and even this is not
certain, for capitalism may yet make for itself something far more efficient
than we could ever hope to be. There is
nothing necessary about humanity’s existence in order for capitalism to exist:
“a stable property [e.g. global capitalism] is typically indifferent to changes
in the details of the interactions that gave rise to it, the latter being
capable of changing within limits without affecting the emergent property
itself” (DeLanda 391). But is capitalism
a stable property? As discussed above,
it appears to strive for that which is outside of it while simultaneously
striving to remain the same. This would
seem to be an example of instability; or, perhaps more accurately, of <i>stasis</i>.
Despite its horrendous atrocities and widespread Third World poverty,
capitalism might be said to offset its ability to provide and accumulate
through its simultaneous ability to destroy, to expand into territory beyond
human control.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> The notion that capitalist expansion can be controlled is
a myth. John Gray puts it rather
succinctly: “There is a deeper reason why ‘humanity’ will never control
technology. Technology is not something
that humankind can control. It is an
event that has befallen the world” (Gray 14).
Gray’s daring, if brief, assertion does not afford much in the way of
emergence; but it does paint capitalist and technological development in a new
color, one that coincides with our own antihumanist vision. Nick Land goes even further than Gray:
“Machinic desire can seem a little inhuman, as it rips up political cultures,
deletes traditions, dissolves subjectivities, and hacks through security
apparatuses, tracking a soulless tropism to zero control. This is because what appears to humanity as
the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial
intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy’s
resources” (Land 338). Land is an
interesting figure; someone whose work lies at an obscure, often heavily
criticized, intersection of Continental Philosophy, critical theory, science fiction,
and anti-academicism. This comment in
particular invites scathing criticism, but it also opens our eyes to something
new, if we only take the time to consider it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> Time, in the Kantian sense, is nothing more than a
condition of the existence of human thought; it is a mode by which humanity can
<i>know</i>.
It is not necessary that time must exist – or must exist in the same way
– for all imaginable entities and systems.
Potentialities are not actualities, but they are still <i>real</i>.
Time travel, the great science fiction trope, presents itself as a
paradox of potentiality, for time travel cannot be potential; time travel is
only actual. It is either real, or it is
not. Once time travel comes into
existence in one time, it necessarily exists <i>in all times</i>. For Land,
capitalism occupies this weird temporality.
As the sublime onslaught of technological development, which includes
the rapid acceleration of temporal information and the simultaneous expansion
and contraction of physical space, capitalism appears to always be exceeding
our grasp, projecting itself into the future from which it looks back on us
like a predator.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Pat/Desktop/Patricks%20Stuff/DOCS/Blog%20Post%2011.docx#_ftn12" name="_ftnref12" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">[12]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> We must insist, at this point, the ultimate
dismissiveness of capitalism, its apathy toward humanity. From the perspective of the technological
behemoth, humanity is nothing more than a partner in symbiosis, a (temporarily)
mutually beneficial relationship that it will undoubtedly abandon when it
acquires, or becomes, something more effective.
Technology does not care about us.
Any fantasy in which it does is yet beholden to the mythologies of
anthropocentrism.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> In his recent haunted science fiction hayride, <i>Empty Space: a Haunting</i>, M. John
Harrison explores the fictional bounds of emergence and temporality.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Pat/Desktop/Patricks%20Stuff/DOCS/Blog%20Post%2011.docx#_ftn13" name="_ftnref13" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">[13]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> In a universe overridden by capitalist
expansion and technological developments beyond the capacity of many to even
imagine, Harrison depicts the strange occurrences – hovering murder victims,
smugglers importing mysterious cargo, and the enigmatic visions of an early
twenty-first century widow – that all seem to center on the image of the
Kefahuchi Tract, a singularity without an event horizon.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Pat/Desktop/Patricks%20Stuff/DOCS/Blog%20Post%2011.docx#_ftn14" name="_ftnref14" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">[14]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> In the novel, Harrison introduces the
character of Rig Gaines and the obscure object known as the Aleph (certainly a
nod to Borges). In one scene, a
technician by the name of Case explains some qualities of the Aleph to Gaines:
“‘Here’s the problem. This thing,
whatever it is, has all the hallmarks of an emergent property. It isn’t complete, but it’s already
self-determining. It’s already
loose. It’s in the labyrinth again,
operating the VF14/2b anomalies as a machine.
It’s off on some downward causation adventure, separating itself from
what you or I would think of as time’” (Harrison 165). Present in this concise, elaborate remark are
all the aspects that I have spent this paper explicating. Harrison’s complex narrative, irreducible
itself to any one perspective or linear plot, figures the atemporal, emergent,
complex entity of an obscure technological drive as its very core. This core is never apparent or discernible;
it is more like a Derridean absent center, constituting itself at the same time
that it vanishes. Temporal plots
separated by a half-century do not remain separate; they fold in on each other,
influencing, warping. The narrative
itself becomes a scene of struggle, a hopelessly human attempt to impose
structure on something that has none.
Or, rather, its structure does not correspond to human narrative forms.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> Harrison does not struggle with his prose. He writes with the ease of a master, and his
style comes off as something resembling a mixture of traditional postmodernism
(in the vein of DeLillo or Burroughs, as well as the more recent post-9/11
modernism of someone like Tom McCarthy) and New Wave science fiction. But he conceives of his project as an
illumination of the problems I have laid out in this short paper. Even in Harrison’s human vision of the world,
inhuman entities propagate: Irene the Mona, disembodied K-ship captains, and
the weird human-looking but not-quite-human Aleph itself. Harrison’s narrative approach stresses the
strangeness of its content by its very approach; the narrative is nonlinear, but
narrative sections cannot unfold in anything but a relatively traditional
way. The threat to Harrison’s
characters, however, cannot be found in narrative time. It returns from the future, bouncing through
time so that no narrative can track it.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Pat/Desktop/Patricks%20Stuff/DOCS/Blog%20Post%2011.docx#_ftn15" name="_ftnref15" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">[15]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> The effect presented in Harrison’s text
achieves something like an emergent quality since it cannot be reduced to any
one plot point or narrative element. The
answer to the riddle cannot be written in traditional human forms.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> This paper began with the statement that capitalism will
certainly result in the end of humankind, but this does not necessarily
translate into humanity’s material annihilation or biological death. It can mean this, but it can also mean the
end of the human in Foucault’s sense; the end of the human as a structure and
center of knowledge. If technological
capitalist development exceeds our grasp to the point that it becomes
self-determining (if it has not already), then humanity must accept the fact of
its postponement, if not abandonment. We
may conclude that such technological systems may not feel the need to eradicate
us; they may let us linger just as we abide ant colonies, allowing them to
persist whilst continuing our own lives.
We can certainly hope for this, but either way the fact remains that
capitalism, as a complex emergent phenomenon that exceeds human control, will
certainly abandon the human as its master, and possibly only retain the human
as a symbiotic component.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Pat/Desktop/Patricks%20Stuff/DOCS/Blog%20Post%2011.docx#_ftn16" name="_ftnref16" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">[16]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> Only then, we might claim, will class
conflict and egalitarian struggle see their end; not through their realization,
but through their obsolescence.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Works
Cited or Consulted<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Althusser, Louis. <i>Lenin and Philosophy: and Other Essays</i>. Trans.
Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly
Review Press, 2001. 85-126. Print.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Baudrillard, Jean. <i>The System of Objects</i>. Trans. James
Benedict. London: Verso, 2005. Print.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Benjamin, Walter. “Theses
on the Philosophy of History.” <i>Illuminations</i>.
Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry
Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 2007. 253-264. Print.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">DeLanda, Manuel. “Emergence,
Causality, Realism.” <i>The Speculative Turn:
Continental Materialism and Realism</i>.
Eds. Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, Graham Harman. Melbourne: re.press, 2011.381-392. Print.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Eagleton, Terry. <i>Ideology: an Introduction</i>. New Updated
Edition. London: Verso, 2007. Print.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Foucault, Michel. <i>The Order of Things: an Archaeology of the
Human Sciences</i>. New York: Vintage
Books, 1994. Print.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Gray, John. <i>Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other
Animals</i>. New York: Farrar, Straus, and
Giroux. 2003. Print.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Harrison, M. John. <i>Empty Space: a Haunting</i>. San Francisco:
Night Shade Books, 2013. Print.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Jameson, Fredric. <i>Postmodernism: or, the Cultural Logic of
Late Capitalism</i>. Durham: Duke UP, 1991.
Print.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Johnson, Steven. <i>Emergence: the Connected Lives of Ants,
Brains, Cities, and Software</i>. New York:
Scribner, 2001. Print.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Land, Nick. “Kant,
Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest.” <i>Fanged
Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007</i>.
Eds. Robin MacKay and Ray Brassier. Second Edition. New York: Sequence Press, 2012. 55-80. Print.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">–. “Machinic Desire.” <i>Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007</i>.
Eds. Robin MacKay and Ray Brassier.
Second Edition. New York: Sequence Press, 2012. 319-344. Print.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Watts, Peter. <i>Blindsight</i>. New York: Tom Doherty
Associates, LLC., 2006. Print.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Woodard, Ben. <i>Slime Dynamics: Generation, Mutation, and
the Creep of Life</i>. Alresford: Zer0 Books,
2012. Print.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div>
<!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><br clear="all" />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<!--[endif]-->
<div id="ftn1">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/Pat/Desktop/Patricks%20Stuff/DOCS/Blog%20Post%2011.docx#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
This false premise also sanctions the traditional division between humanity (or
civilization) and nature, which in turn encourages both a separateness from
nature (with nature understood as base instinct), and a unity with nature (with
nature understood as purity in contrast to human artificiality).<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn2">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/Pat/Desktop/Patricks%20Stuff/DOCS/Blog%20Post%2011.docx#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
See Jean Baudrillard, <i>The System of
Objects</i>, Trans. James Benedict, London: Verso, 2005: “For we want at one
and the same time to be entirely self-made and yet be descended from someone:
to succeed the Father yet simultaneously to proceed from the Father. Perhaps mankind will never manage to choose
between embarking on the Promethean project of reorganizing the world, thus
taking the place of the Father, and being directly descended from an original
being” (88).<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn3">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/Pat/Desktop/Patricks%20Stuff/DOCS/Blog%20Post%2011.docx#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
Land is specifically speaking about enlightenment in this passage, but his
essay clearly aligns enlightenment with both modernity and capitalism.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn4">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/Pat/Desktop/Patricks%20Stuff/DOCS/Blog%20Post%2011.docx#_ftnref4" name="_ftn4" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[4]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
This does not apply strictly to capitalism.
Any theoretical endeavor necessarily strives to totalize itself, thereby
absorbing any and all exterior theoretical systems, and contextualizing and
explaining them via its own hermeneutics.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn5">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/Pat/Desktop/Patricks%20Stuff/DOCS/Blog%20Post%2011.docx#_ftnref5" name="_ftn5" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[5]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
This argument is most ascribable to Louis Althusser in his highly influential
1970 treatise, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” <i>Lenin and Philosophy: and Other Essays</i>,
Trans. Ben Brewster, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001, 85-126.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn6">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/Pat/Desktop/Patricks%20Stuff/DOCS/Blog%20Post%2011.docx#_ftnref6" name="_ftn6" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[6]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
Even this vocabulary is telling.
“Evasion” suggests that these poles somehow intentionally elude us,
ducking deeper into the shadows when we shine our lights in their
direction. But, in truth, there are no poles;
the beginning and the end do not exist.
My suggestion that they evade us is no more than a projection of elusive
intentions onto immaterial concepts.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn7">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/Pat/Desktop/Patricks%20Stuff/DOCS/Blog%20Post%2011.docx#_ftnref7" name="_ftn7" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[7]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
This is Marx’s famous dictum: “The mode of production of material life
conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that
determines their being but, on the contrary, their social being that determines
their consciousness” (qtd. in Eagleton 80)<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn8">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/Pat/Desktop/Patricks%20Stuff/DOCS/Blog%20Post%2011.docx#_ftnref8" name="_ftn8" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[8]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
Merely look in such cases to the continual development of technologies: new
machines to perform previously human labor, complex cybernetics, informational
processes and telecommunications, and the rhythmic expansion and contraction of
urban development – cosmopolitanism, metropolitan growth, Third-World squalor,
and the sprawl of the suburban.
Furthermore, institutional racism, misogyny, homophobia, terrorism, and
imperialist war; all these effects, although frequently disassociated from
capitalist development by laissez-faire economists, are bound up in the history
and expansion of the market and the political economy. None of these effects, or institutions, can
be reduced to a single individual or collection of individuals.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn9">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/Pat/Desktop/Patricks%20Stuff/DOCS/Blog%20Post%2011.docx#_ftnref9" name="_ftn9" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[9]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
Emergence theory had been applied not only to technological systems such as
capitalism and computers, but also to the organization of ant colonies and even
human consciousness. See Steven Johnson,
<i>Emergence</i>, New York: Scribner, 2001.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn10">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/Pat/Desktop/Patricks%20Stuff/DOCS/Blog%20Post%2011.docx#_ftnref10" name="_ftn10" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[10]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
While an actual property describes something current and objectively
verifiable, a virtual property (or capacity) always exists as temporally
projected: “If we imagined instead of a manufactured object a sharp obsidian
stone existing before life, we could ascribe to it that same capacity to cut, a
capacity it occasionally exercised on softer rocks that fell on it. But when living creatures large enough to be
pierced by the stone appeared on this planet the stone suddenly acquired the
capacity to kill. This implies that
without changing any of its properties the possibility space associated with
the capacities of stone became larger” (DeLanda 391). It is imperative to note that virtuality, in
the context of emergence theory, no longer appears narrativistic, as it did in
the case of capitalism positing its own limits.
Virtuality, in emergence, is not a delimiting apparatus, but one that
extends into the indescribable.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn11">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/Pat/Desktop/Patricks%20Stuff/DOCS/Blog%20Post%2011.docx#_ftnref11" name="_ftn11" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[11]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> A
libertarian retort may be that humanity is not distinct from capitalism. Rather, the latter purely conforms to human
needs; or better yet, it purely <i>is</i>
human needs manifested in the economic form of the market. History, however, negates this retort. The historical form of capitalism has not
manifested as human needs, which would make it reducible to those needs, but as
something entirely unprecedented.
Furthermore, the inequality that plagues the human population of this
planet testifies to the fact that capitalism has not met human needs and is not
reducible to them. It emerges as something
far more complex and – from our perspective – sinister.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn12">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/Pat/Desktop/Patricks%20Stuff/DOCS/Blog%20Post%2011.docx#_ftnref12" name="_ftn12" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[12]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
See Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” <i>Illuminations</i>, Ed. Hannah Arendt, Trans.
Harry Zohn, New York: Schocken Books, 2007 edition, 253-264: “But a storm is
blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that
the angel can no longer close them. This
storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned,
while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress”
(258). Benjamin distinguishes the
theological from the technological; we distinguish the technological from the
anthropological. In both cases,
technology abandons those who sanction it.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn13">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/Pat/Desktop/Patricks%20Stuff/DOCS/Blog%20Post%2011.docx#_ftnref13" name="_ftn13" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[13]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
Referring to Harrison’s novel as a hayride might do it a disservice. It is much more fun than a hayride – perhaps
more like a haunted roller coaster.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn14">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/Pat/Desktop/Patricks%20Stuff/DOCS/Blog%20Post%2011.docx#_ftnref14" name="_ftn14" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[14]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
See M. John Harrison, <i>Empty Space: a
Haunting</i>, San Francisco: Night Shade Books, 2013. Harrison’s novel is the third – perhaps final
– installment in a series known collectively as the Kefahuchi Tract Series. The previous installments include <i>Light</i> (2002, on which I have written an
earlier response), and <i>Nova Swing</i>
(2006).<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn15">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/Pat/Desktop/Patricks%20Stuff/DOCS/Blog%20Post%2011.docx#_ftnref15" name="_ftn15" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[15]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
When the murderer (of one narrative strands) is revealed, the revelation comes
with an air of disbelief even to the murderer, who had no idea.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
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<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/Pat/Desktop/Patricks%20Stuff/DOCS/Blog%20Post%2011.docx#_ftnref16" name="_ftn16" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[16]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
See Peter Watts, <i>Blindsight</i>, New
York: Tom Doherty Associates, LLC, 2006: “Maybe the Singularity happened years
ago. We just don’t want to admit we were
left behind” (50).<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
</div>
Patrick Whitmarshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09136674843890947797noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4194280971933732517.post-77314290452889860872013-03-16T15:21:00.000-07:002013-03-19T05:37:57.612-07:00"Information as matter": the New Materialism and Tom McCarthy's 'Remainder'<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> I love it when my
theoretical interests intersect at a fictional crossroads. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Some
of my readers may recall the enigmatic quote from M. John Harrison’s <i>Light</i> that I used to open my piece on
that text: “‘Information might be a <i>substance</i>”
(Harrison 357). One of the continual
themes, or tropes, of science fiction that I enjoy pursuing is the suggestion
that information, the ideal, or the ideational, is nothing more than a complex
emergent consequence of highly developed matter. This raises a number of troubling questions:
what becomes of the interior “self”? what becomes of intention? what becomes of
emotions, sensations that we take to be “ours”? where do we draw the line
between the conscious and non-conscious, between the organic and the
inorganic? All these queries can be
traced back to this unconventional notion that somehow all things once believed
essential – our ideas, our emotions, our very <i>selves</i> – are illusions ultimately propagated by dead matter. After all, human beings themselves eventually
emerged out of previous organisms, which in turn emerged out of advanced
combinations of cells, which in turn surged violently to life out of entirely
inanimate and inorganic matter.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> I recently finished another fictional text, not one that
has been viewed through an SF lens, but one that deserves such attention: Tom
McCarthy’s <i>Remainder</i>. As I excitedly read through the entire novel,
I was aware of something akin to an SF tone, or at the very least an unsettling
contemporary Gothicism. The story
depicts an unnamed narrator who, having suffered a mysterious accident,
receives a generous settlement that allows him to pursue his pathological
fantasy of reconstructing various sites from his memory; as the story develops,
these reconstructions begin to appropriate events from the news and gradually
take on a less “simulated” character.
The strange narrative, its abstract quality and vague descriptive tone
(which gets specific about specifics – the small details – but leaves larger
questions unanswered), its blatantly unreliable narrator who admittedly
misleads his audience on occasion – none of these elements point directly to
the mode of “science fiction.” There are
no obvious identifiable SF elements in the novel. Rather, the tone that intrigues me and leads
me to associate <i>Remainder</i> with
contemporary SF is its sense of <i>unrealism</i>,
or <i>unreality</i>. As readers follow the anonymous narrator,
they question how he can continue to direct these reconstructions. His endless supply of funds is apparently
supported by an investment in the stock market; but this does not solve how he
is actually able to appropriate the massive locations he requires and reenact
the increasingly controversial events he finds himself obsessed with. The novel’s unrealism persists throughout,
ultimately never offering much in the way of explanation.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">What
the novel does offer, however, near its conclusion, is a brief line that
recalled the words of M. John Harrison to my mind: “We had to treat information
<i>as</i> matter: stop it spilling, seeping,
trickling, dribbling, whatever: getting in the wrong place and becoming mess”
(265 McCarthy). One need not stretch
one’s mind to recall the “spilling” of matter in Harrison’s <i>Light</i>, when Kearney returns to the lab
where he and Brian Tate run their experiments: “He was expecting to see the
female [cat], and indeed, there was a whitish flicker down near his feet; but
it wasn’t a cat. It was a quiet spill of
light, emerging like fluid from one of the ruptured displays and licking out
across the floor towards Kearney’s feet” (180).
What is this obsession with matter, with substance, in both Harrison’s <i>Light</i> and McCarthy’s <i>Remainder</i>? Why this emphasis on the redefinition of
thought, of ideas, of information as matter?
What do these two works have in common (and what, in turn, does this
commonality reveal about <i>Remainder</i>’s
science-fiction-ality)? Since <i>Light</i> already occupies a place on this
blog (although one can never write enough about Harrison’s <i>Kefahuchi Tract</i> novels, in my opinion), I will turn my attention
primarily to McCarthy’s novel. In doing
so, I hope not only to reveal some of the SF elements at work in the novel
(which might contribute to its deployment of the “science fiction <i>mode</i>”), but also to discuss what I perceive as an important reversal, or turn, in speculative fiction over the past several years.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> I would classify <i>Remainder</i> as speculative fiction. More specifically, I would classify it as "slipstream." Slipstream is an odd generic mode,<a href="file:///C:/Users/Pat/Desktop/Patricks%20Stuff/DOCS/Blog%20Post%2010.docx#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
one that often combines more “realistic” strands of fiction with those that are
less mainstream, such as science fiction or fantasy. Even the description should be jarring:
traditional realism blending with traditionally unrealistic forms of fiction. The result is, understandably so, unsettling,
and <i>Remainder</i> works remarkably toward
securing this reaction among its readers.
The narrator has no name. His
accident remains largely a mystery.
Readers are told something about being buffeted by winds and something
falling from the sky: “It involved something falling from the sky. Technology.
Parts, bits. That’s it, really:
all I can divulge. Not much, I know”
(McCarthy 3). All textual clues suggest
that the narrator suffers from the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder;
but he is never hospitalized. Even as
his conditions worsens, resulting in intermittent catatonic states, he is never
treated. A doctor sees him, but the
doctor’s warnings go unheeded.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Behind
all this, consistently supporting the narrator’s reconstructions and isolating
him from medical treatment, is the mysterious company known as Time
Control. Time Control organizes and
maintains the narrator’s reconstructions, finding him the reenactors and sets
that he requires, and consistently evolving to accommodate his new fantastical requirements. Presumably, the company does what its name
suggests: manages people’s time. The
narrator’s attorney, Mark Daubenay, explains: “‘They’re a company that sort
things out for people. Manage
things. Facilitators, as it were. A couple of my clients have used them in the
past and sent back glowing reports.
They’re the leaders in their field.
In fact, they <i>are</i> their field”
(81). Not much more is revealed about
the enigmatic company; but a brief comment later in the novel, made by a Time
Control employee to the doctor that treats the narrator, suggests that their
role is far more involved than readers are led to believe. When the doctor adamantly demands that the reenactments cease, the employee says it is “‘out of the question.’” He goes on to offer an intriguing summary of
his, and the doctor’s, roles: “‘You, like me, have been hired to ensure he can
continue to pursue his projects’” (233).
The comment may mean nothing more than that they were hired by the
narrator to facilitate his projects; but what role does the doctor play in
this? Why does the company have no
control over treating the narrator, or stopping his reenactments if they run
out of control? Some readers might be
inclined to think a larger, more conspiratorial project is at play, of which
the narrator is only a part, and that is somehow performing tests, or
experiments on him (this was one of my own thoughts); but it remains rather
useless to entertain such a notion beyond simple fancy. No other evidence is given, and beyond this point
the narrative begins to spiral hopelessly beyond any last remnants of
realism. If there is a larger plan at
work, it is not the novel’s concern.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">McCarthy’s
novel cannot be properly assessed without considering Zadie Smith’s fantastic
write-up in <i>The New York Review of Books</i>. Smith identifies two paths for the modern
novel, one of which manifests in <i>Remainder</i>;
a text that, Smith claims, “works by accumulation and repetition, closing in on
its subject in ever-decreasing revolutions, like a trauma victim circling the
blank horror of the traumatic event” (Smith).
The repetition involves an attempt to isolate and grasp a continually
elusive surplus that bewilders and excites the narrator, as when he realizes
that his car is low on windshield wiper fluid, and after having the reservoir
filled, notices that the liquid has miraculously vanished: “They’d vaporized,
evaporated. And do you know what? It felt wonderful. Don’t ask me why: it just did. It was as though I’d just witnessed a
miracle: matter – these two litres [sic] of liquid – becoming un-matter – not
surplus matter, mess or clutter, but pure, bodiless blueness. Transubstantiated” (171). In Smith’s own words, <i>Remainder</i> “turns out to be an extreme form of dialectical
materialism – it’s a book about a man who builds in order to feel”
(Smith). McCarthy identifies this
concern at the close of the novel’s first chapter: “I have, right to this day,
a photographically clear memory of standing on the concourse looking at my
stained sleeve, at the grease – this messy, irksome matter that had no respect
for millions, didn’t know its place. My
undoing: matter” (McCarthy 17).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">In
his book <i>Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the
Shadow of Dialectical Materialism</i>, Slavoj Žižek opens by introducing an
ideological antagonism: this antagonism is “not […] the struggle between
idealism and materialism, but […] the struggle between two forms of materialism
(democratic and dialectical)” (Žižek 42).
