"Future History": Science Fiction and Historicism

My topic today is partly informed by the dialogue between historicism and scientism in Marxist hermeneutics.  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.  Since this blog, as a space for science fiction, is specifically concerned with the genre’s more current obsession with the nonhuman as is, I would like for this post to concern itself seriously (or as seriously as is possible in an online space) with this theoretical debate.  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 nonhuman approach of science fiction literature.  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).  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^th-century historicist hermeneutics.

To begin the explication of this discourse, I want to introduce a quote from science fiction writer Philip K. Dick:

[Robert] Heinlein has written what he calls “future history,” and much of SF is.  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.  It is a great colloquy among all of us, writers and fans and editors alike.  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 continuity and the possibility, the opportunity, the ethical need, if you will, for them to add onto this growing “future history.” (Dick 71)

This quote is taken from The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick, a collection of essays, speeches, interviews, and even some proposals, and hypothetical introductions, for unwritten novels or screenplays.  The book concludes with excerpts from Dick’s Exegesis, an intimate portrayal of the writer’s hallucinations and visions near the end of his life.  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.  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.  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?  Is what I remember doing yesterday what I really did yesterday?  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?

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”.  Each is characterized by a very specific style and set of standards.  In Golden Age, plots are often rather straightforward, linear, and feature more traditional, archetypal models (despite its late appearance, George Lucas’s Star Wars trilogy fits rather nicely into this category, albeit without the advanced scientific knowledge that characterized many earlier examples).  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.  Finally, Golden Age sci-fi is also often profoundly concerned with the ideas it proposes, ideas that often trump plot and character in importance.  For this reason, many critics find Golden Age sci-fi simple and hackneyed in style, and some of them rightly so.

In contrast to the Golden Age, New Wave sci-fi introduces something new.  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^th century), and the New Wave picks up sometime in the 60s and 70s.  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 Library of America collections).  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.  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.  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.  In Dick’s work, even his earliest stories, the speculative environments introduced are rarely posited as objective or noumeal realities, in-itself realities.  They are, readers will often find, skeptical to a sometimes debilitating extent.  The speculative environment becomes reflexive of a possible internal disjunct with reality, a perception that might not square with what actually exists.

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.  As he matures, so does his writing, and later novels such as A Scanner Darkly or VALIS 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.  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 Ubik).  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.  This shift from Golden Age to New Wave can perhaps be characterized most explicitly as a shift from idea/concept to character.  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.  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.

The divide between Golden Age and New Wave can actually be rather explicitly identified.  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.  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.  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.  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.

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.  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.”  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.

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?)?  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.  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).  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 The Political Unconscious, which specifically targets Althusserian scientific Marxism.  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.  This mode of being exterior to capitalism is not conditioned by the latter, thus making it a pure, radically other form of existence that is always available, always potentially present and ripe for revolutionary action.  In contrast, Jameson’s historicist model suggests that revolution and radical action can only develop historically, and he observes literary models to support this.  In literature, The Political Unconscious claims, we can observe certain antinomies of capitalist ideology emerging as the systems interior components begin to come into contact with one another.  The Political Unconscious looks at binary oppositions in different works of literature, and rewrites them as historically charged manifestations of cultural conditions.  Thus, for Jameson, revolution is an emergent phenomenon, comprised of action that must gradually develop over time, alongside capitalism but not a property of capitalism per se, until the antinomies of the system can no longer sustain themselves.  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.  For Jameson, revolution becomes historically possible; for Althusser, revolution is always possible.

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.  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.  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.

Let me reiterate: I subscribe to the Jamesonian version.  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.  If ideology and cognitive/physical bondage take different historical forms, how can any “universal” revolutionary praxis work for all of them?  Is it not more likely that history conditions not only the components of cultural ideology, but also the components necessary for emancipation?  Althusser’s theory thus becomes one of idealism, despite his claim that “ideology has a material existence” (Althusser 112).  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.  Furthermore, Althusser claims that ideology has no history, in stark contrast to Jameson, where ideology must be historically determined.

If one has difficulty seeing where all this leads, that person is not alone.  Althusser claims that “ideologies have a history of their own” while “ideology in general has no history, not in a negative sense (its history is external to it), but in an absolutely positive sense” (108).  These are strong words, especially for a theorist who also wrote that “ideology has no outside (for itself), but at the same time […] it is nothing but outside (for science and reality)” (119).  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).  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.