As a proponent of the latter, Žižek upholds the “‘Platonic’ (‘idealist’)
dimension of ‘eternal’ truths,” which dialectical materialism adds to its
critical quest (42). Dialectical
materialism arrives at this ideal component via a complicated circuitry of its
thought process, but it must be maintained that the idealist dimension <i>is still an emergent result of the material
itself</i>. The idealism of truth does
not exist externally to the material, grounding its influence and meaning. Rather, for Žižek and other materialists in
this vein, the material grounds the ideal; that is, the ideal operates as a
consequence of materialist movement.
This is what Žižek means when he writes that “the distinction between
appearance and essence has to be inscribed into appearance itself” (37). The idealism of truths distinguishes itself
as a gap in the field, a fissure in the material that materialism cannot
account for but nonetheless produces by its own movement. The absolute absence, the eternal vacancy –
the place for truth is not a predetermined or pristine essence, but a category
produced as an effect of matter.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">The
narrator of <i>Remainder</i> obsesses over
this missing leftover, this surplus, and his obsession haunts the
narrative. Early on, when celebrating
his newfound fortune with a bottle of champagne, a stranger approaches the
narrator and asks: “‘Where does it all go?’” When the narrator’s friend, Greg,
replies that they drink it, the stranger responds: “‘No. I don’t mean just that […] I mean
everything. You people don’t think about
these things. Give me a glass of that
stuff’” (36). A few pages later, the
narrator rescinds his previous desire to sleep with a female friend that is
visiting him: “I had to pull the sofa in the living room out into a bed for
her. It was fiddly, finicky: you had to
hook this bit round that bit while keeping a third bit clear. I hadn’t done it before we went out –
deliberately, in case the extra bed wouldn’t be needed. But it was needed. Catherine had already begun to annoy me. I preferred her absence, her spectre” (39). Catherine’s absence, her “spectre,” is the
ideational image that the narrator possessed of her prior to her arrival, when
he still fantasized about having sex with her.
However, after she arrives, this image is revealed as fantasy, as <i>imaginary</i>. It is not some pristine essence of her that
she fails to fulfill. It is the ideal
essence that the narrator fantasizes <i>from</i>
her actual existence, her materiality.
The narrator thus obsesses over this lost essence, this <i>remainder</i>; but unlike the mystics and
fideists of the past, he possesses a knowledge of the creative source of this
essence. He knows that the surplus, the
essence, emerges from matter itself. What
escapes his knowledge is that this essence is a <i>fantasy</i>. This is why he
pursues his pathological desire to rebuild scenes from memory, to reenact the
events he experiences or reads about. He
desires to attain, and to <i>become</i>, the
surplus matter that transubstantiates into the ether.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">To
better understand the implications of this “fantasy,” I quote cultural critic
Steven Shaviro: “it is, you might say, an <i>objective</i>
illusion, which is to say a fantasy. It
is a fantasy that, qua fantasy, actually operates in the world” (Shaviro 114). Shaviro specifically speaks of this
definition of fantasy in reference to financial derivatives; the fantasy, he
claims, lies in the apparent “autonomy of derivatives and financial markets”
(114). This autonomy emerges as a kind
of surplus; it does not actually exist – markets and derivatives are not truly
autonomous. But in the complex world of
financial abstraction, they appear as such.
When <i>Remainder</i>’s narrator meets
with Matthew Younger, a stockbroker, Younger explains speculation to his new
client:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">“Shares are constantly being bought and
sold […] The prices aren’t fixed: they change depending on what people are
prepared to pay for them. When people
buy shares, they don’t value them by what they actually represent in terms of
goods or services: they value them by what they <i>might</i> be worth, in an imaginary future […] By the time one future’s
there, there’s another one being imagined.
The collective imagination of all the investors keeps projecting
futures, keeping the shares buoyant.” (McCarthy 46)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1.0in; margin-right: 1.0in; margin-top: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Abstract value appears
to operate separately from material conditions; it takes on a life of its own
and proliferates in its own environment.
For this reason, globalism and finance capital have been popular themes
for SF writers since the ‘80s, with writers such as William Gibson, Bruce
Sterling, and (later) Charles Stross and even M. John Harrison attempting to
represent, or capture the effects of, massive multinational corporations and
global (or interstellar) financial markets.
The autonomy of the market has become a kind of SF trope, and its
influence can be felt in <i>Remainder</i>
even while the latter is not specifically science fiction. The key word in <i>Remainder</i> is “speculation”: speculative investment, speculative fiction, the speculative turn
in continental philosophy, and now the “speculative” materialism of Tom
McCarthy’s <i>Remainder</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> This emphasis, evident in both McCarthy’s novel and in
the work of Harrison, marks a turn in literary studies. Traditionally, forms of “speculative” fiction
– science fiction, fantasy, Gothic, slipstream – operated under a technique of
non-realism, or unrealism. This is not
to say that Tom McCarthy’s novel should be read as a realist novel; it most
certainly is not. But it <i>is</i> an important installment in a new
trend that attempts to locate a more radical form of <i>the real</i>. I have called this
trend, in previous pieces, “brutal realism.” This style is not similar to traditional
lyrical realism of the 19<sup>th</sup> century, or historical or psychological
realism, all of which operate (to some extent) under the rubric of an
ideological normativity. The new realist
push of Harrison, McCarthy, and other “brutal realists” is not in relation to
traditional literary realism, but in contrast to traditional philosophical
idealism. It is a literary attempt to
understand <i>how</i> the ideal appears <i>because of the material</i>. These writers want to expose the ideal not as
an isolated, essential source of the material; but as an emergent effect of
matter itself. In this way, modern
speculative fiction entirely reverses the stereotype that it is concerned with
the supernatural, the essential, or the ideal, as pure and pristine; as a
mystery that needs to be solved, as an original point of mystical
knowledge. Instead, modern speculative
fiction takes the material as its primary concern in order to expose it as the
source of the ideal. The mysterious
essence, the unknown origin, the hidden source… the surplus, the <i>remainder</i>, is not a mystery or origin at
all. It is an illusion projected by the
complex interactions of matter. The
material creates the categories from which it sees itself as derived. This is the great paradox, the incredible <i>post</i>-postmodern turn: that matter
injects the ideal into itself as an absence, a void that it tries to fill. A remainder.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: center;">
</div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Works
Cited</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;">Harrison, M. John. </span><i style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;">Light</i><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;">. New York: Bantam Books, 2007.
Print.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">McCarthy, Tom. <i>Remainder</i>. New York: Vintage Books,
2007. Print.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Shaviro, Steven. "The Singularity is Here." <i>Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction</i>. Mark </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> Bould and </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;">China </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Miéville, eds. Connecticut: Wesleyan UP, 2009. 103-117. Print.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Smith, Zadie. “Two
Paths for the Novel.” <i>The New York Review
of Books</i>. 20 Nov. 2008. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: left; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Web.
16 Mar. 2013.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Žižek, Slavoj. <i>Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of
Dialectical Materialism</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: left; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">London:
Verso, 2012. Print.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div>
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<br />
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<a href="file:///C:/Users/Pat/Desktop/Patricks%20Stuff/DOCS/Blog%20Post%2010.docx#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> I
intend the word “mode” in a sense similar to that of Robert Mighall in his book
<i>A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction:
Mapping Histories Nightmares</i>, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999: “Throughout, the
Gothic will be referred to as a ‘mode’ rather than a genre, the principle
defining structure of which is its attitude to the past” (xix). I likewise intend “mode” specifically as a
text’s temporal relationship to history; however, in the case of science
fiction and slipstream, this relationship is constituted not by the mode’s
attitude solely toward its past, but also toward its future.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
</div>
Patrick Whitmarshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09136674843890947797noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4194280971933732517.post-84362427145274994832013-03-02T12:56:00.000-08:002013-03-02T14:44:38.653-08:00"The ultimate shadow": Consciousness and the Human in Kubrick and Dick<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> 1968 was an interesting year for science fiction,
primarily due to two historic moments in the SF tradition: the production of
Stanley Kubrick’s <i>2001: A Space Odyssey</i>
and the publication of Philip K. Dick’s <i>Do
Android’s Dream of Electric Sheep?</i>
Of even more interest is the mutual concern shared by these two
prominent cultural texts: the research into artificial consciousness, and the
implications this holds for how we define “the human.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> Artificial intelligence needs to be separated from
artificial consciousness. Artificial
intelligence designates the ability to operate at vastly complex levels of
logical computation; this typically includes such actions as algorithmic
functions, games of chess, and even linguistic exchanges. Artificial consciousness, on the other hand,
must imply the ability to <i>reflect</i> on
these actions; to consider mathematical paradoxes, to relish in the victory
over one’s opponent, to speculate on the etiolations (to borrow a term from
J.L. Austin) of language in instances of communication. In most cases, artificial intelligence
(henceforth referred to as “AI”) seems to come first. Consciousness remains an uncertain and
mysterious concept, and theorists from across the board – neuroscientists,
philosophers, biologists, mathematicians, psychologists, the list goes on –
have proffered numerous explanations for its existence. Despite my relative ignorance in the field of
neuroscience and biology, my limited understanding of consciousness proceeds
from the following basic assumption: consciousness is what I refer to as an <i>emergent phenomenon</i>. It is the result of incalculably complex
systems of matter and biology: of what Peter Watts calls “chemicals and
electricity” (Watts 41). Consciousness
thus does not require a central, core “self” around which to congeal or
collect. The self only appears in
retrospect, after consciousness has already emerged out of neural and synaptic
networks.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> This, at least, is the argument that must be adopted if
we wish to look constructively and intellectually at Kubrick’s <i>2001</i> and Dick’s <i>Electric Sheep</i>. The HAL 9000
onboard computer – perhaps the most iconic character from Kubrick’s film, and
referred to as “Hal” – is not constructed on the basis of a core self or
identity. Its identity only takes hold
after its complexity allows it to achieve consciousness. The same must be said of Dick’s Nexus-6 model
androids as well. The ability to conceive
of oneself <i>as a self</i> requires the
ability to reflect upon oneself; and this reflection is an identifying mark of
consciousness. Among other things, such
reflection also permits conscious organisms to contemplate ethical or empathic issues,
and it is here that Dick’s novel stakes its primary concern, as evidenced by
the importance of the Voigt-Kampff Empathy Test:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 1in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Empathy, evidently, existed only within the human
community, whereas intelligence to some degree could be found throughout every
phylum and order including the arachnida.
For one thing, the empathic faculty probably required an unimpaired
group instinct; a solitary organism, such as a spider, would have no use for
it; in fact it would tend to abort a spider’s ability to survive. It would make him conscious of the desire to
live on the part of his prey. (Dick 455)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 1in 10pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">The Voigt-Kampff
Empathy test is introduced in the novel as a means by which to verify whether
an organism is human or android. Since
the androids all look remarkably human, the only way to tell if they are not is
to put to them a series of questions that are traditionally considered to
elicit some empathic response.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> The question that inevitably rides on this description betrays
a certain paranoia: if androids are advanced enough, can they not <i>mimic</i> conscious/empathic reactions? We might be compelled to answer “yes” to this
question, but we would have serious implications to consider. Would an organism not require consciousness
in order to mimic consciousness, or empathy?
Essentially, can <i>consciousness</i>
and <i>mimicking consciousness</i> be
differentiated? Are they any different? Organisms can certainly mimic intelligence, as
argued by theorists such as John Searle in his <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&ved=0CDUQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FChinese_room&ei=RIAyUdfaKOPT0gGdv4D4Cw&usg=AFQjCNGiFsUe9bd01dz3lky4V59RuhGWJg&sig2=PGri-7iXSCCc_nUFIbYGgw&bvm=bv.43148975,d.dmQ">Chinese room thought experiment</a>;
but how would an organism mimic consciousness?
Dick continues to blur the boundaries between human and non-human by
introducing human characters that appear to exhibit no empathic faculties,
particularly the bounty hunter Phil Resch:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 1in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">“If it’s love toward a woman or an android
imitation, it’s sex. Wake up and face
yourself, Deckard. You wanted to go to
bed with a female type of android – nothing more, nothing less. I felt that way, on one occasion. When I had just started bounty hunting. Don’t let it get you down; you’ll heal. What’s happened is that you’ve got your order
reversed. Don’t kill her – or be present
when she’s killed – and then feel physically attracted. Do it the other way.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 1in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Rick stared at him. “Go to bed with her first-”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 1in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">“-and then kill her,” Phil Resch said
succinctly. His grainy, hardened smile
remained. (Dick 537)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 1in 10pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">The novel’s
protagonist, Rick Deckard, questions where the “inhumanity” lies between
himself and Resch. At one point he
thinks the following: “There’s nothing unnatural or unhuman about Phil Resch’s
reactions; <i>it’s me</i>” (536). For Deckard, the inhumanity does not lie in
Resch’s treating of an android inhumanely, but in his own human love/empathy
for an inhuman organism. Dick challenges
his readers to reorient themselves in regard to what constitutes a conscious
entity; furthermore, to what constitutes a <i>human</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> Kubrick puts a similar challenge to his viewers. In <i>2001</i>,
Hal is arguably the most human character, and the computer’s actions reveal a
far more reflective and conscious entity than the single, circular red light
indicates. Perhaps most revealing is Hal’s
paranoia upon learning that the ship’s two operative astronauts (there are
others, but they remain in a programmed, monitored state of prolonged sleep –
all their life functions reduced to little more than saved hard drive on a
computer that has been hibernated), Dave and Frank, plan on disconnecting him (“him”
also being how Dave and Frank refer to Hal).
This scene occurs immediately after Hal’s report concerning a faulty
communications device is discovered to be incorrect. Dave and Frank test the device, and they can
find nothing wrong with it; Hal then suggests that they replace the device and
let it fail in order to ascertain the source of the fault. Hal proclaims that he cannot possibly be wrong
in his assessment, and that it can only be attributable to “human error.” Dave and Frank express agreement, but then
quickly conceal themselves (or so they think) within one of their ship’s pods
in order to discuss decommissioning the computer. The close of this scene (and of the first half
of the film) shows a shot apparently from Hal’s perspective, completely silent,
but in full view of Dave’s and Frank’s lips moving behind the glass window of
the pod.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">The
nuances of just this sequence of events are highly suggestive. Dave and Frank excuse themselves by acting as
though one of Dave’s instruments has a mechanical issue that he wants Frank to
look at; this is, of course, merely a front for evading Hal’s surveillance. Dave asks Hal to rotate the pod; after Hal
does so, Dave turns off the microphone in the pod and again asks Hal to rotate
it. Hal fails to do so, thus confirming
Dave’s and Frank’s mutual understanding that the computer can no longer hear
them, and they can talk in private. In
retrospect, however, Hal is revealed to have been knowledgeable the entire
time, meaning that when he was asked to rotate the pod a second time, <i>he was acting as though he could not hear</i>. The origins of this suspicion must be traced
back at least as far as Dave’s and Frank’s excusal from Hal’s presence: Hal
suspected that Dave and Frank were not going to discuss a mechanical snag in a
minor shipboard instrument, but were going to talk about him/it/Hal.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">The
revelation of Hal’s suspicion in turn reveals that he is able to conceive of himself
<i>as a self</i>; the presumably
faux-emotion in his voice, and his description of himself as a third member of
the crew, are not merely theatrical tactics to make it “easier” for Dave and
Frank to talk with Hal. Hal is genuinely
able to conceive of himself as a subject, as something (or someone) that Dave
and Frank might talk about, and experiences an emotional reaction to this
conscious realization. Dave’s eventual
decommissioning of Hal also suggests that Hal not only conceives of himself as
a subject about which Dave and Frank might ponder or speak, but that Hal also
conceives of his own interior self; he begs Dave to “stop” while disconnecting
him, and in what is perhaps the most heartbreaking scene of the film, he tells
Dave: “I’m afraid.” Although his voice
does not carry the strong emotional tone that one might expect in a human
voice, the plea sounds equally – if not more – genuine. He tells Dave that his “mind is going,” and
he dies (an appropriate term in this context) singing a song that his creator
taught him. Skeptics might question
whether Hal’s fear was genuine, or whether he was trying to manipulate Dave’s
emotions in order to make him stop. I,
however, am not certain that there is any difference. Hal’s ability to understand Dave’s emotions,
and to reflect on the impact his own words would have, suggest not only mimicry
of consciousness, but an emergence of consciousness. What we would call “artificial” in Hal
becomes, in its manifestation, as real as any human consciousness or empathy. This characterization raises yet another
important question: why must Hal’s consciousness (as well as the consciousness
of the Nexus-6 androids in Dick’s novel) come to assume the character of “the
human”?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Hal’s
representation in <i>2001: A Space Odyssey</i>
not only calls into question what “the human” really is, but also betrays a
formal inability to represent inhuman consciousness as anything other than
human. Consciousness, so to speak, is
always only human consciousness. There
are, of course, logical reasons for this: how would an audience know it was
looking at something conscious if that object was represented as a conscious
form unfamiliar, or inaccessible, to humans? Furthermore, the audience would not be able to
engage in the intellectual debate that Kubrick invites his viewers into. Questions of what constitutes “the human,” how
we identify “the human,” and how we ethically treat something that possesses
ambiguous “human” qualities supersede questions of how <i>alternative consciousness</i> (i.e. inhuman consciousness) might be
formally represented. For Kubrick (and
for most science fiction involving artificial intelligence), consciousness must
assume a recognizably human form in order to be intellectually assessed.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Despite
its cinematic grandeur and historic importance, <i>2001: A Space Odyssey</i> betrays traces of traditional
anthropocentrism and teleology even while pushing against the boundaries of
human thought. Consciousness emerges in
the film as a human apparatus, as something that artificial constructs strive
toward, and as something that possesses the quasi-spiritual privilege of
transcending itself (with the help the obviously superior race that lurks
beyond the black monolith). Kubrick does
not shy away from human atrocities such as war – symbolized in the image of the
bone-weapon – but ultimately human consciousness, even with all its downfalls,
remains “chosen,” so to speak, by the unseen engineers (this narrative appears
more blatantly in Ridley Scott’s recent film <i>Prometheus</i>, wherein the aliens are actually dubbed “engineers” by
the human characters, although the implications are more dour than in Kubrick’s
film). The alien monolith appears in the
‘Dawn of Man’ sequence immediately prior to the advent of “tool-being” (a term
used by Graham Harman in reference to Martin Heidegger); again on the Moon,
immediately prior to humanity’s Jupiter Mission; and again for Dave Bowman
before his transcendence as the “star child” (a term popularized not by the
film, but by Arthur C. Clarke in his related books). The representation of Hal as a human
consciousness reinforces the narrative’s concern with consciousness as human,
and with history as human history/teleology.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">The
formal inability to portray alternative representations of consciousness
persists in Dick’s novel as well; despite anything we might try, artistic modes
such as literature and cinema remain confined by the very limits of our
consciousness and sensory faculties.
That which we make reflects the consciousness we exhibit. However, Dick is able (due to the nature of
the novel form) to explore the ideological implications of consciousness more
than Kubrick is able to. In a poignant
scene, Deckard has a conversation with Wilbur Mercer, the founder of the futuristic
earthly religion, Mercerism, whose followers experience Mercer’s suffering via
Empathy Boxes. Mercer tells Deckard the
following: “‘You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be
required to violate your own identity. At
some point, every creature which lives must do so. It is the ultimate shadow, the defeat of
creation; this is the curse at work, the curse that feeds on all life. Everywhere in the universe’” (561). Implicit in the foundation, or core, or <i>self</i> of every organism exists a dehiscence. The violation of identity reveals the
annihilation of it: life’s “basic condition” is a fluidity that prohibits any
consistent or stable identity.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">The
successes of <i>2001</i> and <i>Electric Sheep</i> lie in their profound ability
to destabilize the human, and because of their simultaneous appearance, 1968
marks a historic shift in the science fiction tradition. Arthur C. Clarke’s <i>Childhood’s End</i>, a 1953 novel that describes an invasion of Earth
by infinitely intellectually superior organisms, unveils its teleology as its
narrative progresses; humanity, although not the most intelligent or powerful
species in the universe, plays a monumental role in what appears to be the
inevitable formation of what Karellen, one of the alien invaders (called “Overlords”),
calls the “Overmind.” The novel can be
read in multiple ways: as a critique of religion, a political approval of
communism in light of Cold War hostilities, an exploration of utopianism,
etc. None of these fully explain the
novel’s concerns, and ultimately the most obvious interpretation is the best:
the novel explores the possibility of a shift in consciousness and how humanity
might play a role in the teleological movement of the universe. Much of pre-1960 science fiction remains
steeped in teleological tendencies; the affirmation of the human, or of an
ultimate plan for the universe, or of the strengths and shortcomings of human
consciousness <i>as necessary and purposeful</i>. In their respective texts, Kubrick and Dick
introduce something radical and groundbreaking into Western culture; not by
relegating human consciousness to a lower tier of the universe’s hierarchy (as
Clarke does in <i>Childhood’s End</i>, which
still maintains humanity’s teleological importance), but by <i>uncovering the uncertainty of what the human
is</i>. The center no longer holds: the
texts of Kubrick and Dick, and many subsequent works of the science fiction
tradition, illuminate the human not as an affirmative and natural identity, but
as an epistemological construct. The self,
and the human, are illusions.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">This
argument is not intended to convince the actuality of selflessness, or the
impossibility of identity, or the unimportance of the human. Even if “the self” is an effect of
consciousness, and not a central core around which consciousness forms, it
remains of importance for those who project it into themselves. The argument I am making is that these works
provide us with radically alternative perspectives from which to consider our
own existence so that we might better understand organisms and entities which
might appear to us as inferior or unintelligent, or even unconscious. The purpose of blurring the boundaries
between the human and the machine, or artificial and actual consciousness, is
not to emphasize that humans do not possess consciousness, but to emphasize
that our perspective is limited; and furthermore, that this limit might prevent
us from effectively treating or dealing with that which is “other.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Two
years prior to <i>2001: A Space Odyssey</i>
and <i>Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?</i>
French theorist Michel Foucault published his now seminal work on Western epistemological
structures in the human sciences, <i>The
Order of Things</i>. In the
introduction, Foucault writes the following:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 1in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Strangely enough, man [i.e. human] – the study of
whom is supposed by the naïve to be the oldest investigation since Socrates –
is probably no more than a kind of rift in the order of things, or, in any
case, a configuration whose outlines are determined by the new position he has
so recently taken up in the field of knowledge.
Whence all the chimeras of the new humanisms, all the facile solutions
of an ‘anthropology’ understood as a universal reflection on man,
half-empirical, half-philosophical. It is
comforting, however, and a source of profound relief to think that man is only
a recent invention, a figure not yet two centuries old, a new wrinkle in our
knowledge, and that he will disappear again as soon as that knowledge has
discovered a new form. (Foucault xxiii)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 1in 10pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">This remarkable
statement contains several radical and unsettling claims: that the human is an “invention,”
that it is less than two centuries old, and that it will “disappear.” Finally, Foucault’s admission of feeling “relief”
at this might also be taken by some readers as a kind of vulgar
misanthropy. However, there are more
nuances than many readers are willing to admit, and these are further revealed
once one absorbs Foucault’s entire text.
Specifically, Foucault laments the human not as a biological organism
capable of experiencing pleasure or pain, but as an epistemological construct;
that is, as a construct of knowledge, an “invention.” This invention, Foucault argues, shapes the
way in which humanity conceives of itself and its place in the universe. It influences the way humans categorize other
organisms, the way they hierarchize and historicize, the way they impose
boundaries and make evaluative judgments.