Interestingly enough, this is how I sometimes imagine the character’s in Dick’s novels feel.

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.  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.  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.  He thus proposes a method of philosophical praxis that is impossible to practice.

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.   The impasse collapses inward from culture and society down to cognition itself – a theme that registers with a great deal of contemporary sci-fi.  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.  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.  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.”

It is with this point that Dick hits on the crux of the argument between historicism and scientism.  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:

[…] I would imagine a whole culture, and speculate as in a voluntary dream, what that person’s world might have been like.  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.  What I see is what I suppose I would have to call a “fictional” environment that that skull tells me of.  A story that that skull might wish to say.  “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.  Each object is a clue, a key, to an entire world unlike our own – past, present, or future, it is not this immediate world, and this skull tells me of this other world, and this I must dream up myself.  I have passed out of the domain of true science. (Dick 72).

This excerpt, as the one above, is from a 1974 essay titled “Who is an SF Writer?”  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.  This reality cannot be explained, Dick claims, through recourse to traditional science, that being a pursuit of knowledge conditioned by known, or contemporary, reality.  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.  This context is only available to the sci-fi writer through the lens of historiography.

This might seem contradictory, since history itself is always a human history.  It is written by humans, requested by humans, and read by humans.  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.  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.  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.  It is in this way that we begin to see the inherent chaos of historical development, and the illusion behind the notion of progress.  It is no coincidence that one of Dick’s early and most successful novels, Man in the High Castle, was an alternative history novel.  And merely three years later he published Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb, a novel that dealt with the aftermath of nuclear war on earth.  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, historical.

Jameson’s theory posits the historical development of both ideology and the revolutionary tools with which human subjects can try to dismantle it.  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.  In a sense this is true; but in another sense, it is misleading.  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.”  Not at all.  Jameson’s theory is one of intellectual dedication and commitment, and the continual attempt of revolution against a continually adapting ideological complex.  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).  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).  What Jameson’s The Political Unconscious 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).  In the conclusion of his book, Jameson asks his audience the following:

[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).

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.  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 all class ideologies contain a Utopian element within themselves, and this is the justification for his historical conception of Marxism.  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.

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, Iron Council.

Iron Council 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.  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 Theses on the Philosophy of History), and role of human subjects in realizing historical opportunity.  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:

“You don’t decide when is the right time, when it fits your story.  This was the time we were here.  We knew.  We decided […] We were something real, and we came in our time, and we made our decision, and it was not yours.  Whether we were right or wrong, it was our history.  You were never our augur […] Never our savior.” (Miéville 552).

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.  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 opportunity for revolution.  Jameson’s theory, as described above, is not one designed to create the opportunity for revolution, but one designed to realize when the opportunity is present.  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.  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.  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.  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.  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.  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.  History is, in its very composition, an ideological maneuver; a product, like the literary texts considered by Jameson in The Political Unconscious, of cultural ideology itself.  This is no doubt why Althusser finds the need to theorize a form of radical existence outside of historical conditioning.

In this regard, one might question whether or not successful emancipatory action is ever truly possible, in an absolute sense.  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.  I have no definitive answer to this question, but I take comfort in Žižek’s recitation of the Beckettian motto: “Try again.  Fail again.  Fail better” (qtd. in Žižek 86).

Works Cited

Althusser, Louis.  “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” Lenin and Philosophy and

Other Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster.  New York, Monthly Review Press: 2001. 85-126.

Dick, Philip K. “Who is an SF Writer?” The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected

Literary and Philosophical Writings. Ed. Lawrence Sutin. New York, Vintage Books: 1995. 69-78.

Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca,

Cornell UP: 1982.

Jorgensen, Darren. “Towards a Revolutionary Science Fiction.” Red Planets: Marxism and

Science Fiction. Eds. Mark Bould and China Miéville. Middletown, Wesleyan UP: 2009. 196-212.

Miéville, China. Iron Council. New York, Del Ray Books: 2004.

Žižek, Slavoj. First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. London, Verso: 2009.

Blindsight (Science Fiction and the Ontological Tradition)

DISCLAIMER: My knowledge of philosophy is a work in progress, so excuse any obscure or poorly conceived references.  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).  Furthermore, portions of this post cite excerpts from Peter Watts’s novel Blindsight.  However, these excerpts are largely decontextualized and do not pose any narrative spoilers.

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.