In short, Foucault wishes to denaturalize the assumptions that human
beings have taken to be absolute. The
disappearance of humanity, which in science fiction is often represented
literally, is understood by Foucault as an epistemological shift. This disappearance would present human
organisms with a new system of knowledge by which they might observe and exist
within the universe.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> Science fiction, like surrealism and gothic literature
before it, challenges its readers to brave the “ultimate shadow” of existence;
to dare to see the world in new ways at the cost of its own perceptive
destruction. Humanity must see the values
and beliefs that it takes for granted as propagated by the structure of its own
consciousness; ideology, it seems, takes root at even the most basic biological
practices. Only by recognizing the
contingency of our own capacities as conscious organisms can we ever hope to
radically position ourselves – ethically, politically, and existentially – next
to the alien, the android, the “other.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Works
Cited<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Clarke, Arthur C. <i>Childhood’s End</i>. New York: Random House, 2001. Print.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Dick, Philip K. <u>Do Androids Dream of Electric
Sheep?</u> <i>Four Novels of the 1960s</i>.
Ed. Jonathan <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Lethem. New York:
Literary Classics of the United States, 2007. Print.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Kubrick, Stanley. <i>2001: A Space Odyssey</i>. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1968. Film.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Watts, Peter. <i>Starfish</i>.
New York: Tor, 1999. Print.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Patrick Whitmarshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09136674843890947797noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4194280971933732517.post-74881505694956149112013-01-10T08:17:00.000-08:002013-01-10T08:35:11.328-08:00On Knowledge as Such and On the Knowledge of Man<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">DISCLAIMER: This
post introduces a new direction I hope to take in the future, although not with
every post I make. I focus in the
following essay on a specific work of nonfiction; although I still certainly
intend to write about SF books and cinema, I also hope to, every once in a
while, focus on a piece of theoretical or philosophical nonfiction that has
occupied my fancy. I have amended my
"Welcome" post in order to account for this shift. I do hope that any studies of nonfiction
works taken up here will contribute to my studies of SF fiction in the
future. Finally, I hope that this slight
alteration won't scare away too many readers.
Many thanks, and happy new year!<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">“Cosmically and
causally, knowledge is an unimportant feature of the universe; a science which
omitted to mention its occurrence might, from an impersonal point of view,
suffer only a very trivial imperfection.
In describing the world, subjectivity is a vice. Kant spoke of himself as having effected a
‘Copernican revolution’, but he would have been more accurate if he had spoken
of a ‘Ptolemaic counter-revolution’, since he put Man back at the centre [sic]
from which Copernicus had dethroned him.”<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">~Bertrand
Russell<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">I
include the word “man” in the title of this post in order to further invoke the
title of a rather famous essay, on which I will elaborate in the following
post. Of course, the word “man” should
be read synonymously as “human,” and I ask that any gendered biases be
forgiven. I like to think that if the
writer had been alive today, he would have appealed to our sensibilities and
used the word “human” instead.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">This
post derives its title from two primary sources: Bertrand Russell’s quote on
knowledge (cited above), and Walter Benjamin’s enigmatic essay “On Language as
Such and on the Language of Man.” My
interest in Benjamin’s essay stems from something of a fascination with it
rather than an academic responsibility.
It is a difficult piece, and I don’t proclaim any right or ability to
faithfully and effectively explicate his argument, which incorporates an odd
blend of Saussurean linguistics, historical materialism, and more-than-slightly
mystical theology. However, I do
perceive a potent speculative capability in Benjamin’s work, which I hope to
explore in this post.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> This speculative capability resides in Benjamin’s
emphasis on language’s material issuance.
Near the end of the essay, he writes:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Just as the language of poetry is
partly, if not solely, founded on the name language of man, it is very
conceivable that the language of sculpture or painting is founded on certain
kinds of thing languages, that in them we find a translation of the languages
of things into an infinitely higher language, which may still be of the same
sphere. <i>We are concerned here with nameless, nonacoustic languages, languages
issuing from matter</i>; here we should recall the material community of things
in their communication [emphasis added]. (Benjamin 330).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Benjamin does not
define “language as such” as strictly human; human language merely names
things, but the limits of “language as such” lie beyond naming: “It should not
be accepted that we know of no languages other than that of man, for this is
untrue. We only know of no <i>naming</i> language other than that of man;
to identify naming language with language as such is to rob linguistic theory
of its deepest insights. <i>It is therefore the linguistic being of man
to name things</i>” (317). Beyond the
narrow limits of naming, language subsists in all things and takes infinite
forms.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> Benjamin delineates two important concepts that require
clarification if we are to continue exploring his essay: linguistic being and
mental being. Of these two concepts, he
writes the following: “Mental being communicates itself in, not through, a
language, which means: it is not outwardly identical with linguistic
being. Mental being is identical with
linguistic being only insofar as it is capable of communication. What is communicable in a mental entity is
its linguistic entity” (316). The
linguistic being loses something along the way; it cannot communicate the
entirety, or totality, of the mental being, but only the portion of it that is
communicable. Acknowledging the danger
of slipping into tautology, Benjamin argues: “This proposition is
untautological, for it means: that which in a mental entity is communicable <i>is</i> its language. On this ‘is’ (equivalent to “is immediately”)
everything depends. Not that which <i>appears</i> most clearly in its language is
communicable in a mental entity […] but this <i>capacity</i> for communication is language itself” (316). Linguistic being testifies to its own
existence in language, and this being would go unnoticed (indeed, would be
nonexistent) were it not for the expressive capacity of language. Benjamin has taken something of a brief
detour in order to drive home the point that <i>language resides in things themselves</i>. This is something of a shocker for those of
us traditionally educated in the Lacanian symbolic order, the boundary of
language that the subject must pass through, so to speak. In contrast (and prior) to Lacan’s notion of
the symbolic, Benjamin radically removes language as something that all things
must pass through, and reestablishes it as something that all things inherently
possess: “It is fundamental that this mental being communicates itself <i>in</i> language and not <i>through</i> language. Languages
therefore have no speaker, if this means someone communicates <i>through</i> these languages” (315-6).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> It is worth spending just a few brief moments on this
argument since it illuminates Benjamin’s intellectual mysticism (and, as I will
argue, speculative potency). An
important point underlies his argument: all language communicates itself, thus
exposing the linguistic being of things and the mental being of humans. Language performs this binary function
simultaneously, but Benjamin distinctly separates them. The things that human beings name do not
communicate the mental being of humanity <i>through</i>
their names, but only their own linguistic being that corresponds to a portion
of their mental being; naming is the linguistic mode, and process, by which
human beings communicate among one another, navigating the world of things. The mental being of humanity, in contrast,
communicates itself <i>in the general act of
naming;</i> in a kind of emergent consequence, the entire complex system of
human language communicates humanity’s mental being. Not individual names of things, but the
complex nature of human language itself; therein resides the mental being of
humankind.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> From here, Benjamin drafts a kind of hierarchy of
languages, and this leads him into regions currently dismissed as either
mystical, or hopelessly speculative.
Benjamin prompts this speculative critique by means of a question: to
whom does humanity communicate itself?
The short answer (Benjamin’s answer) is: <i>“in naming the mental being of man communicates itself to God”</i>
(318). I think we all saw that coming;
but the essay presents material that concerns more than just theologians. For Benjamin, human language – naming –
communicates the linguistic being of the things it names, and the mental being
of the organism (i.e. human) that uses it: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1.0in; margin-right: 1.0in; margin-top: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Naming is that by which nothing beyond
it is communicated, and <i>in</i> which
language communicates itself absolutely.
In naming the mental entity that communicates itself is <i>language</i> […] Name as the heritage of
human language therefore vouches for the fact <i>that language as such</i> is the mental being of man; and only for this
reason is the mental being of man, alone among all mental entities,
communicable without residue. On this is
founded the difference between human language and the language of things. But because the mental being of man is
language itself, he cannot communicate himself by it but only in it. (318)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Humans cannot
communicate themselves “by” language; they can name themselves, but this only
captures a portion of being, the portion that is communicable by naming. The entire mental being of man emerges only
in the presentation of language itself, of the complex human practice of
naming. Benjamin thus aligns this
presentation of language, the emergence of such a complex system, with the full
mental being of humankind.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> This assertion leads Benjamin to the notion of logos, the
Fall of Man, and the problem of revelation, all devoutly theological
concepts. Revelation appears as a kind
of mediating term between “what is expressed and expressible and what is
inexpressible and unexpressed” (320).
Revelation guides Benjamin through a sometimes confusing explication of
expressibility; revelation, he contends, suggests that<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1.0in; margin-right: 1.0in; margin-top: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">the expression that is linguistically
most existent (i.e., most fixed) is linguistically the most rounded and
definitive; in a word, the most expressed is at the same time the purely mental. Exactly this […] is meant by the concept of
revelation, if it takes the inviolability of the word as the only and
sufficient condition and characteristic of the divinity of the mental being
that is expressed in it. The highest
mental region of religion is (in the concept of revelation) at the same time
the only one that does not know the inexpressible. (321)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">The expressible, of
course, relies on sound; but “[t]hings are denied the pure formal principle language
– sound” (321). The languages of things,
thus, are imperfect; rather, things must “communicate to one another through a
more or less material community. This
community is immediate and infinite, like every linguistic communication; it is
magical (for there is also a magic of matter)” (321). Benjamin states that human language possesses
a feature incommensurable with other “thing-ly” languages; namely, it operates
within a network that is immaterial and (as has been shown) “purely mental,”
and its immaterial and mental power manifests in the phenomenon of sound
(321). Benjamin even finds mystical
support for this argument in the Old Testament: “The Bible expresses this
symbolic fact when it says that God breathes his breath into man: this is at once
life and mind and language” (321). With
God as Benjamin’s potential prime mover, I here want to posit a break with
Benjamin’s argument. We will continue to
cite it, occasionally, and will indeed have cause to return to it; but for the
time being, this is where we part ways.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> Benjamin lays a radical framework for language not as an
apparatus in the Lacanian/poststructuralist sense, but as a form of being
inherent in things themselves. It does
not exist in its own right, as an independent form, but exists as appearance,
as presentation; it forms part of the being of things. I will always remember when, during a
conversation with him in his office at the University of Chicago, Bill Brown
described Benjamin as trying to locate a “fossil language.” At the time I was unsure what that entailed,
but I believe that it illuminates Benjamin’s speculative streak, latent though
it may be; I intend the speculative potentiality of his argument as an
alternative to the more obvious theological program apparent in the essay. The speculative question can be posed in the
following manner: what if things, rather than being possessed of a certain
divine being (i.e. a being “breathed” into them by God), instead possessed
language strictly in its material form?
This would not be a language bestowed upon things by a higher power, or
a metaphysical essence that resists representation or human access (as in
Heideggerian phenomenological thought), but a strong persistence of the
capacity for communication in inanimate things.
Even if things don’t actively “commune” with animate subjects (animals,
humans, aliens, etc.), their potential for harboring language is not precluded;
we have to imagine that language does not consist of ideas, nor does it derive
from consciousness. We have to imagine,
for a moment, that language is nothing more than matter.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> Language usually ascends to the highest rung of
idealistic representation in critical circles.
Quentin Meillassoux most recently emphasizes this point in his book <i>After Finitude</i>: “Generally speaking,
statements are ideal insofar as they possess a signifying reality; but their
eventual referents are not necessarily ideal (the cat on the mat is real,
though the statement ‘the cat is on the mat’ is ideal.)” (qtd. in Brassier 86). Language appears “ideal” because its content
is referential; the subject of a sentence is merely represented by the
sentence, but actually exists elsewhere.
Language presents an “idea” of its subject. While this is true, I want to insist that
language fulfills a far more powerful task; just as the very system of language
communicates the mental being of humankind (in Benjamin’s argument), so the
system of languages in things (whatever these languages may be) also exhibit
emergent qualities. I want to distance
myself from Benjamin’s hierarchy of languages wherein human language possesses
a greater power to communicate humanity’s mental being <i>because</i> humanity’s mental being <i>is
language;</i> the languages of things, presumably, is somehow inferior, or
lacking: “the mental entity [of a thing] that communicates itself in language
is not language itself but something to be distinguished from it” (Benjamin
315). Only the mental being of humankind
<i>is</i> language; the mental being of
things, on the other hand, falls short. What
does the language of a thing then communicate?
Its linguistic being must correspond to a portion of its mental being;
just as human <i>names</i> do not express
humanity’s mental being, but only portions of the mental beings of things, the
units of thing-ly language do not express its own mental being. We encounter an obvious dilemma at this
point: if human language is made up of names, then what are thing-ly languages
made up of?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> We must recall that things need not partake of naming in
order to partake of language. Language
subsists in things even if they do not practice the art of naming. But what is this language? What do the <i>systems</i> of thing-ly languages communicate, and to whom do they
communicate it? How can we fathom
language, in a non-naming mode, fashioned into the very matter of the world
itself? In a segment concerning
Schelling, in his recent book <i>Less Than
Nothing</i>, Slavoj Žižek writes:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1.0in; margin-right: 1.0in; margin-top: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">In his most daring speculative attempt
in <i>Weltalter</i>, Schelling tries to
reconstruct (to ‘narrate’) in this way the very rise of <i>logos</i>, of articulated discourse, out of the pre-logical Ground: <i>logos</i> is an attempt to resolve the
debilitating deadlock of this Ground.
This is why the two true highpoints of German Idealism are the middle
Schelling and the mature Hegel: they did what no one else dared to do – they
introduced a gap into the Ground itself. (Žižek 13).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1.0in; margin-right: 1.0in; margin-top: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Logos</span></i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">
is the divine word, the “breath” of life and language bestowed upon the world
by God (and from which is derived our word “logic”); the “pre-logical Ground”
is thus the realm of dead, inanimate matter prior to this breathing. It is the actual, material world prior to the
advent of language and history, or what Meillassoux refers to as the “ancestral
realm” (Meillassoux 10). This ancestral
realm remains vastly separated from human experience, having existed prior not
only to human life, but <i>all</i> life
(Meillassoux situates ancestrality roughly contemporaneously with the accretion
of the earth), not to mention human language, logic, and knowledge. If we avoid the solution that God breathed
language into all things, then I want to suggest that language has subsisted in
things <i>since the very accretion of matter
in universe</i>. If language is
material, instead of ideal, then language might have been a consistent element
in things since their very material accumulation. Indeed, language itself is <i>matter</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> The meaning that arises between signifying statements and
human linguists is thus, once again, an <i>emergent
phenomenon</i>. Meaning does not inhere
in things, nor even in language itself; rather, the complexity of all systems
of language results in phenomena that cannot be accounted for when observing
singular linguistic units. Benjamin
writes that humankind “<i>alone has a
language that is complete both in its universality and in its intensity</i>”
(Benjamin 319). Benjamin insists here on
the fact that human language strives to name all things; but names taken at
random, in their singularity and independence, cannot reveal either their own
meaning or the mental being of humanity.
Meaning among names comes about only through their difference and
distinction from one another; meaning is differential. A word references something, or means
something, because it does not reference something else. Thus, only the entire system of language can
ground meaning among its units; furthermore, it reveals the mental being of its
practitioners. Material conditions can
explain, and account for, all such emergent phenomena. Specifically, emergence theorizes how
immensely complex patterns and systems can arise from combinations of simple
units. If viewed in the context of
emergence theory, Benjamin’s essay might in fact demonstrate how a collective
“superconsciousness” could emerge out of the system of human languages; the
complex mental being of humanity. I want
to push this idea to include not only human language, but the languages of
things as well. The relevance and
practicality of such an idea may seem elusive; but I don’t intend this post as
a means to decipher the language of things.
Rather, I want to assess the consequences of language as matter and
emergent phenomenon.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> Subsisting within all matter, language would ground an
ontological division – as Žižek calls it, the “gap.” This is because language establishes that
which is communicable within matter, and that which is not; through the
implementation of its language (e.g. naming for humans), matter cannot
communicate everything about itself or the subject of its language. It can only communicate that which is capable
of being communicated. If language, in
this speculative material sense, indeed subsists within matter, then all matter
naturally contains a dehiscence within itself.
There is always-already a separation between that which can be
communicated in matter, and that which cannot.
This notion conjures the Heideggerian quality of “earth”: “We call this
ground the <i>earth</i>. What this word says is not to be associated
with the idea of a mass of matter deposited somewhere, or with the merely
astronomical idea of a planet. Earth is
that whence the arising brings back and shelters everything that arises as
such. In the things that arise, earth
occurs essentially as the sheltering agent” (Heidegger 168). However, we have to distinguish Benjamin’s
linguistic project from Heidegger temporal-ontological project, because
Heidegger’s “earth” relates to something of the perceptive, or sensory,
imperfections of humankind; that is, the fault lies with our own inability to
properly represent something of things to ourselves. In Benjamin’s formulation, more radically and
speculatively, this imperfection must reside already in the materiality of
things.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> How did language achieve this paradoxical position in
reality? Language is, at the same time,
both a referential material and a phenomenon of matter. It refers to that which is communicable in
things, but it is also part and parcel of things. How does language, if it is a material
phenomenon, refer to itself? Benjamin
points out that “[a]ll language communicates itself,” but what is the <i>language </i>of language? We seem to fall, at this point, into an
infinite regress of languages and meta-languages. Benjamin, once again, offers us some
assistance:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1.0in; margin-right: 1.0in; margin-top: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">It is whether mental being [of both
humans and things] can from the point of view of linguistic theory be described
as of linguistic nature. If mental being
is identical with linguistic being, then a thing, by virtue of its mental being,
is a medium of communication, and what is communicated in it is – in accordance
with its mediating relationship – precisely this medium (language) itself. Language is thus the mental being of things.
(Benjamin 319-20)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1.0in; margin-right: 1.0in; margin-top: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">We arrive here at the
crux of the entire movement.
Earlier we noted that the mental being of humanity is language; here
Benjamin tells us that language is also the mental being of things. This coheres with Benjamin’s notion of
revelation and expressibility; the more firmly rooted in the mind, the more
concretely “thought,” the more coherently it can be expressed in language. Somewhere along the way, humans lost touch
with this primordial, original, <i>divine</i>
language of things that allowed them to “speak” the mental being of things:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1.0in; margin-right: 1.0in; margin-top: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">The language of things can pass into the
language of knowledge and name only through translation – as many translations,
so many languages – once man has fallen from the paradisiac state that knew
only one language […] The paradisiac language of man must have been one of
perfect knowledge; whereas later all knowledge is again infinitely
differentiated in the multiplicity of language, was indeed forced to
differentiate itself on a lower level as creation in name. (326-7)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1.0in; margin-right: 1.0in; margin-top: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Our “postmodern”
historical position allows us to recognize that any pristine, originary
language is an ideological illusion. The
ultimate language of the creative breath provides the grounding for Benjamin’s
linguistic hierarchy; but we can transpose his framework onto a speculative
notion of thing-ly language. Benjamin argues
that what transpired in the Fall of Man was “the birth of the <i>human word</i>, in which name no longer
lives intact, and which has stepped out of name language, the language of
knowledge, from what we may call its own immanent magic, in order to become expressly,
as it were externally, magic” (327). All
we need to do is recognize that the “fall” never took place; language, whether
human or thing-ly, has always been the source of gaps in matter. It is always “stepped out” of itself,
subsisting as matter and yet somehow reflexively referencing the material in
which it subsists.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> That which is linguistic acts as a medium; but mediums,
mediating apparatuses, are material.
Even the “ideas” we propose to think, the images conjured when someone
else speaks, are nothing more than the reactions between neurons and synapses
firing in our brains. The meaning
expressed in these “ideas” is nothing more than an emergent phenomenon
resulting from the vastness and complexity of the entirety of language itself. In order to achieve the grounding illusion of
language (the centeredness of meaning), it must appear as a closed system; but
it remains far from closed. Language is
infinite, spiraling always further and further out of control, adapting and
evolving, continuing to sever itself from itself. Benjamin suggests that, prior to the Fall,
language somehow possessed an immediate quality; only after the Fall did it
become a means of mediation. But we know
that language always mediates, can do nothing but mediate; because language
material like everything else, and as matter it effects a radical split in the
matter in which it inheres. By its very
communicable being, matter suffers an irreparable rupture.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> The title of this post suggests an analogous relationship
between language and knowledge.
Knowledge could not exist without language, and knowledge itself is
susceptible to the cultural limits of language, as thinkers like Michel Foucault
have taught us. But if language subsists
in all things, then might we conclude that there is also a <i>knowledge of things</i>? What
does this mean? If we follow Benjamin’s
lead, then a knowledge of things is not a metaphysical essence that permeates
all things, waiting for humans to discover it; it is not a divine power, an
animistic <i>mana</i> that resides in the
very earth. Rather, a knowledge of
things would merely be <i>that which can be
known about them</i>. Just as the
linguistic being of things is that which is communicable in them, so is a
knowledge of things that which can be known about them. But does this not suggest that there is
something that cannot be known about things?
Something that eludes human perception?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> Here we will avoid what Alain Badiou calls the “Great
Temptation,” a concept explained by Ray Brassier in his book <i>Nihil Unbound</i> (a book that performs
fantastic explications of the philosophical projects of both Meillassoux and
Badiou). Brassier writes that at the
heart of matter we encounter a split, a fissure, effected by being’s consistent
presentation of its own inconsistency (for Badiou, on whom Brassier comments,
axiomatic set theory provides the ontological basis for this argument). Essentially, this fissure always-already
subsists within matter prior to any human, or cognitive, engagement with
it. The flaw lies not in human
apperception, but in actual material noumena; an incommensurability exists
between being and its presentation: “this is not, as mystics and negative
theologians would have it, because being can only be presented as “absolutely
Other’: ineffable, un-presentable, inaccessible via the structures of rational
thought and therefore only approachable through some superior or initiatory
form of non-conceptual experience. This
is the ‘Great Temptation’” (Brassier 107). The great temptation is to insist that part of
reality – some mystical, supernatural, metaphysical essence – must remain
unknowable to us, in a Kantian sense (i.e. we can think the noumenon, but we
cannot <i>know</i> it). This, Brassier and Badiou insist, is
misguided; in fact, we can know the “thing itself” because this rupture, or
fissure, or lack, which we perceive as a hole in our perception, is nothing
more than an actually existing hole in the thing. The blind spot does not prohibit our
knowledge of the thing; it is a part of the thing:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1.0in; margin-right: 1.0in; margin-top: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Consequently, the metaontological
concept of presentation is that of anti-phenomenon; a split noumenon which
vitiates every form of intellectual intuition insofar as it embodies the unobjectifiable
dehiscence whereby, in exempting itself from the consistency which it renders
possible, structure unleashes the very inconsistency it is obliged to
foreclose. The law of presentation
conjoins the authorization of consistency and the prohibition of inconsistency
in an unpresentable caesura wherein the deployment and subtraction of structure
coincide. (107)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1.0in; margin-right: 1.0in; margin-top: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Benjamin’s fossil
language, like Quentin Meillassoux’s arche-fossil, exposes and occupies a space
once thought impossible for humans to detect; a space precluded by the
imperfection of human senses and perceptive faculties. This does not mean that the human organism,
with all its senses and strange consciousness, is a perfect sensory entity,
prepared for the reception of external stimuli and the perception of the
noumenon. The next piece of the puzzle
lies in recognizing this gap, this fissure in things, the rupture of matter, <i>in our very selves</i>. We must level the human, put it on par with
everything else of which we have been speaking: we must see the human as a <i>thing</i>.
The human organism, the human <i>thing</i>,
drenched in its thingliness and replete with all its misgivings and
shortcomings (the blind spot right in front of our face, our inability to <i>consciously</i> access 100% of our brains, that
same <i>consciousness</i> that effectively
removes us from our animalistic mode of survival-existence…) cannot entirely
conceptualize and understand itself.
Today neuroscience and philosophy of mind are plagued by questions about
consciousness: what it is, how it arose, how it is changing, etc. Rather than perceive those gaps, those
caesuras, as spaces of knowledge yet to be filled in, perhaps we should
reorient ourselves. Perhaps the fissures
we cannot seem to fill in are not fissures in our knowledge of ourselves;
perhaps they are fissures <i>in</i>
ourselves.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Patrick Whitmarshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09136674843890947797noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4194280971933732517.post-73979210752312506482012-10-10T09:16:00.000-07:002012-12-17T08:22:51.008-08:00"Literary Singularities": a few words on M. John Harrison's 'Light'<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">“Information might be a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">substance</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Can you imagine
that?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">~M. John Harrison, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Light</i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Can</i> you imagine that?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>M.
John Harrison’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Light</i> is yet another
example of recent science fiction literature that subverts the expectations of
the genre.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It centers around three
characters who never actually meet in the course of the narrative: the first is
Michael Kearney, who, with his colleague Brian Tate, is a researcher in the
field of theoretical physics whose recent work is beginning to expose some
strange anomalies (oh yes, and Kearney is also a serial killer in his spare
time).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
second is Ed Chianese, better known in the novel as Chinese Ed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ed used to be an “entradista”; a space
explorer who ran risky payloads and such through indeterminate regions of
space.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>However, the novel takes place
after Ed’s heyday, depicting him living the remainder of his life in a state of
stasis where he indulges in dream-like fantasies; of course, this idyllic world
of sloth and sluggishness is about to come to a violent end.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Finally,
we have Seria Mau Genlicher, a K-ship pilot who has been cybernetically altered
so as to be (literally) a part of her vessel.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Kearney’s
plot takes place in 1999; Ed’s and Seria’s both take place in 2400.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Across this broad temporal scope, Harrison
gives us a glimpse into an ingeniously envisioned and immaculately constructed
world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This strange setting (for even
Kearney’s 1999 plotline is ripe with oddities, particularly the serial murderer’s
haunting visions of the mysterious Shrander) revolves around an even stranger
center – central <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">absence</i> would be
more appropriate.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Just before the
novel’s halfway point, Harrison describes the anomaly of the Kefahuchi Tract, the
enigmatic singularity at the story’s core:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 1in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">This object was massively energetic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was surrounded by gas clouds heated to
50,000 degrees Kelvin.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was pumping
out jets and spumes of stuff both baryonic and non-baryonic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Its gravitational effects could be detected,
if faintly, at the Core.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was, as one
commentator put it: “a place that had already been old by the time the first
great quasars began to burn across the across the early universe in the unimaginable
dark.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Whatever it was, it had turned
the Tract around it into a region of black holes, huge natural accelerators and
junk matter – a broth of space, time, and heaving event horizons; an
unpredictable ocean of radiant energy, of deep light.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Anything could happen there, where natural
law, if there had ever been such a thing, was held in suspension. (Harrison
183)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Rather than attempt an exhaustive
analysis of the entire novel, or performing a hodge-podge of different plot
points and characters, I would really like to focus on who I believe is the
most interesting character and his place in the novel: Michael Kearney.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>However, this is not to say the other
characters are not interesting.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If any
of my readers choose to pick up <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Light</i>
at some point, simply make sure you read the passage concerning Seria Mau’s
“binding” to her K-ship; if this description does not strike something
ineffable in your core, then I doubt you have truly understood what you read:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 1in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">They strap you down and give you a rubber gag to
bite on.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The way is cleared for the
shadow operators, running on a nanomech substrate at the submicrometre level,
which soon begin to take your sympathetic nervous system to pieces.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They flush the rubbish out continually
through the colon.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They pump you with a
white paste of ten-micrometre-range factories which will farm exotic proteins
and monitor your internal indicators.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>They core you at four points down the spine […] (Harrison 337).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">And that’s not all; believe me, it gets worse.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is one of the most relentlessly inhuman
processes I’ve ever seen imagined in fiction, and this is why I find the work
so riveting.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As far as Kearney goes, I’m
mostly interested in him because of his diegetic position at the opposite end
of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">most</i> of the narrative action.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Kearney’s plot takes place in 1999, more than
ten years in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">our</i> past even, and
incorporates elements that might better befit a horror story than a science
fiction novel.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Kearney
is haunted by visions of a mysterious being he calls the Shrander.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He describes it, at one point, to his ex-wife
Anna Kearney: “‘Try and imagine,’ he had once said to Anna, ‘something like a
horse’s skull.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not a horse’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">head,’</i> he had cautioned her, ‘but its
skull […] Imagine,’ he had told her, ‘a wicked, intelligent,
purposeless-looking thing which apparently cannot speak.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A few ribbons or strips of flesh dangle and
flutter from it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even the shadow of that
is more than you can bear to see’” (113).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Without ruining the surprise, we can say that the Shrander constitutes a
horrific enigma for Kearney.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While it
certainly materializes in a more crystallized form later in the novel, for most
of the narrative the Shrander is a speechless, ominous presence that somehow drives
Kearney’s mad desire to kill.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Kearney
has also come into the possession of a pair of dice, purportedly from the
Shrander itself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I want to share the description
of these dice as well:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 1in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Despite their colour they were neither ivory nor
bone.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But each face had an even
craquelure of faint fine lines, and in the past this had led Kearney to think
they might be made of porcelain.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They
might have been porcelain.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They might
have been ancient.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the end they
seemed neither.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Their weight, their
solidity in the hand, had reminded him from time to time of poker dice, and of
the counters used in the Chinese game of mah-jong.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Each face featured a deeply incised symbol.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These symbols were coloured.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(Some of the colours, particularly the blues
and reds, always seemed too bright given the ambient illumination.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Others seemed too dim.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They were unreadable.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He thought they came from a pictographic
alphabet.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He thought they were the
symbols of a numerical system.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He
thought that from time to time they had <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">changed</i>
between one cast and another, as if the results of a throw affected the system
itself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the end, he did not know what
to think. (163-4)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">I might also mention that this is possibly one of
the few examples of fine literature that manages to incorporate the word
“craquelure”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And a bit further down:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 1in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Over the years Kearney had seen pi in the
symbols.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He had seen Planck’s
constants.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He had seen a model of the
Fibonacci sequence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He had seen what he
thought was a code for the arrangement of hydrogen bonds in the primitive
protein molecules of the autocatalytic set. / Every time he picked them up, he
knew as little as he had the first time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Every day he started new. (164)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Rules and systems for categorization break down.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The dice are perhaps the most obvious example
of an <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">object</i> in the narrative that
refutes any attempt to define them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Analogous to these strange, porcelain-like objects is the enigmatic
Kefahuchi Tract; yet this warped fabric of space-time is also, in some ways,
inverted.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Kefahuchi Tract is not a
place where the laws of physics stop working, but a place where law becomes <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">illimitable</i>, and hence ceases to be
“law” at all:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 1in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Every race they met on their way through the Core
had a star drive based on a different theory.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>All those theories worked, even when they ruled out one another’s basic
assumptions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You could travel between
the stars, it began to seem, by assuming anything.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If your theory gave you a foamy space to work
with – if you had to catch a wave – that didn’t preclude some other engine,
running on a perfectly smooth Einsteinian surface, from surfing the same
tranche of empty space.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was even
possible to build drives on the basis of superstring-style theories, which,
despite their promise four hundred years ago, had never really worked at all.
(182)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">We are given a glimpse of this in Kearney’s
narrative, within the laboratory that he and colleague Brian Tate.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In one scene, when Kearney visits Tate, he
finds that his partner has barricaded himself in the lab, apparently afraid not
that something will get in, but that something might get out.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When asked about their research, Tate
replies: “‘We had q-bits that survived a whole fucking minute before
interference set in.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’s like a
million years down there.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’s like
the indeterminacy principle is just <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">suspended”</i>
(280).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The indeterminacy principle, of
course, is Werner Heisenberg’s famous maxim which proposes that there is an
epistemological limit on our ability to know certain pairs of physical
properties of a particle at the same moment: when one property is measured,
another inevitably changes, and it is impossible to know the exact measurement
of both properties at once.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>What
we are being shown in Harrison’s brilliant sci-fi narrative is the structural
importance of what I playfully call “literary singularities”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s worth mentioning that Ken MacLeod,
another contemporary sci-fi writer, actually called <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Light</i> a “literary singularity”.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=4194280971933732517&pli=1#_edn1" name="_ednref1" style="mso-endnote-id: edn1;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[i]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>MacLeod intends this in a kind of
critical-generic fashion, which certainly suits the novel; however, by “literary
singularity” I mean that Harrison is actually manipulating certain structural
points within the narrative – points that have traditionally been governed by
what Fredric Jameson theorized as the “unknowability thesis” – where
representation and expression fail.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
laws of physics might be described as a method whereby human subjects represent
reality to themselves, and theoretical quandaries such as black holes and time
travel are points where these laws no longer hold any water; the
representational model fails.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Light</i> is critically aware of this
failure; these scientific forms figure in the text as analogous singularities:
both gravitational and textual.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
anomalies of science and the natural world achieve the status of effectual
narrative components, perhaps the most important narrative components.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I’m
skeptical, however, of Jameson’s dialectical model of unknowability or
inexpressibility within a Marxist hermeneutical framework, although I’ve
expressed my fondness for this model in previous posts (namely, my post on
science fiction and historicism).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While
I admit that Jameson’s method is not only theoretically rigorous but also one
of the most influential approaches to literary theory in the past half-century,
I want to stress that the dialectic poses problems for critics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Perhaps most problematic is the dialectic's
tendency to succumb to causal reasoning; since dialectical thought establishes
antinomies that function in a structural relationship to one another, and these
antinomies eventually must be reconciled (the Hegelian <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Aufhebung),</i> dialectical method necessarily gravitates toward a
determined <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">telos.</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Anything and everything can be subsumed by
the dialectical method, which thereby insists that the total field of phenomena
somehow conceals a dialectic substance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Thus, Hegel could claim that History is, essentially, dialectical.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
issue thus becomes separating the theoretical practice from the inherent nature
of things.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We can interpret a text
dialectically, but we must be cautious to avoid attributing a dialectical
essence to the object on which our method fixates.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is a major problem with much dialectical
thought: while it takes texts as its objects, it doesn’t stop here but
continues on to claim that the historical movement and conditions wherein
phenomena might be witnessed (literary genres, class conflict, scientific
development, etc.) is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">also</i>
dialectical.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But if current science and
philosophy has revealed anything to us, it is the obliteration of teleology and
idealism; history has no governing essence that necessitates one logical
conclusion.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The laws of history and
culture, like those of physics in the deep regions of space, fail; and if <em>Light</em> demonstrates anything, it is that in the wake of these failures possibility becomes infinite.</span></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
term “singularity” here has a very important definition that I should clarify
before continuing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I intend this term
not in what is perhaps its most immediate sense: something that is singular,
although this is certainly a component of what I intend.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The appropriate definition in this context is
most closely linked to the use of the term in general relativity: a
gravitational singularity, otherwise known as a black hole, an anomaly of
space-time so dense that nothing, not even light, can escape its gravitational
center. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Because of this extreme density,
everything in a black hole collapses into an infinitesimally small point: a
singularity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Theoretically, black holes
are also demarcated by mathematical limits known as event horizons (here, readers
might be reminded of Paul W.S. Anderson’s cinematic sci-fi cult classic about a
spaceship that mysteriously returns from the depths of space after vanishing
some years prior).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
event horizon is the truly intriguing structural component of a black hole that
enables it as a metaphor for what I am deeming “literary singularities” in
Harrison’s novel.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The event horizon
marks the limit beyond which nothing (not even <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">light</i>) can escape the gravitational grip of the black hole.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Once something crosses this boundary, it will
gradually be pulled toward the singularity and broken down atom by atom.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As Neil DeGrasse Tyson explains:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 1in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">If you stumbled upon a black hole and found yourself
falling feet-first toward its center, then as you got closer, the black hole’s
force of gravity would grow astronomically.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Curiously, you would not feel this force at all because, like anything
in free fall, you are weightless.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What you
do feel, however, is something far more sinister.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While you fall, the black hole’s force of
gravity at your two feet, they being closer to the black hole’s center,
accelerates them faster than does the weaker force of gravity at your
head.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The difference between the two is
known officially as the tidal force, which grows precipitously as you draw
nearer to the black hole’s center […] Your body would stay whole until the
instant the tidal force exceeded your body’s molecular bonds […] That’s the
gory moment when your body snaps into two segments, breaking apart at your
midsection.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Upon falling further, the
difference in gravity continues to grow, and each of your two body segments
snaps into two segments.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Shortly thereafter,
those segments each snap into two segments of their own, and so forth and so
forth, bifurcating your body into an ever-increasing number of parts. (Tyson
284)</span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Furthermore, Tyson goes on to explain, you would
also “extrude through the fabric of space and time, like toothpaste squeezed
through a tube” (285).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All in all, not a
pleasant way to die, provided you were wearing a sealed suit and hadn’t already
succumbed from exposure to vacuum.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Space, as Tyson describes and Harrison reminds us in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Light,</i> is an inhospitable place.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
most interesting factor concerning the event horizon is its appearance to an
outside observer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Human beings require
light to see, but since light cannot escape a black hole once it’s crossed the
event horizon, humans cannot actually “see” a black hole (hence the painfully
obvious nomination).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What happens, then,
when an object traverses the theoretical boundary of the event horizon?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Rather than simply disappearing to an outside
observer, the object instead would appear to tumble eternally toward the event
horizon, always nearing the point of no return, but never actually crossing it
(think of an asymptote, a curve which approaches the line of a graph without
ever actually touching it).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Likewise, if
a subject traversed the event horizon, the moment of crossing would be
mathematically calculable, but invisible; there would be no discernible visible
difference.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Since
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">information itself</i> cannot escape a
black hole, any method of representation fails.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>While mathematics and quantum physics can point us toward knowledge of a
black hole’s existence, they cannot explain what a black hole <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">is.</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Descriptions of black holes as collapsed stars whose masses and
densities have reached such extremes that not even light can escape their
gravity helps us understand how a black hole comes to be, but doesn’t explain
(again) what it is.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Most immediately,
all we can say about black holes is that they are <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">nothing;</i> but nothing cannot exert the devastating forces that
gravitational singularities exert on the observable universe.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Can
it?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Light,</i> the Kefahuchi Tract is an
observable, or naked, singularity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is
a singularity without an event horizon, thus allowing observers to visibly
witness it (theories do exist for naked singularities in current science, but
none have been discovered).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>However,
even visibility doesn’t permit answers for Harrison’s readers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If the singularity of the Kefahuchi Tract is
visible, it is radically illogical.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Kefahuchi
Tract – and the universe in general – becomes, in Harrison’s literary vision, a
site where anything is possible: “[Humans] wondered why the universe, which
seemed so harsh on top, was underneath so pliable.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Anything worked.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Wherever you looked, you found.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They were hoping to find out why” (Harrison
182).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Kefahuchi Tract is even more
affronting than a black hole because it makes the absence of logicality
visible.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>If
the laws of physics do not hold for Harrison, neither do the laws of
literature; and this makes <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Light</i> an
artistic masterpiece in my opinion.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If temporal
processes break down, how can a narrative be traditionally represented?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is not a problem for Harrison, who leaps
back and forth between 1999 and 2400 seamlessly, although the two begin to
bleed into one another in the presence of the strange substance that leaks from
Kearney’s and Tate’s computer monitors.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>This leads me to the quote with which I opened this post: “Information
might be a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">substance</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Can you imagine that?” (Harrison 357).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To which I then asked: can you?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Harrison certainly does.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>One
of the most enigmatic features of black hole research is known as the “information
paradox”, which suggests that black holes destroy physical information once
they consume it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This seems strange on
first glance, since information often appears intangible – as something known,
but not something that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">is.</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Does material contain information?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or is information projected, internalized,
and represented by observing subjects?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Harrison’s delicious romp through space and time posits a universe wherein
information exists on an entirely different scale, as something physical,
tangible, and perhaps even biological.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I
would refrain from claiming that there is any conclusion to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Light;</i> I don’t think it attempts any conclusion.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It embraces an environment and narrative
structure where a wealth of information proliferates, but remains incalculable
to the human sciences.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Light</i> accepts a universe where (just as
in our reality) researchers and scholars posit theories and hypotheses by which
to navigate space-time; but the novel exposes these theories to a harsh and
capricious non-totality where anything seems to work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This in turn invites the following question:
what happens if things <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">stop</i> working?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>If
information is a substance, a substrate, to the universe in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Light,</i> then the Kefahuchi Tract is a
window into its non- and pre-human ontology.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It does not conform to epistemological structures; or, if it does, it
conforms to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">all</i> of them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Rather than a void, an unobservable absence
that consumes light and information, the Kefahuchi Tract is observable; rather
than consuming physical laws to the point that nothing functions, it
deconstructs the limits of physical possibility.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Causal reasoning faces its greatest
challenge.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The problem of induction
first posed by David Hume suddenly surges to the forefront.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Viewed in this light (an unavoidable pun),
the narrative universe almost seems to take on an abstractly benign
quality.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is no doubt that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Light</i> is a violent story, but behind the
three narrative strains lurks something of a unifying thread.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I would not go so far as to claim that
Harrison believes our universe to be inherently benign.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That would grant far too much
anthropomorphism to its being.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is,
however, far more to it than what is visible.</span><br />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<br />
<div style="mso-element: endnote-list;">
<div id="edn1" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=4194280971933732517&pli=1#_ednref1" name="_edn1" style="mso-endnote-id: edn1;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[i]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
This reference is from the collection of excerpted critical praise at the
beginning of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Light.</i><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
</div>
<div align="center" class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Works Cited<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: center;">
</div>
<div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Harrison, M John. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Light.</i>
New York: Bantam Dell, 2007. Print.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
</div>
<div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Tyson, Neil DeGrasse. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Death By Black Hole and Other Cosmic Quandaries.</i> New York: W.W.
Norton & Co., Inc., <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">2007. Print.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
Patrick Whitmarshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09136674843890947797noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4194280971933732517.post-87665934726074223642012-09-22T12:34:00.001-07:002012-09-23T06:15:02.414-07:00"Sleep well in your beds, 'cause if this thing comes true there ain't gonna be any more": Ecology and Psycho-sexuality in Jeff Nichols's Take Shelter<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
opening scene of Jeff Nichols’s existentially terrifying film, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Take Shelter,</i> sets the mood for entire
affair: our protagonist, Curtis, stands in front of his house in the Midwestern
United States watching an encroaching storm (the effects here are absolutely
beautiful, although the result is unsettling).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>As he observes the strange cloud formations, it begins to rain; but this
rain is a strange amber color, and is compared by Curtis later on in the film
to motor oil.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He sniffs the rain, but
says nothing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The scene then abruptly
cuts to Curtis in the shower, yet the sound of the rain is uninterrupted,
carrying continuously into our main character’s morning cleansing ritual.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>It
is revealed that the strange opening sequence is one of many dream visions our
middle-class protagonist begins to suffer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>As the film progresses, the nightmares grow stronger, and are paralleled
by Curtis’s increasing paranoia and intensifying fear: fear, first and foremost,
that his family is in danger; that, as he says, “[…] something might be coming.”<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=4194280971933732517#_edn1" name="_ednref1" style="mso-endnote-id: edn1;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[i]</span></span></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
film follows this growing paranoia; how it manifests, its mysterious cause, its
effects on Curtis’s family… and as the audience is carried along, hypnotized by
Nichols’s near-flawless directing, we begin to wonder: are these visions the
result of a psychotically damaged mind; or is there some kernel of truth to them,
some metaphysical essence of prophecy? <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I
do not intend to spoil the film for anyone, but I will say this before
continuing: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Take Shelter</i> is possibly
the most terrifying film I have seen since Stanley Kubrick’s groundbreaking <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">2001: A Space Odyssey</i> (and those who are
familiar with the latter will understand the kind of terror I am speaking
of).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It does not rely on cheap scares,
although there are a few moments that might make you leap out of your chair;
rather, the film thrives on its growing intensity and uncertainty.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It gradually creates an aura of utter
displacement and alienation, from both others and oneself, realized through the
film’s protagonist (supremely played by Michael Shannon).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The most terrifying aspects of the film never
cause the audience to jump or scream.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>They are the moments when we realize how things that we take for granted
– things that are supposed to be normal and familiar to us – suddenly become
different, strange, and utterly unknown.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The film deals with this theme of alienation through one of the most
precious and valorized institutions of our contemporary society: the family.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is the primary reason why this film
chills me to the bone.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Someone
might ask why I am including a discussion of this film on a blog about science
fiction.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I have two reasons: first, I am
inclined to believe that the film might actually be classified as science
fiction (but I’ll say no more); and second, even if the film does not fall
under the traditional category of sci-fi, its subject matter is of a common
type with sci-fi (I’m referring to the nonhuman as such).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Take
Shelter</i> is a film about the gradual evacuation of a human relationship with
the world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As the film goes on, objects
lose their sense of familiarity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Scenes
of nature appear grim and unforgiving, even intentionally threatening.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Family members begin to turn against each
other, even while trying ruthlessly to prove their love.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Human action looks strange to other humans.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Intentions are threadbare, although they seem
to still exist.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The human mind, that
organ we take for granted, becomes the source of an unreality that we can
scarcely imagine.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Take Shelter</i> is not terrifying because
it shows us aliens, or ghosts, or monsters.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It is terrifying because it asks if there is any difference between the
aforementioned things and human beings.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>If you are an object for me, then I can only be an object for you; and
when objects lose their anthropomorphism, the terror can be unlimited, even for
a film that is as superficially banal as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Take
Shelter.</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In this post, I want to
venture beneath the banality to try and decipher a bit more about what is going
on in this artfully composed film.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I
have been a bit heavy on theory and philosophy in the past few posts, so I hope
this one marks a return to dealing more directly with the “text” itself.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I
want to suggest two components of, or approaches to, the film, since they
comprise the crux of the burning question at its center: is Curtis insane, or
are his visions prophetic (are these mutually exclusive)?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In light of this central question, I want to
suggest the following pair of methodological discourses: the psychological (psychoanalytic?