Let me rephrase.  This post is about science fiction.  I believe that we are witnessing an increasing trend in modern sci-fi to explore unresolved (even non-attempted) philosophical issues.  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).  Today, I want to inform my discussion with some comments on a new addition to the list.

Late in Peter Watts’s brilliant and devastating sci-fi novel, Blindsight, the narrator states: “All those theories, all those drug dreams and experiments and models trying to prove what consciousness was: none to explain what it was good for” (Watts 313).  I only recently finished this novel, but it has lingered with me nearly constantly since.  It’s a tragic elegy to the human condition; a lamentation of what the author perceives as an evolutionary weak link, a developmental accident.  ‘What if,’ the novel essentially asks, ‘consciousness is not the most efficient state for optimal instinctual survival?’  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.  It is a deep, dark, cold work that thrusts its readers into the abyss, both physically and cognitively.  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.

Blindsight 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.  The novel is also an experiment in something I would deem “brutal realism,” a style that I would also ascribe to Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (my favorite American novel) or Alain Robbe-Grillet’s La Jalousie.  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^th-century tradition of realist literature (Balzac, Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, and their ilk).  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.  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.  Some might be tempted to invoke Baudrillard’s notion of hyperreality, of something that is realer than real; but I would discourage my readers from this.

Cormac McCarthy’s wonderful historical novel, Blood Meridian, is far from what any literary theorist would call “realist.”  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.  Rather, the novel achieves a different kind of realism; a brutal realism.  This is a realism that spawns not from its dedication to accurate phenomenological representation, but from an obsession with human dissociation.  Objects, landscape, environment – in brutal realism, these things become strange, unreal, inhuman.  They take on a distance from the human, and impossible separation that no amount of narrative, representation, or communication can overcome.  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.  In brutal realism, these relations, which have so often donned an anthropomorphic appearance, are deprived of any human context.  They become truly alien.

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 look alien but who act at best like rabid dogs in chitin suits” (375).  Representations of alien organisms almost always are informed by certain anthropocentric standards.  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).  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 intentionally hostile.  It was Watts’s goal, in Blindsight, to “create an ‘alien’ that lives up to the word, while remaining biologically plausible” (375).  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).  Rather, it requires an incredible, nearly unfathomable distance.  The alien must become so strange, so unknowable, so immensely alien that it achieves a form worthy of being called such.  Its hostility, if it exhibits any, must be purely natural rather than intentional, intentionality being something more decidedly human.  Brutal realism allows such a distance.  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.

To us, such literary representations often take the form of what we label “science fiction.”  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 American Psycho, 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).  However, I do believe that it is in science fiction and fantasy that we find this style most prevalently.  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.  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.  Rather, near unreality; reality so extreme that we represent it to ourselves as unreal.  This is the exact opposite of Baudrillardian, postmodern hyperreality.  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.

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.  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, are notable, for reasons concerning their content if not any fashionable label that sports the term “realism.”  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.  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.

Martin Heidegger is considered, by many, to be the last truly great philosopher in the Continental tradition, and his magnum opus, the formative Being and Time, still stands to this day as one of the great behemoths of ontological philosophy.  For a long time after Heidegger, “philosophy” in its traditional sense seemed to diminish.  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).  Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Hans-Georg Gadamer may be other contenders, but their work is also often overshadowed by that of Heidegger.  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.  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.  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.  This is why, during the reign of poststructuralism and postmodernism in the later 20^th 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.  Philosophy becomes a philosophy of itself, and Derrida’s unrelenting deconstruction purports to bleed all previously lauded philosophies of any substantial content.  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.