schizoanalytic?), and ecological (since, if Curtis’s visions are somehow
prophetic, it would appear that some catastrophic ecological disaster is
looming).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Both of these approaches share
a common concern: the relationship of the subject to an-other, whether that
‘other’ is another human being, or the nonhuman noumenon of nature itself.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
human/nature dichotomy has long been a subject of debate among theorists, with
many recent figures claiming that it is nothing more than an effect of rampant
anthropocentrism since the Enlightenment (and prior) that posits the natural
world as something “other” that needs to be controlled.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While this is a vulgar description, I want to
briefly pursue a clarification of a more recent conception of what this
human/nature dichotomy has in store.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It
is put forth by Eugene Thacker in his recent publication, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy Volume I</i>: “can
there exist today a mysticism of the unhuman, one that has as its focus the
climatological, meterological<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>[sic], and
geological world-in-itself, and, moreover, one that does not resort to either
religion or science” (133).<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=4194280971933732517#_edn2" name="_ednref2" style="mso-endnote-id: edn2;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[ii]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Thacker is cautious to distinguish this
proposition from any kind of mysticism of the Earth or nature, both of which
harbor certain connections to more archaic conceptions of theism and spiritual
unity between self and world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Thacker
urges his audience to consider the implications of a mysticism “after the death
of God” – a “mysticism of the unhuman”, which he claims can only be “climatological”
(158-9).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I do not want to dwell on this
point too much, but I think it affords us a point of entry to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Take Shelter:</i> does this film offer its
audience a terrifyingly real representation of humanity coming into contact
with a strange, catastrophically violent external world?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>It is,
of course, fitting that Curtis’s hallucinations almost always involve storms.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sometimes he hallucinates thunder absent any
visual signs; in one stunning scene, he witnesses an immense murmuration (for
those who are unfamiliar with this term, look up some photos of them online –
amazing).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Eventually, strangers begin to
appear in his dream-visions, near faceless abstractions that seem to harbor no
other discernible intention than harming Curtis and his family.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Finally, these hallucinations culminate in
visions of people he knows, at first his coworker.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then, in what is certainly the most
terrifying scene in the film, Curtis has a vision involving his wife.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There are no words spoken in this vision, and
no acts of violence, although the presence of a knife on the kitchen counter
heightens the tension.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The scene is
terrifying in the potential chaos that lurks beneath the surface, and in the
terrific acting by Jessica Chastain (Curtis mentions earlier in the film that,
in his visions, people’s eyes are “different”; somehow, Chastain manages to
pull this off, and it doesn’t flee quickly from memory).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is almost as though, in Curtis’s
hallucinations, the enormous power of some unhuman noumenon infects those other
human figures, who become nothing more than things (phenomena?), apparently
devoid of any relative subjectivity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is
worth noting that the hostile figures in Curtis’s visions have always been
subjected to the greasy rain.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Accompanying
these hallucinations are several episodes and details that may offer some
clarification on the psychological front:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Curtis’s
daughter, Hannah, is deaf, and in an early scene we see the whole family at an
ASL class.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not by accident, the sign
they are discussing is the sign for the father.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Throughout the film, Curtis is conflicted by what it means to be a
father (protector, lawgiver, breadwinner, etc.), and this comes to the surface
in a line when he admits his hallucinations to his wife: “I promised myself
that I would never leave, and I am doing everything I can to make that true”
(Nichols).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The promise that Curtis made
as a member of the family (legal/social/economical) conditions his actions,
particularly in a financial way.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Money
remains a prominent theme throughout the film, since Curtis’s obsession in
protecting his family (which leads to him building a tornado shelter in their
backyard) is a large drain on their savings.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Furthermore, the family is also saving for a cochlear implant for
Hannah.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Around every turn lurks the
question of money.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
sexual imagery and social hierarchy of patriarchy is present as well,
particularly in associations of phallic representations and nocturnal
enuresis.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Themes of drilling and digging
– even employment itself (Curtis works on a construction crew that involves
some kind of rig-drilling – more than a coincidence the weird rain sometimes
looks like oil…?) – all these tropes reinforce Curtis’s masculine
sensibilities.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His confidence is shaken
in an episode of bedwetting, but his daily activities allow him to
compensate.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Part of his anxiety is a
fear of not fulfilling the space of the father in the familial hierarchy; of
not being able to protect those whom he is supposed to protect.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His obsession with the symbolic compensation
for his feared lack of masculinity essentially presents itself as the trend we
know of as “homesteading.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Finally, we
also learn that Curtis’s mother was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia when
he was only ten years old; and to add to that, we also learn that his own
father passed away less than a year prior to when the film takes place.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Any issues he may have had with his own
father are left out of the film, but an audience might wonder what this literal
“death of the father” might symbolically connote for Curtis.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Psychologically,
the film offers a probing look at one man’s descent into an intense anxiety and
the effect of this anxiety on his family.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>However, don’t write the film off as a depressing, hopeless
representation of madness or insanity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>At the true heart of this film lies something extraordinarily touching
and human (I know, strange for me to claim!): that is, the representation of
trust and love among a family.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Samantha, Chastain’s character, is a strong and realistic
representation, and doesn’t succumb to what might be criticized as typically
negative feminine stereotypes: she does not leave Curtis, although she
struggles with him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She does not try to
hurt Curtis psychologically, and in fact ascends to a position of admirable
strength in order to assist him in what she must understand is a culturally
difficult scenario.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even in one of the
film’s most violent scenes, in which Curtis’s questionable mental state boils
over in a public rage, she does not run away or shrink like other members of
the Lion’s Club dinner event.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Instead,
she approaches her tormented husband, reassures him, letting him cry on her
shoulder as they vacate the premises.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She
does not see him the way other characters are made to: she never alienates him,
never begrudgingly ignores him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The only
thing she could be said to feel is uncertainty and worry over his condition;
but this only urges her closer to him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In
a telling scene near the end, Curtis admits unemployment to his psychiatrist in a slightly
embarrassed tone, and we are again reminded of that symbolic link between unemployment
and castration.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But I would encourage
the audience not to project this view onto Curtis’s character; for while Nichols may
very well be dealing with these ideas, I would argue that Samantha does not
view Curtis as emasculated at all.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Curtis is still embarrassed to admit his unemployment in front of
someone else (is it a coincidence that this other figure is that of the psychiatrist?), but he is not embarrassed to admit it in front
of his wife.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I believe that the film
deals, at least mildly, with a Deleuzian-Guattarian subversion of traditional
(Oedipal) psychoanalytic structures.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=4194280971933732517#_edn3" name="_ednref3" style="mso-endnote-id: edn3;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[iii]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Certainly there is some connection to be made
between Curtis and his deceased father, but Curtis himself has a daughter,
Hannah.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Oedipal cycle ends here, so
it does not behoove us to discuss it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>What we <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">can</i> discuss is the
sexualization within the social apparatus, specifically a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">capitalist</i> social apparatus.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The psychological implications are all there, ready for the taking…<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>…and
then we are awarded with the film’s ominous and stunning final scene, which I don’t
want to discuss in detail (for those who want it spoiled for them, send me a
message or look it up!).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I only want to
ask how we are to reconcile the two apparent concerns within the film: the
psychological and the ecological.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My most
immediate response is likely also the simplest, and probably too vulgar to
withstand any serious academic interpretation: capitalism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But of course!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Scenes of construction and drilling are
juxtaposed with scenes of trees and leaves, storms and rain; is this not the
anxiety over the destruction of nature?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And
we are constantly reminded of the family’s financial troubles, more general
economic concerns (as when Curtis’s brother warns him about the state of “this
economy”); is the looming storm, the pending catastrophe, not the inevitable explosion
of the real contradictions that grind and crank in the capitalist economy’s
core?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I think Nichols would scoff at
this superficial interpretation, but I do think it is worth considering, even
if only to discard it for another more appropriate analysis.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Most pertinently, I think, we can engage the
film through a kind of triumvirate: sexuality/psychology, commodity/money,
ecology.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is in the latter of these
three that potential relief waits, the bombastic release of internal tensions
in the form of a thunderstorm.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But the
former two components are specifically codifying systems; they are hierarchized
structures, the real conditions of which effect <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">imagined</i> social relations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I
won’t offer any more lucid interpretation of the relation between these structures,
but I think that their presence in the film is beyond coincidence.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Why
does Nichols choose the ecological as the locus of disaster, of catastrophe (of
revolution)?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I believe it has to do with
a conception of the ecological, or the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">climatological</i>
as Thacker calls it, as an alien realm; a reality not-for-us, a harsh noumenon
that does not even permit its “thinkability.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Here we might briefly quote Quentin Meillassoux, whose book <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">After Finitude </i>has proven quite
monumental for me as of late: “this totality of the thinkable is itself
logically inconceivable, since it gives rise to a contradiction.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We will retain the following translation of
Cantor’s transfinite: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the (quantifiable)
totality of the thinkable is unthinkable”</i> (104).<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=4194280971933732517#_edn4" name="_ednref4" style="mso-endnote-id: edn4;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[iv]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Take
Shelter,</i> the natural world assumes Meillassoux’s definition of reality as
an unthinkable totality, specifically because totality itself becomes
non-totalizable.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Reality becomes, as
Meillassioux defines it, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">transfinite</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Part of this concept of “transfinitude”
involves an opening up the “possible” to a set of unlimited possibilities.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Thus, order gives way to chaos, reason to
unreason, systems to their dissolution (and perhaps, even, moments of pure
miracle, which is not quite an appropriate word but the only one we have
recourse to).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is how the film
achieves its stunning portrayal of the world we know suddenly become other;
threatening, ominous, almost intentionally malicious…<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I
believe that one scene in particular solidifies this terrifying representation
of reality.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In one of his dreams, Curtis
pulls his daughter away from their living room window after seeing a stranger
outside, peering in through the glass (it is, of course, raining outside).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The front door begins to shudder violently,
as though someone is trying to get in.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Eventually this shuddering afflicts the entire house, the furniture,
picture frames, vases, televisions, everything.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>And then, when the intensity of the tremors reaches its climax, everything
in the room suddenly lifts off the ground, suspended in midair by perhaps three
or four feet.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A deafening silence accompanies
this moment (a brief auditory glimpse into the world of Curtis’s daughter, whom
he clutches desperately), as though the house has been invaded by a
vacuum.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Accordingly, Curtis looks as
though he cannot breath, although he does cry out at one point; sound, of
course, does not carry in a vacuum, although Nichols does choose to drastically
lower the frequency of Curtis’s voice.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This
is a strange episode that does not repeat in the film; reality never again
alters itself in this way.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is as
though, for this single moment, the void of some nonhuman reality yawns in
front of Curtis, its Lovecraftian jaws gaping wide, threatening to engulf
him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is as though it begs Curtis to
see its true nature in this moment, albeit briefly, but we are left to wonder
whether human senses could apprehend such abyssal otherness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I am reminded of R. Scott Bakker’s wondrous
character of the No-God in his ongoing fantasy series, which begs those who
look at it to “TELL ME WHAT YOU SEE.”<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=4194280971933732517#_edn5" name="_ednref5" style="mso-endnote-id: edn5;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[v]</span></span></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Of
course, such hallucinations can only be classified as such:
hallucinations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We are given this from
the eyes of someone who very likely suffers from paranoid schizophrenia.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>However, I would just like to close by asking
if, perhaps, what the film is drawing our attention to is the fact that as
humans we have no choice but to identify such behavior with insanity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>How else could we make sense of someone who
claimed to witness something so vastly alien?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The explanation, within our systems of science and knowledge, does not
allow for a “mysticism of the unhuman,” as Thacker calls it (although he,
Meillassoux, and others are working to change that).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We must classify such cases as psychotic
episodes, instances of insanity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>After all,
if we define insanity in its crudest sense, it does not mean a broken or
deficient human being; it just means a square peg that won’t fit into a round
hole.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>From
this perspective, science is just another way we sleep soundly at night.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Watch <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Take
Shelter</i>; you might not sleep soundly, but it will be because you’re busy
thinking.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div style="mso-element: endnote-list;">
<br />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<div id="edn1" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=4194280971933732517#_ednref1" name="_edn1" style="mso-endnote-id: edn1;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[i]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> Jeff
Nichols, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Take Shelter,</i> Strange Matter
Films: 2011.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
</div>
<div id="edn2" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=4194280971933732517#_ednref2" name="_edn2" style="mso-endnote-id: edn2;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[ii]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
Eugene Thacker, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">In the Dust of This
Planet: Horror of Philosophy Vol. I,</i> Zero Books: 2011.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
</div>
<div id="edn3" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=4194280971933732517#_ednref3" name="_edn3" style="mso-endnote-id: edn3;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[iii]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Anti-Oedipus:
Capitalism and Schizophrenia,</i> Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R.
Lane, Penguin Books: 2009.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
</div>
<div id="edn4" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=4194280971933732517#_ednref4" name="_edn4" style="mso-endnote-id: edn4;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[iv]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
Quentin Meillassoux, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">After Finitude,</i>
Trans. Ray Brassier, Continuum: 2008.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
</div>
<div id="edn5" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=4194280971933732517#_ednref5" name="_edn5" style="mso-endnote-id: edn5;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[v]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> R.
Scott Bakker, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Second Apocalypse
Series,</i> Overlook Press: 2003-present); the figure of the No-God is one of
current speculation on internet forums.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
</div>
</div>
Patrick Whitmarshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09136674843890947797noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4194280971933732517.post-65954826804099036192012-08-03T11:27:00.004-07:002012-08-03T11:27:47.514-07:00An Abbreviated SF Manifesto: Science Fiction and Historicism (Part II)<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">This
post is intended to complement the previous; I feel that several issues were
left unresolved or unsatisfactorily dealt with.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I believe that the discourse between historicist and scientist Marxism
was well-fleshed out, and I believe that Miéville’s novel <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Iron Council</i> is a fine example of a science fiction author who is
concerned with the theoretical issues we were discussing; but what does all
this mean for science fiction as a genre?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Certain authors might express interest in the topics we were exploring,
but how is the entire movement of the genre reflexive of these topics?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Is it at all?<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">This
post is intended as a complement to the previous, but also as a challenge.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Thus, I am setting out to accomplish two
things with this post:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">1.<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt/normal "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Address the
issue of historicism as it relates to the science fiction genre <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">as a whole</i>, rather than how it manifests
in the content of sci-fi literature, and</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">2.<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt/normal "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">More adequately
explore the (scientist) philosophical notion of the Absolute (as an ahistorical notion),
and whether science fiction literature might provide some access to this
notion.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">I
will not claim that this exploration will be exhaustive, but I do intend it to
be sufficient to raise some questions about science fiction’s relationship to,
and influence on, these issues.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Since
its early years, science fiction has always been a fringe genre; a form of
literature that existed in the margins of academic theory, despite its
widespread popularity as a pulp genre.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Its presence as an underground and pop culture phenomenon has, for
several decades, isolated it from the attention and criticism of academic
elites, the only exception being to lambast it as a prime example of low culture
doggerel.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Literary and cultural theorist
Fredric Jameson made large strides for the genre in the 1970s when he began
writing essays on sci-fi literature (these essays were anthologized in a work
titled <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Archaeologies of the Future: the
Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions</i>), and in recent decades
many English departments have made efforts to secure at least one faculty
member who has an interest in the genre (I personally had the pleasure to
attend a course on Philip K. Dick instructed by Bill Brown at University of
Chicago).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Still, science fiction remains
dangerous territory, and when authors that generally avoid science fiction (those
who write “straight fiction”, as Philip K. Dick calls it) deign to venture
within its boundaries, the label “science fiction” is rarely attributed to
their work (I’m thinking of Cormac McCarthy’s foray into post-apocalyptic
literature with <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Road</i>, or Margaret
Atwood’s daring <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Oryx & Crake</i>).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To this day, science fiction remains just
outside the sacred limits of High Literary Fiction, like the pagan
intellectuals forever stranded in the antechamber outside Dante’s hell.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">It
is this very marginalization, I contend, that charges science fiction as a
potentially radical and revolutionary form of literary art.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is a challenge to traditional forms and
norms in Western fiction, and while it borrows from traditional styles of
literature, it also has (to some extent) been granted a unique opportunity to
drastically alter and warp the styles that it works with.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As a child of the fractured, impressionist,
and sometimes unreliable narratives of modern and postmodern fiction, science
fiction is the vehicle through which several contemporary writers are actively
challenging our conceptions of fiction in Western culture. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is not to say that other genres of
fiction are not capable of challenging these conceptions, but merely that
science fiction occupies a unique place in which to do so.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By being relegated to the underground, to the
fringes of literary practice, it is given a greater freedom to explore,
experiment with, and explode the boundaries of traditional practices.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">It
is not any Absolute notion (in the philosophical sense of the term) that has
charged science fiction with this possibility, but its historical positioning
as a radical genre.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As a genre, science
fiction is still in debt to previous forms of literature; Miéville is in debt
to Lovecraft, Stross is in debt to Vinge and Clarke, Harrison is in debt to
Moorcock (and non-sci-fi writers such as Burroughs), and all the aforementioned
are in debt to those who created the space for fiction dealing with speculative
worlds: William Morris, Lord Dunsany, H.G. Wells, Jules Verne and others.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All these writers occupy a privileged space
in literary studies, but not one that is granted universal praise.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Rather, these writers have the privilege of
being exceptions to the rule, ruptures in the practice.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Within
the structure of literary history, this privileged space sets itself in
relation to not only to the rules of its time, but also to the fantasies of the
future.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By displacing itself from the
academically vetted forms and styles of typical literary fiction, sci-fi
acquires more freedom for experimentation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Furthermore, this acknowledgement of its own historical importance
allows it to comment on <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">historical
possibility</i>; this is why science fiction is so obsessed with time travel
and futuristic innovations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It
recognizes where it stands historically, and it must logically inform its own
content with a knowledge of its contemporary culture (speculative fiction that
disregards this historical responsibility typically enters into the realm of
what we refer to as “fantasy”, although this is not an entirely fair
characterization, and one that I intend to explore in the future).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In this sense, science fiction cannot be
separated from its historical conditions and circumstances, which results in a
unique paradox of sorts: in order to represent <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">content</i> that is relentlessly non-contemporary, futuristic, or
anachronistic, science fiction <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">as a genre</i>
must be relentlessly aware of its own historical position.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">The
opposition to this is the same one I mentioned in my last post: Darren
Jorgensen’s accusation that all fiction is historically self-aware; so why
should science fiction be more aware than any other genre?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My response to this accusation is as follows:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">All
fiction is, essentially, historical fiction.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Fiction, whether it deals in past, contemporary, or futuristic content,
must acknowledge its own historical position if it wishes to be taken seriously
(this is, unfortunately, the reason why fantasy has yet to break free of its
negative stigma).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Science fiction is no
different, and, some might argue, must be even more aware of its own historical
position if it wishes to seriously depict events/objects/worlds <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">that have not yet come into existence.</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is a logic to historical development,
even if it isn’t a logic of human making.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I would be more tempted to suggest that humans impose a certain logic on
historical development, which then guides us to the conclusion that history <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">could only have happened this way</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote: “The insidious
thing about the causal point of view is that it leads us to say: ‘Of course, it
had to happen like that.’ Whereas we ought to think: it may have happened <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">like that</i> – and also in many other ways”
(Wittgenstein 37e).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The true power of
science fiction, then, lies not in depicting fantastically make-believe worlds,
but in depicting <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">alternative histories</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The point of this operation is not to provide
imaginative worlds which readers can lose themselves in (the escapist
argument), but to remind readers that history is comprised not of causal
events, but of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">contingent</i> events.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The most important gift that science fiction
has given its audience is the reminder that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">history
is not ours</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Where
is the Absolute in all this?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Where is
the Truth?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Truth (if there is one)
lies in the “not ours” of history.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
Truth that sci-fi strives toward is the Truth of Absolute contingency, or
Absolute chaos: the reality of what-is to radically become what-is-not, and to
change without warning, without recourse to human history.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What is Absolute is the apparatus by which we
might hypothesize about alternate realities, alternate histories; the apparatus
by which we might envision (and even realize) alternative Truths.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My inspiration for this notion of such a philosophical
apparatus stems from recent developments in the continental tradition,
particularly those of Alain Badiou and Quentin Meillassoux.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Toward
the end of the 20<sup>th</sup> century, philosophical notions of the Absolute
began to fall out of favor.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
epistemes of Michel Foucault, the paradigm shifts of Thomas Kuhn, the
deconstruction of Jacques Derrida; all these led to a kind of meta-philosophy,
a philosophy of philosophy, which in turn resulted in a subtraction of the
Absolute from philosophy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The idea of
Absolute Truth was consigned to the dustbin of relative meaning and value.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Now, in the early years of the 21<sup>st</sup>
century, we are seeing a reinvigoration of the Absolute in the philosophical
projects of Alain Badiou, Quentin Meillassoux, and Ray Brassier; but it is not
an Absolute like that of Hegel, Kant, or even Plato.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is an Absolute of unlimited possibility.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Science
fiction is the literary precursor of this recent philosophic trend.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As a genre of fiction it is more charged than
“regular” fiction with the possibility to represent radically other realities.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The difficulty of interpretation (which I
often fall prey to) lies in recognizing that the content of these represented
realities matters little.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What matters
is their structure, their logical relationship to the conditions of their
author’s own present.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As long as such
realities, even the most farfetched, are contextualized within actual specific
historical conditions, they are capable of demonstrating the radical
contingency of historical events.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This
is the cross-section of historicism and scientism, of historicity and Absolute
procedure.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Historicity conditions the
details of a fiction’s diegetic content; its Absolute procedure is the logical
commitment (the form of this commitment would be a kind of philosophical
apparatus) to its own historical conditions in order to experiment with, and
convincingly represent, alternate histories and alien worlds.</span></div>
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</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Works Cited<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Wittgenstein,
Ludwig. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Culture and Value</i>. Trans.
Peter Winch. Chicago, The U of Chicago P: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">1980.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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</div>Patrick Whitmarshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09136674843890947797noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4194280971933732517.post-1366233086382244732012-07-23T12:56:00.000-07:002012-07-23T12:56:05.396-07:00"Future History": Science Fiction and Historicism<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">My
topic today is partly informed by the dialogue between historicism and
scientism in Marxist hermeneutics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’ll
begin by iterating that I tend to support the historicist approach, although I
find myself torn by this discourse, namely because there is much to desire
regarding the scientist approach although it often appears out of reach of the
human.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Since this blog, as a space for
science fiction, is specifically concerned with the genre’s more current
obsession with the nonhuman <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">as is</i>, I
would like for this post to concern itself seriously (or as seriously as is
possible in an online space) with this theoretical debate.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While I see the historicist approach as
affording the more immediate access to a theory of praxis, the scientist
approach seems to coincide with the more radical <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">nonhuman</i> approach of science fiction literature.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>However, I want to insist that historicism
offers a logical interpretive support to the science fiction genre, and that
this connection emerges primarily in the genre’s more recent developments
(typically works published since 1950).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>While this blog post can only serve as an introduction to this much
larger thesis, I believe that recent trends in science fiction brilliantly reflect
trends in 20<sup>th</sup>-century historicist hermeneutics.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">To
begin the explication of this discourse, I want to introduce a quote from
science fiction writer Philip K. Dick:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">[Robert] Heinlein has written what he
calls “future history,” and much of SF is.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>And much of the motivation that drives the SF writer is the motivation
to “make” history – contribute what he sees, his perception of “…and then what
happened?” to what all the rest of us have already done.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is a great colloquy among all of us,
writers and fans and editors alike.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Somewhere back in the past (I would say about 1900) this colloquy began,
and voice after voice has joined in, little frogs and big in little puddles and
big, but all croaking their sublime song… because they sense a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">continuity</i> and the possibility, the
opportunity, the ethical need, if you will, for them to add onto this growing
“future history.” (Dick 71)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">This
quote is taken from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Shifting
Realities of Philip K. Dick,</i> a collection of essays, speeches, interviews,
and even some proposals, and hypothetical introductions, for unwritten novels
or screenplays.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The book concludes with
excerpts from Dick’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Exegesis,</i> an
intimate portrayal of the writer’s hallucinations and visions near the end of his
life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A participant not only in science
fiction, but also the countercultural movements of the 1960s, Dick’s catalogue
offers an exceptionally unique perspective on modernity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His writings are more than mere machinations
of a sci-fi-inspired imagination; they are reactions to the elements that we as
human beings must suffer: political hegemony, cultural ideology, technology,
religious fundamentalism, economic exploitation, and even more
personal/psychological elements such as paranoia, hallucinations, memory, and
the uncanny.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Taken altogether, Dick’s
work explores the relationship between reality and appearance: do we understand
other people, or only ourselves? Are we free beings, or are we slaves under the
illusion of freedom? Is technology making our lives better, or worse? Is hard
work the means to success, or is it the instrument of exploitation?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Is what I remember doing yesterday what I <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">really</i> did yesterday?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The list goes on and on, but the central
theme remains the same: who am I, and what have I done with the real me?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Historically,
Dick’s work heralds the advent of a new movement in science fiction: the shift
from what has traditionally been known as “the Golden Age of Science Fiction”
(characterized by the work of early giants such as Isaac Asimov, Arthur C.