And then, in 1988, something happens.  An obscure gem appears on bookshelves under the name L'être et l'événement - Being and Event.  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.  In this sense, Badiou aligns himself with the ontological tradition last touched on by Heidegger.  However, Badiou also challenges Heidegger, and Being and Event, down to its very title, is a direct confrontation of the ontological theory laid out in Being and Time.  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).  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.  For Heidegger, phenomenology presented the most applicable approach to ontology.  Being presented itself in temporality, the human subject was bound up in a continual process of opening, of emerging.  As Heidegger says: “time needs to be explicated primordially as the horizon for the understanding of Being, and in terms of temporality as the Being of Dasein, which understands Being” (Heidegger 39).  Badiou’s accusation is that, while Heidegger attempts to circumvent metaphysics, his theory of Being remains inhibited by metaphysical obfuscation.  For Heidegger, Being lurks behind a certain veil, manifesting in phenomenological reality only when a temporal subject engages with phenomenal objects.  In contrast, Badiou seeks a materialist ontology, not a metaphysical, or noumenal, Being that is concealed behind natural phenomenon.  Mathematics, Badiou claims, provides philosophy with the path to such a radical ontology.  For Badiou, a Subject isn’t reducible to an individual, but an individual might become part of a new Subject through participation in truth procedures.  Thus, the act of emergence, of presentation, 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.  Time remains important for Badiou, but only insofar as it relates to the temporality of the event, a rupture in which individuals may ingratiate themselves to a new Subject through radical truth procedures.  This involves the instantiation of new possibilities, possibilities that were previously considered to be outside the realm of possibility.  As Badiou clarifies: “The State is always the finitude of possibility, and the event is its infinitization” (IC 7).  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.

I don’t intend this post as an exhaustive exploration of 20^th-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.  Regardless, the most important point I wish to communicate is that Heidegger still stands as an indispensable figure in 20^th-century philosophy, and Badiou is, in my opinion, the most recent genuine challenge to Heideggerian ontology.

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.  I still am not sure which way I lean.  A theory of the Subject is comforting, while theories of its emptiness often appear convincing.  Perhaps a reconciliation of sorts is in order; but for now, I wish to move this discussion along and back into the science fiction realm.  The philosophers I’m about to mention may be offended at being associated with science fiction, but I think the connection warrants attention.  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^th-century sci-fi, some of which even began appearing before their philosophical contemporaries got a hold of them.  In the wake of Badiou’s new ontology, a group of radical and welcomed thinkers has emerged.  Meillassoux’s After Finitude, Brassier’s Nihilism Unbound, and Thacker’s After Life 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.  ‘How,’ these texts ask, ‘are we to think the nonhuman?  The nonliving?  The unmediated?’  How can we possibly seize upon something not human without recourse to what is human?  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 beyond possibility.  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.  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.  One merely needs to observe Watts’s Blindsight to find the argument that human thought and action, no matter how hard it tries, is condemned to failure.  The State will not be ruptured by any collective humanist event.  It will be ruptured by the imposition of radically inhuman forms and environments, by an object-realm that posits itself as unflinchingly not-for-us.  And, as in Blindsight, there is very little, if anything, that we can do about it.

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.  This move is given to us by recent developments in cognitive science.  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’.  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.  It remains unconscious toward much of its own biochemistry, its own survival instincts, and in fact it impedes its own success.  The subject of consciousness is a weak link.  The subject of consciousness is an evolutionary failure.  Watts writes:

I wastes energy and processing power, self-obsesses to the point of psychosis.  Scramblers [alien organisms in Blindsight] have no need of it, scramblers are more parsimonious.  With simpler biochemistries, with smaller brains–deprived of tools, of their ship, even of parts of their own metabolism– they think rings around you.  They hide their language in plain sight, even when you know what they’re saying.  They turn your own cognition against itself.  They travel between the stars.  This is what intelligence can do, unhampered by self-awareness. (Watts 304).

It is a move that bemoans the impotence not only of institutions such as language, politics, or religion, but of consciousness itself.  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.  Not very much, it turns out.

Some might argue that this doesn’t warrant an abandonment of ontological philosophy and discussion, and I would agree.  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.  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; his theory involves a multiplicity of individuals.  Yet it clings to the hope of progress and prosperity through mutual cooperation.  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.  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.

Blindsight takes a further step.  It doesn’t care as much about what consciousness is, but what purpose it serves.  Watts gives a depressingly blunt answer to this quandary: “You want to know the only real purpose [consciousness] serves?  Training wheels” (302).  In Blindsight, 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.  Thrills that once had to be earned in increments of fitness can now be had from pointless introspection.  Aesthetics arise unbidden from a trillion dopamine receptors, and the system moves beyond modeling the organism.  It begins to model the very process of modeling.”  Consciousness, Watts claims, is a step removed from survival-existence.

However, I want to reiterate that this does not 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.  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.  Meillassoux offers an interesting assessment in After Finitude:

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)

Each field privileges itself with its own brand of knowledge which it believes the other to be lacking.  Meillassoux certainly appears to elevate philosophy in this statement, but I believe he intends for a synthesis between the two.  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.  But what does this mean for philosophy?  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?  How should we move forward?  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.

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.  It would require far more research on my part to properly distinguish between and among these terms in this context.  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.  I do acknowledge, however, that the entire realm of ‘Being’ does extend beyond the narrow parameters that I’ve described above.  Cognitive science and philosophy of mind attempt to explore and explain merely one facet of that much larger and more complicated field of ontology.

Works Cited

Badiou, Alain. Being and Event. Trans. Oliver Feltham. London: Continuum, 2006.

-. “The Idea of Communism.” The Idea of Communism. London: Verso, 2010. 1-14.

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. John MacQuarrie and Edward Robinson. New York:

 Harper & Row, 1962.

Meillassoux, Quentin. After Finitude. London: Continuum, 2008.

Watts, Peter. Blindsight. New York: Tor, 2006.

Prometheus

I try not to deal in spoilers, but if you haven’t seen the film yet I’d recommend not reading this post.

Is Ridley Scott’s film, Prometheus—a film that has been met, unfortunately, with disappointment and even contempt among audiences—actually redeemed by its shortcomings?  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.  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.  So, today, I’m going to ask my readers to consider two hypotheticals.  First: that Prometheus is, hypothetically, an excellent film; and second: that its characters can only engage hypothetically with its own themes.

            Prometheus is a film about origins.  Human origins.  That said, it doesn’t answer very many questions about them: Who are we? Where do we come from?  Who made us?  And most important, why did they make us?  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.  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.  Prometheus 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.  Why, then, does it appear to lose all sense of direction well before its rather anticlimactic conclusion?  Why are the grand yet redundant questions that it raises almost completely ignored?

            First, we have to realize that these questions are not ignored by the characters.  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?”).  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.  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).

            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.  The film doesn’t offer a form of alternative history, a genre that depicts historical events that are factually different from its actual course.  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.  The plot of Prometheus hasn’t been negatively criticized because it deals with subject matter that is entirely ridiculous and impossible.  Rather, it has been criticized because the plot apparently fails to resolve these issues that it raises.  But is this a failure on the writers’ part?  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.  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.

            But now let’s seriously consider the hypothetical.  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.”  What might those purposes be?  It is here that, I believe, a deeper discussion of the concept of origins will be beneficial to this examination.

            In “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” theorist Michel Foucault offers an interesting interpretation of the concept of origins.  He writes: “The origin always precedes the Fall.  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).  Considering Prometheus’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.  The Engineers fill this obscure, mystical position previously reserved for deities.  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.”  In Prometheus, 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.  Jean Baudrillard relates this obsession to the pursuit of origins, often manifested in the guise of “mythological object[s]”;  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).  In Prometheus, the humans occupy the unique position of being both the primitive and advanced culture.  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.  Hence, humanity views them through a lens of advancement.  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.  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.  So humanity occupies both places in Baudrillard’s conception; the advanced and the primitive.

            This displacement results in a certain amount of anxiety placed upon the human explorers.  This anxiety is not purely their hesitance and, eventually, terror upon arriving at the alien site.  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.  To come to know our forefathers, but also to relieve them of their elevated status in our history.  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).  He then goes on to make a remarkably poignant statement: “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 [emphasis added]” (SO 88).  The quest Baudrillard is describing, the quest that the film depicts, is a Promethean quest; a quest that will provide a new established order, will create a new structure of knowledge, but that is ultimately doomed to fail.

            How does this quest provide a new established order or structure of knowledge?  Baudrillard is not the only one to make this connection.  Foucault also claims that “the origin makes possible a field of knowledge” (NGH 372).  What does this mean for the human characters in Scott’s film?  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).  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.  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).  Put even more bluntly, what lies at the historical beginning is not some total, pure origin, but “the dissension of things […and…] disparity” (372).  The genealogy that Foucault is outlining is one of impossible truth.  This is because, for Foucault, knowledge is (in a sense) antithetical to truth.  Fields of knowledge, “truthful” discourses… these things do not expose the truth, but paint it in new, sometimes even preconceived colors.  This is because any human discourse on origins is an anthropocentric interpretation of an utterly pre-human essence.  They can provide no revolutionary re-structuring because they merely revolve around the potentially incendiary kernel of their question.  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.  The scientists and explorers in the narrative seek a human explanation for something entirely alien and foreign.  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).  It is worth positing that Scott is aware of the idiosyncrasy inherent in such questions.