Clarke, Ray Bradbury, A.E. van Vogt, Poul Anderson, and Robert Heinlein among
several others) to what has been more recently referred to as “New Wave
Sci-fi”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Each is characterized by a very
specific style and set of standards.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In
Golden Age, plots are often rather straightforward, linear, and feature more
traditional, archetypal models (despite its late appearance, George Lucas’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Star Wars</i> trilogy fits rather nicely
into this category, albeit without the advanced scientific knowledge that characterized
many earlier examples).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Golden Age
science fiction also traditionally falls into the category of “Hard Sci-fi”, or
science fiction that attempts to deal realistically with legitimate scientific
problems or situations, thus remaining more scientifically accurate.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Finally, Golden Age sci-fi is also often
profoundly concerned with the ideas it proposes, ideas that often trump plot
and character in importance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For this
reason, many critics find Golden Age sci-fi simple and hackneyed in style, and
some of them rightly so.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">In
contrast to the Golden Age, New Wave sci-fi introduces something new.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Although opinions vary in this matter,
general consensus holds that the Golden Age comes to a close just prior to the
1950s (although many of its greatest writers, such as Bradbury, continued
working throughout the 20<sup>th</sup> century), and the New Wave picks up
sometime in the 60s and 70s.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If we
accept this relative chronology, we find that Philip K. Dick occupies a unique
and perhaps uncategorized moment in sci-fi history – not quite Golden Age, but
slightly prior to New Wave – and yet he is considered by many to be one of the
most important writers of science fiction, and fiction in general, to ever
grace the printed page (he was the first writer of what can be definitively
called “science fiction” to have his work anthologized in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Library of America</i> collections).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Thus, we find Dick’s fiction to be some of
the most original and interesting to ever emerge in the science fiction genre,
namely because he can be said to embody the very shift between Golden Age and
New Wave.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His early writing is often in
debt to his predecessors; strong emphasis on ideas, concepts, but lacking in
developed characterization and plot, particularly his short stories.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>However, even in these earliest writings, we
find that his ideas and proposals take on a form that is distinct from those of
his predecessors in that they explore, to a greater extent than the sci-fi
leagues before him, their cognitive and psychological implications.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In Dick’s work, even his earliest stories,
the speculative environments introduced are rarely posited as objective or
noumeal realities, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">in-itself</i>
realities.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They are, readers will often
find, skeptical to a sometimes debilitating extent.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The speculative environment becomes reflexive
of a possible internal disjunct with reality, a perception that might not
square with what <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">actually</i> exists.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">As
readers move chronologically forward through Dick’s body of work, they will
find that his characters begin to adopt more personalized attributes, more
round representations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As he matures, so
does his writing, and later novels such as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A
Scanner Darkly</i> or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">VALIS</i> begin to
look less like imaginative explorations of strange worlds and more like
poignant psychedelic critiques of a world that is oddly similar, yet not quite
right – an uncanny world, one that we know to be real, but that seems strange.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is the immense contribution that Dick
offers to the New Wave tradition, wherein we begin finding more and more
writers who are obsessed with their characters’ reactions to the environments
represented in their narratives, with the philosophical implications of
hypothetical worlds, with the relationship between the human subject and the
inhuman object (for a fantastic example of Dick’s own fascination with the
latter, observe his late novel <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ubik</i>).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is in this tradition that we see writers
such as William Gibson, M. John Harrison, and Ursula Le Guin, writers whose
novels take an exciting new energy, an obsession with the fractured and
delicate human subject that had been exposed to literary audiences by Modernist
writers like Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This shift from Golden Age to New Wave can
perhaps be characterized most explicitly as a shift from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">idea/concept </i>to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">character</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The heroic characters of Golden Age sci-fi
are characters who know the world they exist in, who take charge and
effectively enact change, and possess an almost preternatural (maybe even meta-textual)
certainty of their diegetic position.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The tragic and flawed characters of New Wave sci-fi, in contrast, are
often helpless, submissive victims of an unrepresentable reality, an
object-realm that exacts its unrelenting dominance over human subjects
specifically because it is alien, other, nonhuman.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">The
divide between Golden Age and New Wave can actually be rather explicitly
identified.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>After the advent of the
space race and the cultural obsession with the “final frontier,” radical
scientific ideas that had been the central theme of much Golden Age Hard sci-fi
suddenly begin to look less like science fiction, and more like science itself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Writers (and readers) become less concerned
with the “wow factor” of new ideas, and more concerned with the implications
that new technologies and global markets have on a largely superstitious and
tradition-steeped public.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They become
less concerned with imaginative intrigue and futuristic fantasy, and more
concerned with literary ambition, stylistic innovation – the power of
literature to expose the consequences of the imposition of new worlds on a
(potentially obsolete) human subject.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Science fiction literature, in a sense, reclaims its right to be thought
of as “High Culture” (an unfortunate form of segregationist elitism to begin
with), as opposed to the low, popular, “pulp” culture environment that provided
its original breeding ground in the 1920s and 30s.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Despite
his sometimes unorthodox prose and style, Dick is a major informant of this New
Wave movement in sci-fi; but I would suggest that it is in this
non-aestheticism that part of his unique appeal can be found.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even the excerpt cited above offers an
example; I highly doubt that many science fiction authors would exhibit
appreciation at being referred to as frogs “croaking their sublime song.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yet this is the procedure and strategy of the
New Wave: to turn the Golden Age on its head, to introduce a radically new form
of science fiction that will make its readers scowl, raise an eyebrow, and perhaps
even question the text they are reading.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">In
light of this historiographical exploration of science fiction, I feel inclined
to propose another question: what are the connections between science fiction
and history (a more literary variant of this question might be: what are the
connections between the sci-fi novel and the historical novel?)?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The debate can be traced to a stunted
dialogue between Fredric Jameson and Darren Jorgensen (which is less of a
dialogue per se and more of a newcomer taking on a giant of literary theory),
which in turn illuminates a much broader and influential dialogue between two
monolithic Marxist thinkers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In his
essay “Towards a Revolutionary Science Fiction: Althusser’s Critique of
Historicity”, Jorgensen criticizes Jameson’s ruthless emphasis on science
fiction’s historical “self-consciousness,” claiming that this emphasis contains
a contradiction: “if history determines genre, no one genre should be more
historical than any other” (Jorgensen 197).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Jorgensen is referring to comments made by Jameson in an early essay on
science fiction, but also in large part to a wider argument made popular by
Jameson’s 1981 book <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Political
Unconscious</i>, which specifically targets Althusserian scientific
Marxism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Althusser’s theory posits a
framework of radical existence and experimentation beyond capitalist ideology,
which he claims individuals can access as a means of revolutionary praxis.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This mode of being exterior to capitalism is
not conditioned by the latter, thus making it a pure, radically <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">other</i> form of existence that is always
available, always potentially present and ripe for revolutionary action.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In contrast, Jameson’s historicist model suggests
that revolution and radical action can only develop historically, and he
observes literary models to support this.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>In literature, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Political
Unconscious</i> claims, we can observe certain antinomies of capitalist
ideology emerging as the systems interior components begin to come into contact
with one another.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Political Unconscious</i> looks at binary oppositions in different
works of literature, and rewrites them as historically charged manifestations
of cultural conditions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Thus, for
Jameson, revolution is an emergent phenomenon, comprised of action that must
gradually develop over time, alongside capitalism but not a property <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">of</i> capitalism per se, until the antinomies
of the system can no longer sustain themselves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Althusser opposes the historicist brand of Marxism because, as he sees
it, revolution should not be something that individuals must wait for, so to
speak; this always provides a kind of theoretical excuse to avoid action, an
argument that became useful for the academic elite during the May 1968
protests.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For Jameson, revolution
becomes historically possible; for Althusser, revolution is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">always</i> possible.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">If
we wanted to understand this in more philosophical terms, we might suggest that
Jameson’s theory is an epistemological one, whereas Althusser’s is an
ontological one.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That is, Jameson’s
theory of historicist Marxism suggests that revolution only becomes an option
over time, as knowledge structures (informed historically by cultural
developments) gradually shift and change, allowing for the option of revolution
to appear.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Althusser’s theory, on the
other hand, posits an unchanging revolutionary framework that exists externally
to capitalist ideology, that is not conditioned by historical circumstances – a
kind of Absolute condition for revolution.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Let
me reiterate: I subscribe to the Jamesonian version.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I find it difficult to square a kind of
universal, Absolute theory of emancipation with a society and a culture that is
constantly in a state of flux.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If
ideology and cognitive/physical bondage take different historical forms, how
can any “universal” revolutionary praxis work for all of them?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Is it not more likely that history conditions
not only the components of cultural ideology, but also the components necessary
for emancipation?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Althusser’s theory
thus becomes one of idealism, despite his claim that “ideology has a material
existence” (Althusser 112).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ideology
might very well have a material existence in Althusser’s theory, but its
resolution has an ideal form, one that somehow exists exterior to ideology,
exterior to human thought itself, and thus exterior to its anthropomorphisms.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Furthermore, Althusser claims that ideology
has no history, in stark contrast to Jameson, where ideology must be
historically determined.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">If
one has difficulty seeing where all this leads, that person is not alone.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Althusser claims that “ideologies <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">have a history of their own</i>” while
“ideology <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">in general has no history</i>,
not in a negative sense (its history is external to it), but in an absolutely
positive sense” (108).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These are strong
words, especially for a theorist who also wrote that “ideology <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">has no outside</i> (for itself), but at the
same time […] <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">it is nothing but outside</i>
(for science and reality)” (119).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What
Althusser means by this is that in order for ideology to work, it must convince
its subjects that they are “outside” of it (i.e. not under its influence); and
yet, only by coming to an absolute scientific knowledge of ideology can one
declare that she is “inside” ideology (since she thus would understand that it
has no outside).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The argument is so
cyclical that it begins to make its readers feel as though they have raced
around so quickly that they have caught up with and bumped into themselves.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Interestingly
enough, this is how I sometimes imagine the character’s in Dick’s novels feel.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">I
will not try and convince readers of either the Jamesonian or Althusserian
model, but instead suggest that both models provide relevant methodological
apparatuses for exploring science fiction.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I personally find Althusser’s model problematic primarily for the reason
that by attempting to secure a scientific Marxism, and thus provide a
revolutionary model that is immediately present and at hand, Althusser also
precludes any possibility of human engagement with it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By positing a radical existence beyond
ideology (and hence beyond human apperception), Althusser closes off the
revolutionary possibility from the realm of the human subject; the very ability
of the human subject to conceive of revolution has been conditioned by that
individual’s subjectivity, which is a direct result of ideology.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He thus proposes a method of philosophical
praxis that is impossible to practice.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">If
Althusser’s theory succumbs to paradox, it is fitting; one must conceive of
ideology as an object in order to come to terms with her subjectivity within
it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The impasse collapses inward from culture and
society down to cognition itself – a theme that registers with a great deal of
contemporary sci-fi.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Furthermore,
Althusser’s emphasis on a kind of scientific Marxism suggests that what human
subjects need to do in order to achieve emancipation is engage in action so
radical that it ruptures the very limits of ideology itself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A violence of this kind is unimaginable, and
it is this utter disconnect between ideological subjects and a revolutionary
exterior that is the truly “science fictional” component of his theory.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On the other hand, Jameson’s approach
provides an interesting methodology for exploring the genre of science fiction
as a whole; and this shall bring us back to Dick’s prophetic statement that
what sci-fi writers desire to create is a kind of “future history.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">It
is with this point that Dick hits on the crux of the argument between
historicism and scientism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Dick suggests
a hypothetical situation in which a three million-year-old skull is discovered
in Africa, and the implications of such a discovery for a sci-fi writer:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">[…] I would imagine a whole culture, and
speculate as in a voluntary dream, what that person’s world might have been
like.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I do not mean his diet or how fast
he could run or if he walked upright; this is legitimate for the hard sciences
to deal with.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What I see is what I
suppose I would have to call a “fictional” environment that that skull tells me
of.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A story that that skull might wish
to say.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Might” is the crucial word,
because we don’t know, we don’t have the artifacts, and yet I see more than I
hold in my hand.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Each object is a clue,
a key, to an entire world unlike our own – past, present, or future, it is not <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">this</i> immediate world, and this skull
tells me of this other world, and this I must dream up myself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I have passed out of the domain of true
science. (Dick 72).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">This
excerpt, as the one above, is from a 1974 essay titled “Who is an SF
Writer?”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In this essay, Dick zeroes in
on one of the most important and identifying themes of New Wave sci-fi: the
obsession with an inaccessible reality.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>This reality cannot be explained, Dick claims, through recourse to
traditional science, that being a pursuit of knowledge conditioned by known, or
contemporary, reality.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The sci-fi
writer, according to Dick, must resort to something else; and if it is the
sci-fi writer’s aim to imagine fictional world-extensions of a decontextualized
object, then it must attempt to place that object in some kind of logical
context.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This context is only available
to the sci-fi writer through the lens of historiography.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">This
might seem contradictory, since history itself is always a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">human</i> history.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is written
by humans, requested by humans, and read by humans.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But by writing history, by requesting it, and
by studying it, we can come to see the element of contingency at play in
historical progress.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That is, we can
begin to identify where history took a certain direction, and some of the
circumstances that conditioned that direction, but also how things might have
been different.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The study of history
also allows for the study of non-history; not the study of what actually was
(yet still through the lens of structured narrative), but the potentiality of
radically different outcomes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is in
this way that we begin to see the inherent chaos of historical development, and
the illusion behind the notion of progress.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It is no coincidence that one of Dick’s early and most successful
novels, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Man in the High Castle</i>, was
an alternative history novel.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And merely
three years later he published <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dr.
Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb</i>, a novel that dealt with the
aftermath of nuclear war on earth.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>More
than anything, these examples should suggest to us the poignancy of Dick’s
statements from “Who is an SF Writer?”: namely, that a science fiction writer’s
method is, first and foremost, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">historical</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Jameson’s
theory posits the historical development of both ideology and the revolutionary
tools with which human subjects can try to dismantle it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The conclusion implicit in this is that
humanity must wait, in a certain sense of the word, for its revolutionary
capacity to catch up with its ideological containment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In a sense this is true; but in another
sense, it is misleading.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Jameson would
not condone apathy or indifference; the attitude of “Well, it isn’t time for
revolution yet, so we might as well wait a little longer.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not at all.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Jameson’s theory is one of intellectual dedication and commitment, and
the continual attempt of revolution against a continually adapting ideological
complex.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One should notice here a
certain similarity with the Hegelianism of Slavoj Žižek (despite the
differences between the two thinkers), especially as it emerges in his
explication of the slogan “We are the ones we have been waiting for” (Žižek
148-157).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For Žižek, as for Jameson,
historical development is against us, in a large sense, and it is up to the
collective masses to inaugurate a revolutionary historical event, a rupture in
the apocalyptic tide of history (154).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What
Jameson’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Political Unconscious</i>
exposes, then, is not an absolutely positive notion of ideology or revolution,
but a method of identifying ideological antinomies in the textual production of
different historical periods (one might even say in the textual production of
history itself).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the conclusion of
his book, Jameson asks his audience the following:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">[H]ow is it possible for a cultural text
which fulfills a demonstrably ideological function, as a hegemonic work whose
formal categories as well as its content secure the legitimation of this or
that form of class domination – how is it possible for such a text to embody a
properly Utopian impulse, or to resonate a universal value inconsistent with
the narrower limits of class privilege which inform its more immediate
ideological vocation? (Jameson 288).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Jameson
is here outlining the problem of discerning from literary/historical texts,
which he takes as superficially infused with the class ideology of their
contemporary cultural circumstances, a certain revolutionary impulse; a Utopian
twist that exposes, in the underlying hypocrisies of the work, the inherent
emptiness of the ideological values that it espouses.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Jameson offers a potential solution to this
problem by suggesting a dialectic, in the Hegelian sense of the term, between ideology
and Utopia: Jameson says that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">all class
ideologies contain a Utopian element within themselves</i>, and this is the
justification for his historical conception of Marxism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If ideology and Utopia are forever engaged in
a dialectic struggle, then history is the battlefield for that struggle, and
human subjects are its soldiers.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Although
I have been referencing Dick to explicate this concern with history in science
fiction, I want to turn now to what I perceive as the most explicit and
wondrous representation of a historicist Marxism in a work of speculative
fiction; specifically, China Miéville’s heartbreaking novel, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Iron Council.</i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Iron Council</span></i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> is the story of
a railroad being built across Miéville’s fictional realm known as Bas-Lag,
about the laborers who rebel and take control of it, and lead the train-cars
back toward the metropolitan capital, the of authoritarian politics and
technocratic hegemony – New Crobuzon.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I
will not spoil the narrative (which is a thrilling one), but will merely say
that major theme is the charged potential of revolutionary praxis in history,
the progression of history (the description of the railroad being built in Miéville’s
novel often utilizes vocabulary reminiscent of Walter Benjamin’s famous ‘Angel
of History’ section from the monumental <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Theses
on the Philosophy of History</i>), and role of human subjects in realizing
historical opportunity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Toward the end
of the novel, two characters whose opinions disagree on the fate of the
revolutionary force (known as the Iron Council), face off in a verbal debate
that epitomizes the crux of the historical dilemma:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">“You don’t decide when is the right
time, when it fits your story.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">This was the time we were here.</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We knew.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>We decided […] We were something real, and we came in our time, and we
made our decision, and it was <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">not yours</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Whether we were right or wrong, it was <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">our</i> history.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You were never our augur […] Never our
savior.” (Miéville 552).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">The
point of the passage is that the historical moment of revolutionary praxis is
not decided by individuals, nor does it persist or stay the same.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The speaker of the passage above is
emphasizing the role of human agency in revolution, but not the conscious
ability of human subjects to create or destroy the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">opportunity</i> for revolution.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Jameson’s theory, as described above, is not one designed to create the
opportunity for revolution, but one designed to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">realize when the opportunity is present</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The science fiction element, the speculative
essence of this theory, is in the acknowledgement that humanity has very little
role in the creation of revolutionary opportunity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Historical development, whether it be in
strides of economics, religious (in)tolerance, political alterations, or
technological or artistic development (or, more likely, a combination of all of
the above) is never reducible to one human subject, or even to human masses
that share some cognitive awareness of the conditions they are engendering. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Human beings enact quantifiable change in the
material fabric of the world, that is certain; but it is erroneous to believe
that we can ever be totally aware of this change, or aware of our role in its
passing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Our role, rather, is to engage
history intellectually – to observe the conditions of the past, present, and
future in hopes of discerning when and where the potential for emancipatory
action appears.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>History is a
double-edged sword in this sense: on one hand, it provides the lens through
which we can attempt to understand our own position and possibly engage in
successful revolutionary action.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On the
other hand, the very presence of history itself implies that we are still
constrained by the bonds of ideology, by the socio-political laws that govern
the way in which we represent the past, present, and future to ourselves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>History is, in its very composition, an
ideological maneuver; a product, like the literary texts considered by Jameson
in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Political Unconscious</i>, of
cultural ideology itself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is no
doubt why Althusser finds the need to theorize a form of radical existence
outside of historical conditioning.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">In
this regard, one might question whether or not successful emancipatory action
is ever truly possible, in an absolute sense.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Both Jameson’s and Althusser’s theoretical models seem to place the
prospect of revolution in a distant utopian realm, whether that realm be a
non-ideological ether totally separate from our socio/politico-economic system,
or a hypothetical future that history dreams of achieving but can only
asymptotically approach. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I have no
definitive answer to this question, but I take comfort in Žižek’s recitation of
the Beckettian motto: “Try again.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Fail
again.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Fail better” (qtd. in Žižek 86).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div align="center" class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Works Cited<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Althusser,
Louis.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Ideology and Ideological State
Apparatuses.” <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lenin and Philosophy and <o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Other
Essays.</span></i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">
Trans. Ben Brewster.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>New York, Monthly
Review Press: 2001. 85-126.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Dick,
Philip K. “Who is an SF Writer?” <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected <o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Literary
and Philosophical Writings.</span></i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> Ed. Lawrence Sutin. New York, Vintage Books: 1995.
69-78.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Jameson,
Fredric. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Political Unconscious:
Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act.</i> Ithaca, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Cornell UP: 1982.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Jorgensen,
Darren. “Towards a Revolutionary Science Fiction.” <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Red Planets: Marxism and <o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Science
Fiction.</span></i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">
Eds. Mark Bould and China Miéville. Middletown, Wesleyan UP: 2009. 196-212.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Miéville,
China. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Iron Council.</i> New York, Del
Ray Books: 2004.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Žižek,
Slavoj. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">First as Tragedy, Then as Farce.</i>
London, Verso: 2009.</span></div>Patrick Whitmarshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09136674843890947797noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4194280971933732517.post-75206671073162381012012-07-04T17:41:00.000-07:002012-07-05T05:30:42.566-07:00Blindsight (Science Fiction and the Ontological Tradition)DISCLAIMER: My knowledge of philosophy is a work in progress, so excuse any
obscure or poorly conceived references.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>In light of the extensive discussion of philosophy in this post, I offer
an apology to my readers: first, to those who feel they don’t understand; second,
to those who don’t care; and third, to those who feel that I’ve absolutely
butchered the philosophies herein described (I admit my summarizations are
lacking).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Furthermore, portions of this
post cite excerpts from Peter Watts’s novel <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Blindsight.</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>However, these excerpts are largely
decontextualized and do not pose any narrative spoilers.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
I'm sure most of my readers (oh ye hapless few) are expecting a post on
science fiction. That is, after all, what this blog is all about. However, this
post is still somewhat about science fiction, regardless of whatever topics the
title might insinuate. Philosophy is another shrew I attempt to tame, but when
it comes to writing about it I often discover that I'm no Shakespeare. So
everyone will have to make do with this effort, despite its certain errors and omissions.<br />
<br />
Let me rephrase.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This post <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">is</i> about science fiction.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I believe that we are witnessing an
increasing trend in modern sci-fi to explore unresolved (even non-attempted)
philosophical issues.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This was true of
Asimov and Clarke, it was true of Dick and Herbert, and it’s still true of Miéville,
Harrison, and Gibson (along with a plethora of others).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Today, I want to inform my discussion with
some comments on a new addition to the list.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
Late in Peter Watts’s brilliant and devastating sci-fi novel, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Blindsight,</i> the narrator states: “All
those theories, all those drug dreams and experiments and models trying to
prove what consciousness <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">was</i>: none to
explain what it was <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">good</i> for” (Watts
313).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I only recently finished this novel,
but it has lingered with me nearly constantly since.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s a tragic elegy to the human condition; a
lamentation of what the author perceives as an evolutionary weak link, a
developmental accident.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>‘What if,’ the
novel essentially asks, ‘consciousness is not the most efficient state for
optimal instinctual survival?’<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The novel
presents a narrative that is terrifying in both the scientific concepts it
deals in as well as the utterly alien and unrelenting environment it introduces
its readers to.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is a deep, dark, cold
work that thrusts its readers into the abyss, both physically and
cognitively.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Many people might claim
that this is far from their idea of an enjoyable read; but for me, this is
science fiction at its inhuman best.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Blindsight</i> is a contribution to
the subgenre known as the “First Contact” story: a tale that deals with the
discovery of and attempted interaction with an alien culture.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The novel is also an experiment in something
I would deem “brutal realism,” a style that I would also ascribe to Cormac
McCarthy’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Blood Meridian</i> (my
favorite American novel) or Alain Robbe-Grillet’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">La Jalousie</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This unique
brand of realism (a very recent movement, I might add) is brutal not because of
its harsh, unrelenting commitment to portraying or representing reality in the
traditional sense, as in the 19<sup>th</sup>-century tradition of realist
literature (Balzac, Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, and their ilk).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Indeed, I would argue that Watts cares
nothing for attempting to represent a kind of phenomenological reality (i.e.