            For Foucault, this profound awareness of and obsession with the past is a modern aspect of humanity.  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.  Great epochs lacked this curiosity, lacked our excessive deference; they ignored their predecessors” (384).  Is the characterization of humans as barbarians gaping before ancient monuments not an accurate description of the human characters in Prometheus as they explore the alien site?  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.  However, this inevitably leads us to another impossible question: where is the process of historical development leading us?  In a way, Prometheus is a reaction to the failure of science and philosophy to answer this question.

Baudrillard writes elsewhere of the failure to predict the future, and the consequences this has had for humanity.  He claims that the idea of finality, the end-point, is what gives a historical movement its purpose and meaning (Passwords 59).  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.  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).  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 Prometheus: “The search for our beginning could lead to our end”).  Now we can see how Prometheus not only conflates Baudrillard’s sociological conceptions of the primitive and advanced cultures, but also the quests for our beginning and our end.  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.  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).  If history has no end, how can it hope to have any beginning?  With no end in sight, only an impossibly infinite cascade through time, the origin can only ever become an intangible, primordial fantasy.  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.

            In the face of this impossibility, humanity must increase its effort.  If mere knowledge and exploration will not suffice, then we must resort to coercion.  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).  This argument is, of course, central to Foucault’s entire theory, i.e. that structures of knowledge are the result of relations of power.  However, in Prometheus, imperialism is turned on its head, for it is not the humans at the helm of imperialist conquest.  Instead, the Engineers are the ones in possession of destructive forces beyond all measure, and of a quality that is utterly foreign.  One merely needs to consider the bewilderment and horror of Native Americans at the unveiling of the Hotchkiss guns to find a suitable analogy.  The twist of Prometheus, however, is that there is some historical connection between the weapons of the Engineers and the creation of humanity itself.  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 Prometheus is a pseudo-prequel).  Destruction begets creation.  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.

            In the case of Prometheus, 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.  No matter what the film attempts to do, any representation that it offers must remain constrained by the images of Western historical preconceptions.  When we observe history, we are not looking at some pristine, pure, untouched object.  We can only, ever, look at it through the lens of modern Western ideology.  Barry Hindess and Paul Hirst explain this notion perfectly:

To be accurate the object of history is whatever is represented as having hitherto existed.  The essence of this representation is preserved records and documents.  History’s object, the hitherto existing, does not exist except in the modality of its current existence, as representations… What the past is is determined by the content of the various ideological forms which operate within the parameters of historical knowledge. (qtd. in Jameson 473)

The origin, history, past foreign cultures… these can never be encountered except 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).  Prometheus 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.  There is no origin in this, only the human interpretation of origin.  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.  They rely on David, their artificially engineered counterpart (the analogous “human” to their own status as “engineers”), to read the alien language for them.  Yet throughout the entirety of the movie, there is no guarantee that David ever completely understands the language of the alien beings.  The only interaction with a living Engineer, at the film’s conclusion, yields no actual communication (in fact, it yields only violence).  Prometheus 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.  From the very beginning of the film, the human efforts are all in vain.

            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.  Prometheus 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).  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.  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.  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?”  As it turns out, Scott doesn’t give his audience much more to go on.  The result is just as disappointing, but this isn’t necessarily a fault of the film’s presentation.  Perhaps it has more to do with the very nature of its quest.

            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 Alien, that’s for sure, and the pacing and atmosphere of Prometheus don’t come close to matching the visceral, terrifying organism that was its predecessor).  It is my intention to explore the themes that Prometheus attempts to tackle, and these themes are not easy to unravel.  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?  Could an explanation of human origins ever hope to transcend our wildest spiritual, mystical, or scientific beliefs?  It’s my claim that Prometheus’s failure ultimately betrays to us our greatest illusion of all: that there was any origin to be found in the first place.  And, just as the origin remains concealed in primordial depths, so the ending as well may never materialize.  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.

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.

Works Cited

Baudrillard, Jean. Passwords. Trans. Chris Turner. London, Verso: 2003.

-. The System of Objects. Trans. James Benedict. London, Verso: 2005.

Foucault, Michel. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” Michel Foucault: Aesthetics, Method, and

Epistemology. Ed. James D. Faubion. New York, The New Press: 1998. 367-391.

Jameson, Fredric. “Marxism and Historicism.” The Ideologies of Theory. London, Verso:

2008. 451-482.