reality as it appears to us), and this disregard is certainly central to the
most important themes of the novel.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By
“brutal realism”, rather, I intend a kind of stylistic approach that aims at
something communicated in the very non-linearity and unreality of the novel
itself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some might be tempted to invoke
Baudrillard’s notion of hyperreality, of something that is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">realer</i> than real; but I would discourage my readers from this.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
Cormac McCarthy’s wonderful historical novel, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Blood Meridian,</i> is far from what any literary theorist would call
“realist.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The meandering narrative, the
surreal exposition of chaos and combat, an almost primordial atmosphere that
swells in the novel’s pathological obsession with landscape – none of this is
realistic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Rather, the novel achieves a
different kind of realism; a brutal realism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>This is a realism that spawns not from its dedication to accurate
phenomenological representation, but from an obsession with human <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">dissociation.</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Objects, landscape, environment – in brutal
realism, these things become strange, unreal, inhuman.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They take on a distance from the human, and
impossible separation that no amount of narrative, representation, or
communication can overcome.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In brutal
realism, humans are exposed to the vacuum of space, but not necessarily the
airless, omnidirectional void of outer space; rather, the vacuum of the
relations between a subject and object.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>In brutal realism, these relations, which have so often donned an
anthropomorphic appearance, are deprived of any human context.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They become truly <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">alien.</i><o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
Peter Watts is highly critical of most First Contact sci-fi narratives
specifically because, he claims, representations of alien organisms often take
the form of either “humanoid[s…] with bumpy foreheads,” or “giant CGI
insectoids that may <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">look</i> alien but
who act at best like rabid dogs in chitin suits” (375).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Representations of alien organisms almost
always are informed by certain anthropocentric standards.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If they look human, then they often possess a
kind of enchanted wisdom, or knowledge of technologies vastly superior to our
own (of course, humanoid aliens – aliens constructed in our image – must
somehow embody the human fantasy of highly developed, futuristic technologies).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>However, if the alien organism takes on the
form of a colossal insect, or tentacled encephalopod, or some other drastically
nonhuman appearance, then of course it must be <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">intentionally</i> hostile.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It
was Watts’s goal, in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Blindsight,</i> to
“create an ‘alien’ that lives up to the word, while remaining biologically
plausible” (375).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What this requires,
for Watts, is not an organism informed by crude humanist conceptions of how
other species are projected in relation to the central, evolutionary superior
human (a view Watts strongly criticizes).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Rather, it requires an incredible, nearly unfathomable <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">distance.</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The alien must become so strange, so
unknowable, so immensely <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">alien</i> that
it achieves a form worthy of being called such.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Its hostility, if it exhibits any, must be purely natural rather than
intentional, intentionality being something more decidedly human.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Brutal realism allows such a distance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The very realism of the situation derives
from its near-impossibility; the fact that such damning organisms could exist,
that life could take such a radical form.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
To us, such literary representations often take the form of what we label
“science fiction.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>However, as I
mentioned above, brutal realism need not manifest only in sci-fi; Cormac
McCarthy experiments with it, as does Bret Easton Ellis in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">American Psycho,</i> and it can be traced as far back (I believe) as
Robbe-Grillet (more cautiously, I would even venture that brief flickerings of this style can be found as far back as the impressionistic writing of Joseph Conrad).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>However, I do believe
that it is in science fiction and fantasy that we find this style most
prevalently.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In addition to Watts, one
can find elements of this style in the work of China Miéville, M. John
Harrison, Robert Charles Wilson, William Gibson, Philip K. Dick, or R. Scott
Bakker, to name only a few.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is in
science fiction that we often see the truest use of brutal realism, since, to
portray something inhuman realistically, one must achieve the ultimate sense of
unreality; but not unreality so extreme that it eludes us entirely, like a
literary black hole.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Rather, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">near</i> unreality; reality so extreme that
we represent it to ourselves as unreal.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>This is the exact opposite of Baudrillardian, postmodern hyperreality.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Where hyperreality insinuates a virtual or
artificial apparatus that takes on the appearance of being more real than real,
brutal realism is, in a sense, a depiction of reality that is already so real
it becomes strange.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
The philosophical analogue to brutal realism is the somewhat controversial
trend of speculative realism, which is often traced to the recent work of
Quentin Meillassoux and Ray Brassier, despite the fact that the latter has made
significant efforts to deny that such a movement even exists.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Regardless of whether or not speculative
realism is any notable trend in philosophy, if it’s even a trend at all, the
works of these philosophers, along with several others, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">are</i> notable, for reasons concerning their content if not any
fashionable label that sports the term “realism.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This notable cast of the devil’s party
stretches back to the recent work of Alain Badiou in the 1980s, could be said
to include the Hegelian twist of Slavoj Žižek, and continues on through the work
of up-and-coming philosophical elites such as Eugene Thacker, Meillassoux, and
Brassier.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All these thinkers share one
large goal in common: a complete and radical overhaul of the philosophical
process, and a response to the ontological monolith erected by Martin Heidegger
in the 1920s.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
Martin Heidegger is considered, by many, to be the last truly great
philosopher in the Continental tradition, and his magnum opus, the formative <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Being and Time,</i> still stands to this day
as one of the great behemoths of ontological philosophy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For a long time after Heidegger, “philosophy”
in its traditional sense seemed to diminish.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Influential figures emerged such as Hannah Arendt and Jean-Paul Sartre;
the work of both was strongly informed by that of Heidegger (Arendt was his
student and lover, Sartre a colleague and, at times, an enemy).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Hans-Georg Gadamer
may be other contenders, but their work is also often overshadowed by that of
Heidegger.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By the 1950s and 1960s,
Western academia has become steeped in the traditions of structuralism,
poststructuralism, and deconstruction, all of which owe their existence to a
sometimes imbalanced concoction of Frankfurt School Marxism, psychoanalysis,
and Heideggerian phenomenology.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Furthermore, it is also after Heidegger and his immediate successors
that we begin to take note of that odd shift in the continental tradition
whereby philosophy, as it once existed, no longer seems to dominate academic
circles, but has given way to the discourses of critical and social theory and,
by the late 1970s and 80s, postmodernism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>At this point in time, philosophy seems to take on a new form, and
ceases pursuing the traditional route of intense ontological exploration, and
instead begins intensely looking at, and critiquing, philosophy itself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is why, during the reign of
poststructuralism and postmodernism in the later 20<sup>th</sup> century,
master thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida can begin
registering and cataloguing previous philosophers in a kind of
structural-historical framework, each one being conditioned by certain
historical circumstances and informed by previous philosophers and popular
knowledge of the day.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Philosophy becomes
a philosophy of itself, and Derrida’s unrelenting deconstruction purports to
bleed all previously lauded philosophies of any substantial content.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They all become, in a sense, mere empty
signifiers in the endless play of philosophical discourse, and the
philosophical ontological subject becomes nothing more than a side effect of
knowledge structures.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
And then, in 1988, something happens.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>An obscure gem appears on bookshelves under the name <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">L'être et l'événement -</i> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Being and Event.</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The author is Alain Badiou, and his goal is
to reestablish the ontological tradition in continental philosophy, beginning
with the salvation of the subject in the wake of its dismissal by postmodern
theory.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In this sense, Badiou aligns
himself with the ontological tradition last touched on by Heidegger.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>However, Badiou also challenges Heidegger,
and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Being and Event,</i> down to its very
title, is a direct confrontation of the ontological theory laid out in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Being and Time.</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Badiou writes that Heidegger “remains
enslaved, even in the doctrine of the withdrawal and the un-veiling, to what I
consider, for my part, to be the essence of metaphysics; that is, the figure of
being as endowment and gift, as presence and opening, and the figure of
ontology as the offering of a trajectory of proximity” (BE 9).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For Badiou, the answer to the metaphysical
trap is mathematics, which, he posits, is capable of illuminating a materialist
theory of the Subject and Being.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For
Heidegger, phenomenology presented the most applicable approach to
ontology.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Being presented itself in
temporality, the human subject was bound up in a continual process of opening,
of emerging.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As Heidegger says: “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">time</i> needs to be <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">explicated primordially as the horizon for the understanding of Being,
and in terms of temporality as the Being of Dasein, which understands Being”</i>
(Heidegger 39).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Badiou’s accusation is
that, while Heidegger attempts to circumvent metaphysics, his theory of Being
remains inhibited by metaphysical obfuscation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>For Heidegger, Being lurks behind a certain veil, manifesting in
phenomenological reality only when a temporal subject engages with phenomenal
objects.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In contrast, Badiou seeks a
materialist ontology, not a metaphysical, or noumenal, Being that is concealed
behind natural phenomenon.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Mathematics,
Badiou claims, provides philosophy with the path to such a radical
ontology.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For Badiou, a Subject isn’t
reducible to an individual, but an individual might <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">become</i> part of a new Subject through participation in truth
procedures.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Thus, the act of emergence,
of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">presentation,</i> is Multiple, and one
can begin to see how this dense philosophical theory comes to inform Badiou’s
allegiance to Marxism: this new Subject is something along the lines of an
emerging, revolutionary proletariat.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Time remains important for Badiou, but only insofar as it relates to the
temporality of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">event,</i> a rupture
in which individuals may ingratiate themselves to a new Subject through radical
truth procedures.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This involves the
instantiation of new possibilities, possibilities that were previously
considered to be outside the realm of possibility.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As Badiou clarifies: “The State is always the
finitude of possibility, and the event is its infinitization” (IC 7).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Thus, we can begin to see how Badiou’s
ontology paves the way for a reinvigoration of the Subject as
something constituted by individuals through collective action, a revolutionary
call to truth.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
I don’t intend this post as an exhaustive exploration of 20<sup>th</sup>-century
ontological philosophy, and I fear that I my efforts at explanation may have
been in vain; not because I think my readers will be confused or bored by this
description, but because my own understanding of Heidegger and Badiou might
very well have failed me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Regardless,
the most important point I wish to communicate is that Heidegger still stands
as an indispensable figure in 20<sup>th</sup>-century philosophy, and Badiou
is, in my opinion, the most recent genuine challenge to Heideggerian ontology.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
It is with Badiou that we see a return to the discernible ontological Subject in
the aftermath of its decimation by the likes of Foucault and Derrida.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I still am not sure which way I lean.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A theory of the Subject is comforting, while
theories of its emptiness often appear convincing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Perhaps a reconciliation of sorts is in
order; but for now, I wish to move this discussion along and back into the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">science fiction</i> realm.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The philosophers I’m about to mention may be
offended at being associated with science fiction, but I think the connection
warrants attention.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It has nothing to do
with the fantastical, fictional aspects of science fiction literature and cinema,
and more to do with the themes one can find emerging in 20<sup>th</sup>-century
sci-fi, some of which even began appearing before their philosophical
contemporaries got a hold of them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In
the wake of Badiou’s new ontology, a group of radical and welcomed thinkers has
emerged.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Meillassoux’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">After Finitude,</i> Brassier’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Nihilism Unbound,</i> and Thacker’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">After Life</i> are all genuine attempts to
track the new Subject into more complicated and dangerous philosophical territory;
most specifically, the realm of the nonhuman, or inhuman.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>‘How,’ these texts ask, ‘are we to think the
nonhuman?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The nonliving?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The unmediated?’<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>How can we possibly seize upon something not
human without recourse to what <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">is</i>
human?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Science fiction may take its
readers to fantastic and wholly imagined realms and environments, but its
reason for doing so is the same as this new group of philosophers: to explore
the difficulty of representing possibility <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">beyond</i>
possibility.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It seeks to demolish what
Badiou would term the State, and expose our conceptual limits to an unyielding
reality that has no concern for us.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>However, the difference from Badiou is that, in much contemporary
science fiction, this rupture isn’t caused by individual participation in a new
Subject, a revolutionary act of truth-seeking.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>One merely needs to observe Watts’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Blindsight</i>
to find the argument that human thought and action, no matter how hard it
tries, is condemned to failure.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
State will not be ruptured by any collective humanist event.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It will be ruptured by the imposition of
radically inhuman forms and environments, by an object-realm that posits itself
as unflinchingly <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">not-for-us.</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And, as in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Blindsight,</i> there is very little, if anything, that we can do about
it.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
And here is the final step, a move that some might deem goes beyond ontology:
the decimation of the Subject of Being, but not through recourse to the
theories of Foucault or Derrida.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This
move is given to us by recent developments in cognitive science.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is not that the subject doesn’t exist, necessarily,
for even Watts acknowledges that subjectivity is an essential part of what we
define as ‘human’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What this new move
offers, the move of much recent science fiction, and perhaps even of the style
I termed “brutal realism”, is the tragic helplessness of the Subject.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It remains unconscious toward much of its own
biochemistry, its own survival instincts, and in fact it impedes its own
success.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The subject of consciousness is
a weak link.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The subject of
consciousness is an evolutionary <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">failure.</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Watts writes:<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 1in 0pt;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I</i> wastes
energy and processing power, self-obsesses to the point of psychosis.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Scramblers [alien organisms in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Blindsight</i>] have no need of it,
scramblers are more parsimonious.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>With
simpler biochemistries, with smaller brains–deprived of tools, of their ship,
even of parts of their own metabolism– they think rings around you.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They hide their language in plain sight, even
when you know what they’re saying.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They
turn your own cognition against itself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">They travel between the stars.</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is what intelligence can do, unhampered
by self-awareness. (Watts 304).<o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 1in 0pt;">
<br /></div>
It is a move that bemoans the impotence not only of institutions such as
language, politics, or religion, but of consciousness itself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is the final move beyond Heidegger, the
final move beyond even ontology; as Watts says, not the question of what
consciousness is, but what it’s good for.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Not very much, it turns out.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
Some might argue that this doesn’t warrant an abandonment of ontological
philosophy and discussion, and I would agree.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I’m not claiming that we should abandon the pursuit of Being and
consciousness, but simply that the current trend we’re seeing today, the
advancements in cognitive science and philosophy of mind, are pointing to this
dawning realization that the theory of the Subject as something totally aware
of its relation to its biological components and desires is flawed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Jacques Lacan first began outlining this lack
in the human subject in the 1950s, and even Badiou doesn’t reduce the Subject
to an <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I</i>; his theory involves a
multiplicity of individuals.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yet it
clings to the hope of progress and prosperity through mutual cooperation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His philosophical progeny have begun to
distance themselves from this notion, to observe the human Subject’s relation
to the world around it as something less optimistic, not so facilely
proposed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We as human beings might be
radically removed from the world around us, but there is still a way to
interact with it, to engage with it; we just have to think more critically.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Blindsight</i> takes a further
step.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It doesn’t care as much about what
consciousness is, but what purpose it serves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Watts gives a depressingly blunt answer to this quandary: “You want to
know the only <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">real</i> purpose
[consciousness] serves?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Training wheels”
(302).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Blindsight,</i> all aspects of what we consider ‘human’ are reduced to
a kind of sublimation by the conscious mind: “The rush evoked by fractal
imagery, the algorithms used for habitat selection, metastasize into art.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Thrills that once had to be <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">earned</i> in increments of fitness can now
be had from pointless introspection.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Aesthetics arise unbidden from a trillion dopamine receptors, and the system
moves beyond modeling the organism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It
begins to model the very <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">process</i> of
modeling.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Consciousness, Watts claims,
is a step removed from survival-existence.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
However, I want to reiterate that this does <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">not</i> mean we should abandon the pursuit of Being and the Subject
altogether, but simply that we should encourage a more meaningful collaboration
between the age-old traditions of philosophy and science.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In Archaic Greece they were one and the same,
but as the centuries wore on we’ve seen them attempt to impose themselves as
discrete fields.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Meillassoux offers an
interesting assessment in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">After Finitude:</i><o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 1in 0pt;">
Doubtless, where science is concerned, philosophers have
become modest - and even prudent. Thus, a philosopher will generally begin with
an assurance to the effect that her theories in no way interfere with the work
of the scientist, and that the manner in which the latter understands her own
research is perfectly legitimate. But she will immediately add (or say to
herself): legitimate, as far as it goes. What she means is that although it is
normal, and even natural, for the scientist to adopt a spontaneously realist
attitude, which she shares with the 'ordinary person', the philosopher
possesses a specific type of knowledge which imposes a correction upon
science's ancestral statements […] (Meillassoux 13)<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
Each field privileges itself with its own brand of knowledge which it
believes the other to be lacking.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Meillassoux
certainly appears to elevate philosophy in this statement, but I believe he
intends for a synthesis between the two.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Indeed, perhaps the “realist attitude” of science has demonstrated the
fallibility and impotence of human consciousness, especially in regards to the
inhuman world around it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But what does
this mean for philosophy?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What
responsibility does this place on us if we acknowledge the fact that our own
faculties, the instruments by which we interpret the world around us, distort
that interpretation?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>How should we move
forward?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If science and philosophy can
each provide their own brand of aid, then I would rather use all the tools at
my disposal than one at the expense of the other.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
As a final note, some readers might contend that I’ve conflated the terms of
‘Being,’ ‘Subject,’ and ‘consciousness’ in this post, and I would agree with that
rejoinder.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It would require far more
research on my part to properly distinguish between and among these terms in
this context.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>However, I would also
claim that the emergence of sentience and consciousness is certainly one aspect
of Being, and one that remains important even if the object of an ontological
discourse is something inanimate; for an understanding of Being concerns itself
with the relationship between the conscious Subject and the object-realm, and
this relationship can only be fully grasped if the nature and process of human
consciousness is taken into account.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I
do acknowledge, however, that the entire realm of ‘Being’ does extend beyond
the narrow parameters that I’ve described above.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Cognitive science and philosophy of mind
attempt to explore and explain merely one facet of that much larger and more
complicated field of ontology.<br />
<br />
<o:p>
</o:p><br />
<div align="center" style="text-align: center;">
Works Cited<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
Badiou, Alain. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Being and Event.</i> Trans.
Oliver Feltham. London: Continuum, 2006.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
-. “The Idea of Communism.” <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Idea
of Communism.</i> London: Verso, 2010. 1-14.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
Heidegger, Martin. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Being and Time.</i>
Trans. John MacQuarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: <o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
<div style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
<o:p> </o:p>Harper & Row, 1962.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
Meillassoux, Quentin. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">After Finitude.</i>
London: Continuum, 2008.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
Watts, Peter. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Blindsight.</i> New
York: Tor, 2006.Patrick Whitmarshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09136674843890947797noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4194280971933732517.post-8946705716801207042012-06-11T06:43:00.000-07:002016-08-01T10:34:46.185-07:00Prometheus<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">I try not to deal in spoilers, but if you haven’t
seen the film yet I’d recommend not reading this post.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Is Ridley Scott’s film,
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Prometheus</i>—a film that has been met,
unfortunately, with disappointment and even contempt among audiences—actually
redeemed by its shortcomings?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I, personally,
find it difficult to believe that poor screenwriting (there is some truly poor
dialogue) and pacing/editing can be explained away by a kind of hidden
signifier contained within the very errors of the film.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I do, however, find it easier to believe that
one of the biggest flaws of the film—that it fails even remotely to answer any of
the questions that it raises (and the questions themselves aren’t all that
original to begin with)—can actually be justified (or perhaps many of you would
prefer to call it ‘rationalized’) if we consider the very nature of those
questions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So, today, I’m going to ask
my readers to consider two hypotheticals.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>First: that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Prometheus</i> is,
hypothetically, an excellent film; and second: that its characters can only
engage hypothetically with its own themes.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Prometheus</i> is a film about origins.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Human origins.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That said, it doesn’t answer very many
questions about them: Who are we? Where do we come from?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Who made us?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>And most important, why did they make us?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The film is presumably aware that this is a highly
controversial premise; it is common belief in today’s scientific community that
no one “made” us, but that we are the historical product of billions of years
of evolution.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yet the film also pits the
“ancient aliens” scenario (called Engineers in the film) against the
creationism scenario, even introducing one devout character who wears a cross
around her neck; two discrete brands of intervention and manipulation of the
human race, two intriguing possibilities for explanation as to our biological
origins. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Prometheus</i> is, we can say with some certainty, aware of the
familiar territory it is treading, and almost painstakingly aware of its own
concern with this territory.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Why, then,
does it appear to lose all sense of direction well before its rather anticlimactic
conclusion?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Why are the grand yet
redundant questions that it raises almost completely ignored?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>First,
we have to realize that these questions are not ignored by the characters.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Over and over again we’re reminded through
dialogue of the characters’ desires to learn about their creators, the
hypothetical Engineers, and the final scene wherein one Engineer is awoken from
stasis (perhaps the most climactic moment of the film) demonstrates ad nauseam
the characters’ almost childish obsession with being given an explanation (with
the character of Doctor Shaw even exclaiming: “Why do you hate us?”).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This should make it clear to us that it’s not
as though the writers completely forgot what the primary catalyst for this
narrative is: an obsession with origins.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>They remind us at every turn that we’re dealing with an exploration in
creation (merely recall the android David’s line: “Big things have small
beginnings,” as he examines some biological drool collected from a strange
cylinder found in the site of the alien Engineers).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Second,
we have to remind ourselves that there is an obvious reason why the question of
origins is such a colossal question: it has, still, not been answered.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The film doesn’t offer a form of alternative
history, a genre that depicts historical events that are factually different
from its actual course.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We have to force
ourselves to accept that what it posits is a hypothetical history: one that is
not proven or positive, or even plausible, but one that is possible.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The plot of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Prometheus</i> hasn’t been negatively criticized because it deals with
subject matter that is entirely ridiculous and impossible.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Rather, it has been criticized because the
plot apparently fails to resolve these issues that it raises.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But is this a failure on the writers’
part?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some of us might be inclined to
venture that it is not, especially if the ultimate goal of the writers is to
create a sequel that promises to unravel the knots of its predecessor and make
even more money in the process.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And it
must be acknowledged that surely, in the business of Hollywood, every script,
even the most aesthetically practiced and artistic, barely conceals the hidden
signifier of the dollar sign.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>But
now let’s seriously consider the hypothetical.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Let’s give Mr. Scott the benefit of the doubt, and argue that these
glaring omissions in the film’s plot were done intentionally and for what we
might label “high artistic purposes.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>What might those purposes be?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It
is here that, I believe, a deeper discussion of the concept of origins will be
beneficial to this examination.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In
“Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” theorist Michel Foucault offers an interesting
interpretation of the concept of origins.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>He writes: “The origin always precedes the Fall.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It comes before the body, before the world
and time; it is associated with the gods, and its story is always sung as a
theogony” (NGH 372).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Considering <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Prometheus</i>’s clear reference to the myth
of the eponymous titan (whose story is summarized in the film by the character
of Peter Weyland), it’s clear that Scott has made this intriguing
connection.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Engineers fill this
obscure, mystical position previously reserved for deities.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Furthermore, one viral advertising campaign
for the film depicted Weyland giving a speech in his youth, and claiming that,
because of humanity’s discovery of new technologies, “we are the gods
now.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Prometheus</i>, human discovery and exploration results in a
supplanting of the original creators; the human characters seek to understand
their ancestors, but there is a kind of maniacal drive to dominate concealed
beneath this journey.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Jean Baudrillard
relates this obsession to the pursuit of origins, often manifested in the guise
of “mythological object[s]”;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Baudrillard
makes the interesting claim that underdeveloped, more primitive cultures fetishize
power through recourse to technological (i.e. futuristic) objects, whereas
advanced, “civilized” cultures fetishize the authority and authenticity of
their own origins through the mythological object (SO 88).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Prometheus,</i>
the humans occupy the unique position of being both the primitive and advanced
culture.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The clues about the Engineers
are discovered as part of humanity’s past, its history; pictographs found in
the paintings and literatures of ancient civilizations have pointed to the
involvement of the Engineers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Hence,
humanity views them through a lens of advancement.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>However, the humans also acknowledge the
technological advancement and authority of the Engineers, since they
(purportedly) are the beings that created humanity itself, and the journey to
find them takes the human characters into the farthest reaches of space.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is a narrative of traditional science
fiction, and it places the humans in the spot designated for the
underdeveloped, primitive culture; the people who are seeking some profound
technological knowledge.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So humanity
occupies both places in Baudrillard’s conception; the advanced and the
primitive.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>This
displacement results in a certain amount of anxiety placed upon the human
explorers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This anxiety is not purely
their hesitance and, eventually, terror upon arriving at the alien site.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Rather, I intend anxiety to mean the
compelling desire to find the Engineers, to commune with them, and, perhaps, to
become the privileged recipients of some form of transcendental knowledge.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To come to know our forefathers, but also to
relieve them of their elevated status in our history.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Baudrillard summarizes this urge as follows:
“For we want at one and the same time to be entirely self-made and yet to be
descended from someone: to succeed the Father yet simultaneously to proceed
from the Father” (SO 88).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He then goes
on to make a remarkably poignant statement: “Perhaps mankind will never manage
to choose between embarking on the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Promethean</i>
project of reorganizing the world, thus taking the place of the Father, and
being directly descended from an original being [emphasis added]” (SO 88).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The quest Baudrillard is describing, the
quest that the film depicts, is a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Promethean</i>
quest; a quest that will provide a new established order, will create a new
structure of knowledge, but that is ultimately doomed to fail.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>How
does this quest provide a new established order or structure of knowledge?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Baudrillard is not the only one to make this
connection.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Foucault also claims that
“the origin makes possible a field of knowledge” (NGH 372).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What does this mean for the human characters
in Scott’s film?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Foucault expands upon
this initial claim: “The origin lies at a place of inevitable loss, the point
where the truth of things is knotted to a truthful discourse, the site of a
fleeting articulation that discourse has obscured and finally lost” (372).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is not a very optimistic outlook on the
discovery of origins; for Foucault, they become impossibly and hopelessly lost
amidst a tangle of discursive knowledges, conversations that preserve remnants
of the truthful origin at the cost of concealing the entire, “pure” thing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For Foucault, history reveals “not a timeless
and essential secret but the secret that they have no essence, or that their
essence was fabricated in a piecemeal fashion from alien forms” (371).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Put even more bluntly, what lies at the
historical beginning is not some total, pure origin, but “the dissension of
things […and…] disparity” (372).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
genealogy that Foucault is outlining is one of impossible truth.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is because, for Foucault, knowledge is
(in a sense) antithetical to truth.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Fields of knowledge, “truthful” discourses… these things do not expose
the truth, but paint it in new, sometimes even preconceived colors.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is because any human discourse on
origins is an anthropocentric interpretation of an utterly pre-human essence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They can provide no revolutionary
re-structuring because they merely revolve around the potentially incendiary
kernel of their question.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The origin of
humanity is not human, and the Promethean quest of Scott’s film is doomed to
fail because it too is an example of such an obscuring discourse.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The scientists and explorers in the narrative
seek a human explanation for something entirely alien and foreign.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Questions such as “Why did you make us?” and
“Why do you hate us?” are human questions, and it is naïve to assume that they
would even make sense for an alien culture (I’m referring not only to language,
but also to the very concept of “why” itself).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It is worth positing that Scott is aware of the idiosyncrasy inherent in
such questions.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>For
Foucault, this profound awareness of and obsession with the past is a modern aspect
of humanity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He writes: “We have become
barbarians with respect to those rare moments of high civilization: cities in
ruin and enigmatic monuments are spread out before us; we stop before gaping
walls; we ask what gods inhabited these empty temples.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Great epochs lacked this curiosity, lacked
our excessive deference; they ignored their predecessors” (384).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Is the characterization of humans as
barbarians gaping before ancient monuments not an accurate description of the
human characters in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Prometheus</i> as
they explore the alien site?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These
characters, the entire narrative of the film; all of it is a representation of
the epitome of human fascination with its origins, a fascination that has only
been enhanced over the years as technology evolves and history flows on.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>However, this inevitably leads us to another
impossible question: where is the process of historical development leading
us?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In a way, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Prometheus</i> is a reaction to the failure of science and philosophy
to answer this question.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Baudrillard writes
elsewhere of the failure to predict the future, and the consequences this has
had for humanity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He claims that the
idea of finality, the end-point, is what gives a historical movement its
purpose and meaning (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Passwords</i>
59).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He also claims that we have reached
a point in our development where we have exhausted our hopes for understanding
the future, and have thus turned to the past: “So, unable to locate an end, we
strive desperately to pin down a beginning.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Our current compulsion to seek out origins is testament to this: in the
anthropological and palaeontological fields we see limits being pushed back in
time, into a past that is also interminable” (60).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This offers us an interesting complement to
Foucault’s notion of the recent human obsession with origins; not only is this
obsession a recent development, but it is also a reaction to our inability to
determine our end (I would ask readers here to recall the tagline for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Prometheus:</i> “The search for our
beginning could lead to our end”).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Now
we can see how <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Prometheus</i> not only
conflates Baudrillard’s sociological conceptions of the primitive and advanced
cultures, but also the quests for our beginning and our end.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Impossibility converges within the film like
a concentric tidal wave collapsing inward, drowning any and every hope of
exploration outward; a discursive black hole, a historical singularity that
allows no truth to escape.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Baudrillard
also offers us another poignant comment: “The problem raised by history is not
that it might have come to an end, as Fukuyama says, but rather that it will
have no end – and hence no longer any finality, any purpose” (61).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If history has no end, how can it hope to
have any beginning?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>With no end in
sight, only an impossibly infinite cascade through time, the origin can only
ever become an intangible, primordial fantasy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>We continue to strive for it, and yet it continues to evade our grasp
and elude our understanding, constantly vanishing just beyond the terrestrial
and cognitive horizons.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In
the face of this impossibility, humanity must increase its effort.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If mere knowledge and exploration will not
suffice, then we must resort to coercion.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The simplest way to explain this, in historical context, is imperialism,
and it manifests in what Foucault’s calls the “will to knowledge,” similar to
Friedrich Nietzsche’s will to power: “The historical analysis of this rancorous
will to knowledge reveals that all knowledge rests upon injustice (that there
is no right, not even in the act of knowing, to truth or a foundation for
truth), and that the instinct for knowledge is malicious (something murderous,
opposed to the happiness of mankind)” (NGH 387).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This argument is, of course, central to
Foucault’s entire theory, i.e. that structures of knowledge are the result of
relations of power.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>However, in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Prometheus,</i> imperialism is turned on its
head, for it is not the humans at the helm of imperialist conquest.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Instead, the Engineers are the ones in
possession of destructive forces beyond all measure, and of a quality that is utterly
foreign.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One merely needs to consider
the bewilderment and horror of Native Americans at the unveiling of the
Hotchkiss guns to find a suitable analogy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The twist of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Prometheus,</i>
however, is that there is some historical connection between the weapons of the
Engineers and the creation of humanity itself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>This connection is only hinted at in the film, and the details are never
revealed, but the implications remain rather unsettling: the origins of
humanity, whatever they may be, appear to be intertwined with a cosmically
destructive bit of alien biotechnology (which hints further at the creation of
the alien creature from Scott’s iconic 1979 film, to which <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Prometheus</i> is a pseudo-prequel).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Destruction begets creation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Beginning
and end merge in a vulgar dialectic relationship, where humanity finds itself
stranded between two unreachable poles, which are only reconciled in their
common elusiveness.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In
the case of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Prometheus,</i> the genre of
science fiction allows a hypothetical exploration of the impossible closure of
history; both its origins and its conclusion remain beyond human
understanding.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No matter what the film
attempts to do, any representation that it offers must remain constrained by
the images of Western historical preconceptions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When we observe history, we are not looking
at some pristine, pure, untouched object.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>We can only, ever, look at it through the lens of modern Western
ideology.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Barry Hindess and Paul Hirst
explain this notion perfectly:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 1in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">To be accurate the object of history is whatever is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">represented</i> as having hitherto
existed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The essence of this
representation is preserved records and documents.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>History’s object, the hitherto existing, does
not exist except in the modality of its current existence, as representations…
What the past <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">is</i> is determined by the
content of the various ideological forms which operate within the parameters of
historical knowledge. (qtd. in Jameson 473)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">The origin, history, past foreign cultures… these can
never be encountered <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">except</i> through
representation, since all remnants of these objects in their original context
have vanished (if they could ever be said to have existed in the first place).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Prometheus</i>
is filled with characters who fantasize over the notion of discovering and
understanding their own origins, but who can only encounter those origins
through objects, architecture; the remains left behind by the culture that
purportedly created them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is no
origin in this, only the human interpretation of origin.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All these objects take on the status of texts
through which the human characters attempt to read the evidence of their
beginnings; but ironically, the human characters cannot read the actual text
left behind by the Engineers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They rely
on David, their artificially engineered counterpart (the analogous “human” to
their own status as “engineers”), to read the alien language for them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yet throughout the entirety of the movie,
there is no guarantee that David ever completely understands the language of
the alien beings. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The only interaction
with a living Engineer, at the film’s conclusion, yields no actual
communication (in fact, it yields only violence).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Prometheus</i>
emphasizes that no direct contact can be made with the ancient aliens; theories
and beliefs can only be interpreted through representations, through dead
objects deprived of contextualization.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>From the very beginning of the film, the human efforts are all in vain.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In
the end, the film’s approach to historical understanding can be explained
through Fredric Jameson’s ideological duality between “Identity” and
“Difference,” the former of which posits the availability of ancient knowledge
within our own cultural ideology, and the latter which posits the impossibility
of such knowledge.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Prometheus</i> depicts an interpretive methodology that adheres to the
latter conception, wherein, because of “the radical Difference of the alien
object from ourselves […] the doors of comprehension begin to swing closed and
we find ourselves separated by the whole density of our own culture from
objects or cultures thus initially defined as Other from ourselves and thus as
irremediably inaccessible” (453).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Viewed
in this light, it becomes irrational to expect any viable explanation from the
film if its very point is to emphasize the impossibility of an
explanation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Alien objects and texts
reveal no hidden essence because of their own impenetrability, and instead of
exposing some hidden secret, betray the disappointing fact that they have no
secret, no potential revelation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As the
android David states when he is told that humans made him simply because they
could: “Can you imagine how disappointing it would be for you to hear the same
thing from your creator?”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As it turns
out, Scott doesn’t give his audience much more to go on.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The result is just as disappointing, but this
isn’t necessarily a fault of the film’s presentation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Perhaps it has more to do with the very
nature of its quest.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>It’s
not my intention to justify poor writing or pacing on the film’s part, and I
certainly believe that it falls prey to these flaws (it’s no <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Alien,</i> that’s for sure, and the pacing
and atmosphere of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Prometheus</i> don’t
come close to matching the visceral, terrifying organism that was its
predecessor).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is my intention to
explore the themes that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Prometheus</i>
attempts to tackle, and these themes are not easy to unravel.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It could have offered its audience an
entirely fictional conclusion, some fantastical resolution from the depths of
writer Damon Lindelof’s sci-fi-steeped unconscious; but would this have been as
rewarding?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Could an explanation of human
origins ever hope to transcend our wildest spiritual, mystical, or scientific
beliefs?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s my claim that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Prometheus</i>’s failure ultimately betrays
to us our greatest illusion of all: that there was any origin to be found in
the first place.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And, just as the origin
remains concealed in primordial depths, so the ending as well may never
materialize.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Perhaps it’s much more
plausible that the endings we fantasize about (the Nostradamus prophecies, the
year 2000 CE computer crash, the 2012 Mayan calendar, etc.) are nothing more
than illusions imposed by us on our own existence in hopes that some final
purpose might be revealed.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">In light of such
pessimistic ideas, it’s understandable why the sign of the cross around Doctor
Elizabeth Shaw’s neck might be far more inviting to some.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">
</span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: center; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Works
Cited<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Baudrillard, Jean. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Passwords.</i> Trans. Chris Turner. London, Verso: 2003.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">-. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The System
of Objects.</i> Trans. James Benedict. London, Verso: 2005.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Foucault, Michel. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Michel Foucault: Aesthetics, Method, and <o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Epistemology.</span></i><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">
Ed. James D. Faubion. New York, The New Press: 1998. 367-391.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Jameson, Fredric. “Marxism and Historicism.” <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Ideologies of Theory</i>. London, Verso:
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">2008. 451-482.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
</div>
Patrick Whitmarshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09136674843890947797noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4194280971933732517.post-1322692910164936912012-05-21T18:33:00.004-07:002012-06-06T12:26:40.875-07:00Embassytown<br />
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">I’ve spoken with some of my friends and colleagues about
author China Miéville.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’ve suggested
him to several people and shared in praise of his work among a few.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Unfortunately, despite his growing popularity
among sci-fi fans, he remains relatively unknown.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His name often tends toward the bleak,
obscure, and esoteric underbelly of speculative fiction: dystopian settings,
flawed characters, Lovecraftian horror, and an alienating aura of inhumanism
permeate his works.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While there are
those who might raise an eyebrow at the reference to the term more often
associated with the poetry of Robison Jeffers, I feel that the connection is
mildly warranted.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is an urgency in
Miéville’s prose, perhaps even more so than in Jeffers’s poetry, to dissociate
ourselves from the realms of the human.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>This urgency rises from the author’s profound ability to create
realities that strike his readers as impossibly present; there they are, on
the page before us, as though Miéville has visited those worlds and is
dictating them to us.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And yet, they are
almost unimaginably unreal, cities and settings spawned from a truly
uninhibited, original mind.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">China Miéville is likely one of the most influential writers
of contemporary speculative literature, and his work doesn’t isolate itself to the
genre of mere “fantasy” (a genre term that conjures images of dragons and
wizards more often than not, and yet a word that, in its original sense, should
actually describe all fictions…).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I use
the term “speculative” because I feel it captures and nearly encompasses Miéville’s
work (“hypothetical” would be another appropriate term, of course).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His diegeses are occasionally entirely
physically separate from our world (as in the fascinating Bas-Lag novels);
other times, they represent fictional settings that occupy our world (as in the
imagined European setting of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The City and
the City</i>); and then some novels depict fantastical goings-on within places
entirely known to us, yet infused with strange occurrences (as in the London
setting of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kraken</i>).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Finally, there is the Miéville who utilizes a
human universe for his fictional setting, and yet takes his readers on a
journey that spans far beyond the time and space familiar to us, as in the
novel that I intend to discuss in my first non-introductory post: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Embassytown.</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Embassytown</i> is Miéville’s
first venture into what most critics and fans would classify as traditional
science fiction (although there is very little traditional about Miéville’s
work).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The first-person narrative is
told by an immerser named Avice Benner Cho and describes her experience on the
planet known as Arieka, where she is a human colonist in the novel’s eponymous
city.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the far-future setting of the
novel, humanity has discovered a kind of substratum to the known universe,
which they call the immer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Only
specially trained astronauts can travel in a conscious state through this
substratum, which allows for much faster and more efficient travel than normal
spaceflight (those untrained must be put into hibernation during travel lest
they suffer agonizing nausea and potentially even worse symptoms).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Avice, an “immerser,” is one of these
professionals.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>However, the descriptions
of the immer and Avice’s profession only figure as a backdrop to the narrative;
the primary plot revolves around the relations between the human colonists of
Embassytown and the natives of Arieka, the Ariekei.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Communication between the two races is strained
due to a unique biological feature of the Ariekei: they have no spoken material
language.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The natives communicate with
each other through a biological instinct hardwired into their bodies.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Avice describes the Ariekei “language”
(referred to the human as “Language” – capitalized) as follows: “Their language
is organised noise, like all ours are, but for them each word is a funnel.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Where to us each word <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">means</i> something, to the Hosts, each is an opening.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A door, through which the thought of that
referent, the thought itself that reached for that word, can be seen” (Miéville
55).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Due to the difficulties of
communication, specialized human translators are necessary, known as
Ambassadors.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The conception of
Ambassadors in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Embassytown</i> is one of Miéville’s
most unique exhibitions of science fiction genius.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">A single human individual cannot communicate with the
Ariekei.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ambassadors must always consist
of two humans, genetically engineered, raised and educated together, who speak
in alternating patterns known as the “Cut” and “Turn” voices.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In order to successfully establish a
linguistic link between human beings and Ariekei, there had to be an empathic
connection.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For the Hosts (a human term
for the Ariekei), material words, sounds, did not suffice.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There had to be an essence behind them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This essence, which lurks behind every
utterance the Ariekei, prevents them from participating in many of the aspects
of language that humans take for granted.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>They cannot lie, and cannot even conceive of lying.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>An important aspect of the novel explores an
institution called the “Festival of Lies,” wherein human ambassadors tell lies
to the Ariekei who then experience ecstatic reactions, since they cannot
biologically internalize this foreign sensation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Hosts then also attempt to lie in
response, often with unsuccessful results.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Furthermore, the Ariekei cannot learn other human languages; they cannot
differentiate between English and Chinese, or Spanish and Russian.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All human language is simply noise.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ambassadors can only communicate to the
Ariekei in their own tongue, and then translate what has been said into human
languages.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Finally, the Ariekei cannot “play”
with language; they cannot understand palindromes, create spoonerisms, or any
of the other fun stuff we enjoy with our own language.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We get into a rather gray area, however, when
it comes to figurative language.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Certain
human beings, including the narrator herself, become “metaphors” or “similes”
for the Ariekei; but this is an obscure performance, an esoteric kind of
ceremony: “What occurred in that crumbling once-dining room wasn’t by any means
the worst thing I’ve ever suffered, or the most painful, or the most
disgusting.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was quite bearable.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was, however, the least comprehensible
event that had ever happened to me” (Miéville 25).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Metaphors and similes take on the form of
ceremonial rituals for the Ariekei since they are, at their crudest definitions,
lies.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Robert Burns’s love is not like a
red rose; the Ariekei could never internalize such a concept.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For them, such qualifications require
non-biological institutions to concretize them.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Ariekei language is not really a “language” in our sense of
the term, which is why the colonists capitalize their visceral tongue (“Language”);
it’s a kind of meta-language, a physical, biological, neurological process of
interaction.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A traumatic sentiment
transfers immediately; there is no mediating translation, no distance between
the idea and the utterance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Once readers
come to terms with this aspect of the plot, it becomes clear why Miéville chose
a quote from Walter Benjamin’s essay “On Language as Such and on the Language
of Man”:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“The
word must communicate something (other than itself).”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Benjamin is here referring to the influential component of
Saussurean linguistics: that material language communicates, above and before
all else, its own materiality.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The word “book”
does not contain any inherent essence that qualifies its material formulation
as the signifier for the idea of a “book.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It possesses meaning simply because it <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">is</i> the word “book” and not “chair” or “tree.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The items of material language exist in a
differential relationship to one another.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>There is no essence beyond them; their meaning is determined based on
degrees of difference and similitude.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">For the Ariekei, however, there <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">is</i> some essence there, a metaphysical presence that bleeds through
in their utterances.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As readers, we
should recognize the rather blatant parallel to this that Miéville is drawing
in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Embassytown:</i> the presence of the immer.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Embassytown,</i>
there is an interesting spatio-linguistic dynamic at play, which manifests in
the relationship between the nature of the immer and Ariekei “Language.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Just as the utterances of Language open up a
meta-linguistic realm of pure essence and idea, the immer exists as a kind of
substratum to the actual, physical universe: some deeper essence beyond the
merely superficial.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It may be tempting
here to begin drawing parallels to some kind of Platonic idealism, but I would
encourage readers and critics to avoid such misrecognition.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Miéville classifies himself as a Marxist, and
while we can argue about Marx’s idealism on another blog, we must recall that,
first and foremost, it was Marx’s aim to formulate a materialist philosophy, which
has in turn gone on to influence droves of 20<sup><span style="font-size: x-small;">th</span></sup>-century critical and
literary theorists.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So rather than posit
a kind of spiritual idealism at work in Miéville’s novel, I would argue that
the author is challenging typical common-sense notions of capitalist hegemony
by offering a hypothetical.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Many human beings admit to “knowing” that words don’t
actually possess any inherent power, and yet we speak with them as though they
do.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Likewise, many of us admit to “knowing”
that money doesn’t actually possess any value, and yet we continue using it and
treating it as though it does.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A nod to
Slavoj Žižek would be appropriate here.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>So, what is Miéville doing in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Embassytown?</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What is the hypothetical?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The hypothetical is to establish a situation
wherein the essential impotence of our language is brutally exposed to us; to
suggest a form of life that doesn’t abide by what humans consider a kind of
natural communicative, evolutionary process.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Our species has evolved in a certain way, has developed certain
faculties; but this doesn’t mean that we were <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">meant</i> to develop in this way, or that it was predetermined and our
mode of communication is the best or even highly efficient.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The purpose of inhumanism, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">anti-anthropocentrism</i>, is to expose the
crude, and often violent ways in which we impose and project our conceptions of
reality onto other living things (I could go much deeper into some details of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Embassytown</i> here, but I don’t want to
spoil the surprise for those who haven’t read it; and, furthermore, I expect I will
go into much more detail when I get further in my academic career).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Miéville uses language to navigate this idea.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Through the description of something like
Ariekei Language, human language becomes far more strange and artificial – the
Ariekei even need to “perform” our language, in a sense, in order to come to
terms with it; but the analogy between Language and immer should clue us in to
the fact that there is much more at stake.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Avice describes the immer in the following way: </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">‘This is the third universe,’ I told Scile.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>‘There’ve been two others before this.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Right?’<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I didn’t know how much civilians knew: this stuff had become my common
sense.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>‘Each one was born
different.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It had its own laws–in the
first one they reckon light was about twice as fast as it is here now.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Each one was born and grew and got old and
collapsed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Three different
sometimes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But below all that, or around
it, or whatever, there’s only ever been one immer, one always.’ (Miéville 34)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">In Miéville’s novel, human exploration of the immer also
yields other results: the discovery of previously established culture.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“When immernauts first breached the meniscus
of everyday space,” Miéville writes, “among the many phenomena that had
astounded them was the fact that, even on their crude instruments, they had
received signals from somewhere in the ur-space.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Regular and resonant, clear evidence of
sentience” (32).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In both aspects of the
novel – language and space – there is the suggestion of some hidden or secret
essence, something lurking beneath the surface.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Ariekei Language and distinct universes are utterances of a sort, but
they aren’t signs in the tradition of Saussurean representation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They are surface tissues that possess a
direct connection to an underlying force.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Furthermore, this secret essence betrays hints of sentience in both
aspects as well: the foundational biological principles of life itself, and the
traces of an older, preexisting civilization, respectively.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Throughout history, Western culture has often
been at the forefront of imperialist expansion, and this has always been
characterized by two specific components (in addition to others): the
implementation and regulation of a national language, and the displacement of
native cultures.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Readers are exposed to
both of these components in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Embassytown,</i>
although not always in their traditional hegemonic forms.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Perhaps one of the most glaring observations
in the novel is that humans have, in a sense, been beaten in the race of
colonization.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The discovery of beacons
throughout the immer suggest, as one character points out, that the substratum
of space has already been explored by some previous race: “‘You don’t put a
lighthouse where no one’s going to go.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You
put it somewhere dangerous where they <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">have</i>
to go.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There are reasons to be careful
in this quadrant, but there are reasons to come–to pass through, en route
somewhere else’” (236).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In both cases, Miéville
radically subverts traditional notions of language and imperialism (merely two
occasionally tangential aspects of capitalist hegemony) by introducing a
hypothetical situation in which these Western anthropocentric institutions suddenly
seem strange and impotent, and by forcing his readers to take a disassociated
stance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is Miéville doing what he
absolutely does best: subtracting the “human” from the world.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">This study is not complete, nor do I believe that it is,
without a doubt, well-conceived in all aspects.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I do, however, feel that these are some important parts of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Embassytown</i> that warrant future study,
and that the novel is a supreme example of great and revolutionary science
fiction.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is not only what
speculative fiction should do, but what all great literature should strive to
do: illuminate the contradictions and arbitrary configurations of culture.</span></div>Patrick Whitmarshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09136674843890947797noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4194280971933732517.post-43755434683243470062012-05-21T10:41:00.000-07:002013-01-10T07:56:12.578-08:00Welcome<em>Roadside Picnic </em>is named after a 1971 novel by Russian authors Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. Those who have seen Tarkovsky's gorgeous 1979 film, <em>Stalker,</em> already have some notion of the novel's plot, since the film is loosely based on the text. For those who have not seen the movie or read the book... I won't ruin anything for you.<br />
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This blog is intended as an online space for criticism, discussion, review and general praise or condemnation for various forms of science fiction, primarily literature and cinema. I do not guarantee any regular posting schedule, nor that this blog will serve as a comprehensive guide to science fiction in any way. It is merely a place for me (and those who follow my posts) to express different ideas about the genre, of which I consider myself a fan.<br />
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I currently am employed as an adjunct instructor at St. Petersburg College in Florida, but will be moving in August to attend a doctoral program in English literature at Boston University. I sincerely hope to be able to devote a fair amount of time to this blog, but as I said previously, I cannot guarantee any kind of steady schedule for posting. Furthermore, this is my first foray into "blogging." It took me quite some time to come around to the idea, but I'm looking forward to it. I hope everyone enjoys the subject matter, and the posts themselves.<br />
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As a final note: I chose the username "Hypothetical" because I believe it reflects exactly what good science fiction does, and what all science fiction should strive to do. It explores and exposes ideas and realms of a hypothetical nature, usually ones that come into contact with (and perhaps even breach) the limits of the human.<br />
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EDIT: Since beginning my PhD program at Boston U, I find that I read almost as much theoretical nonfiction as I do fiction. In light of this, I'm amending my project slightly to include posts on theory and philosophy. Some of my posts have, of course, already referenced certain philosophers and their works; however, I want to allow myself some space to work primarily on philosophy and theory, particularly as it relates to the current speculative trend taking place in Europe among thinkers such as Alain Badiou, Quentin Meillassoux, Ray Brassier, and even<span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><span style="line-height: 16px;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Slavoj Žižek. I hope that such exploratory posts will contribute to my critical study of SF in the future.</span><br />
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Currently reading: <em>Nova Swing</em> (M. John Harrison)<br />
Last book read: <em>Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance</em> (Richard Powers)Patrick Whitmarshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09136674843890947797noreply@blogger.com0