The Pinocchio Theory – Page 13 – "If you fake the funk, your nose will grow."

Some Updates

I haven’t had the time recently to post anything on this blog. Which is unfortunate, as I miss writing here.

But in the meantime, here are a few updates on recent publications and events.

A short article of mine, originally posted on this blog, has appeared in French translation in the journal Multitudes, issue 51, under the title “Comment traduire une forme de vie ?”. I haven’t managed to find a copy of this yet, but the information on the journal issue is here.

Wesleyan University Press has brought back into print a brilliant short novel by Samuel R. Delany, Phallos. The new, enhanced edition of the novel also includes several scholarly essays discussing it, including mine.

The absolutely indispensible Aqueduct Press has just published Strange Matings, edited by Rebecca J. Holden and Nisi Shawl, a collection of essays on the fiction of the late and much lamented Octavia Butler. An essay of mine is included, together with others much better than mine. Book information is here.

And finally, audio is available for the two lectures I recently gave in Dublin at the invitation of DUST (Dublin Unit for Speculative Thought). “Speculative Criteria (a conversation with Paul Ennis)” is available at https://archive.org/details/ShaviroSpecCriteria230513. And “Discognition” is available at http://archive.org/details/DiscognitionALectureByStevenShaviro , and also as a podcast from the University College Dublin Humanities Institute, and via iTunes (free).

SCMS response

Here is my response to the SCMS panel this afternoon on “primordigital cinema,” with talks by Jonathan Freedman, Richard Grusin, and Selmin Kara. Grusin’s paper is available at http://ragmanscircles.wordpress.com/2013/03/09/post-cinematic-affect-scms-march-9-2013/.

All three of these papers point to ways in which the new is never entirely new, but always involves a return to – and what Grusin calls a remediation of – the old. Technological transformation calls forth what Grusin in his paper calls atavism. Digital technologies have at this point entirely displaced the older technological bases of the cinema; this has led both to new forms and new sorts of content, but also to the surprising revival of older forms, contents, and techniques. Sometimes these revivals and remediations involve a nostalgic hearkening back to what has been displaced or lost; but at other times, we may see them as necessary or unavoidable consequences of the very process of social and technological change. All three of these papers consider, and shed interesting light upon, such mixed cases.

I think that Marshall McLuhan still provides us with the best framework for understanding such transformations. So I will use McLuhan’s schema in order to consider what we have learned from these three papers. McLuhan identified four tendencies, or what he called “laws of media”: four ways in which a new medium, technology artifact relates to its environment. This environment consists, in fact, of the older media, technologies, and artifacts that are in process of being displaced by the new. McLuhan describes the four tendencies as follows; each one provides a series of questions that we may ask:

ENHANCEMENT: “What does the artefact enhance or intensify or make possible or accelerate?”
OBSOLESCENCE: “What is pushed aside crobsolesced by the new ‘organ’?”
RETRIEVAL: “What recurrence or retrieval of earlier actions and services is brought into play simultaneously by the new form? What older, previously obsolesced ground is brought back and inheres in the new form?”
REVERSAL: “When pushed to the limits of its potential, the new form will end to reverse what had been its original characteristics. What is the reversal potential of the new form?”

All of these films suggest a progressive movement of enhancement and forced obsolesence of previous modes, and an atavistic retrieval of such modes and reversal back into them, all at once.

Jonathan Freedman untangles the ambiguities of digital cinema in his discussion of INGLORIOUS BASTERDS and HUGO. Quentin Tarantino uses computer-generated imagery precisely in order to celebrate the power of per-computerized, analog movie technology. The power of the old, analog cinematic image is celebrated in BASTERDS in “the shot of Shoshona’s disembodied face projected, ghostlike after her death onto the flame-engulfed theater”; this spectral image proclaims revenge even as the movie theater bursts into flame due to the combustibility of celluloid; so Tarantino both celebrates the power of celluloid, and portrays its destruction. Similarly, in HUGO, Martin Scorsese recreates George Melies’ lost or ruined films by means of 3D digital rendering. In both cases, new media technologies ironically allow the films’ directors to RETRIEVE certain of the lost powers of an older cinema. Digital film ENHANCES the powers of spectacle that already belonged to an older cinema; more specifically, it RETRIEVES the “cinema of attractions” that was made obsolete by conventional (classical) narrative (as well as certain old technologies, e.g. the hand-cranked projector –cf. Tony Scott’s use of hand-cranked cameras).

What is OBSOLESCED in this process, however, is a certain measure of naturalism or realism, or representational accuracy. This erasure of actuality, as a result of the new cinema’s ability to impose its own imagined events without impediment, potentially even reaches the dimension of historical falsification – this is the reason for Freedman’s worry about how BASTERDS achieves its fantasy of revenge against, and defeat of, the Nazis at the price of repressing the actual horrors of the Holocaust. He is less concerned with Scorsese’s mystification of early film history, because this doesn’t have the same ethical weight as Holocaust revisionism. But it still participates in what Freedman calls “the effacement of the signs of history by means of the perfections of digital technology.”

I am sensitive to Freedman’s point here, even if I am not as worried by the ethical and political consequences of this sort of “revisionism” and historical oblivion as he is. This is because I think that our new digital powers to alter historical images at will does not just mean a falsification of memory. But rather this transformation is one part of a whole new articulation of both (collective) historicity and (individual) memory: one that is no longer based in the sense of deep time, or of the density of Bergsonian duration, as was the case for much of the 20th century. David Rodowick deplores what he sees as the loss of duration in digital cinema, just as Fredric Jameson, more generally, criticizes the ways in which the spatialization enforced by postmodernity leads to a loss of history, since now all past moments are equally available for appropriation, outside of sequence, in a sort of eternal present, and with their import reduced to the status of commodified cliches. But it seems to me – and Jameson in certain moods would probably even agree – that this needs to be seen as an ambiguous situation rather than as a decline of formerly available powers. It is the terrain on which, for both good and ill, our political and cultural interventions need to operate.

In this regard, I would contrast INGLORIOUS BASTERDS with another Jewish revenge fantasy – one of its evident sources – that imagines Hitler killed prematurely, so that not only are the Nazis defeated, but the worst horrors of the Holocaust are, as it were, retrospectively averted in advance. I refer, of course, to Jerry Lewis’s 1970 film WHICH WAY TO THE FRONT?, which has no compunctions about transforming the traumas of the War into kitsche. In this film, Lewis’ character impersonates a German General and thereby manages to kill Hitler during the Allied invasion of Italy – hence well before D-Day. Despite its much earlier date than Tarantino’s film, and consequent much less technologically advanced use of (analog) special effects, Lewis’ film already takes for granted the “postmodern” image of history deplored by Jameson. But Lewis’ historical revisionism operates according to far different codes than that of Tarantino (comedy instead of war/macho cliches), to better and more progressive effect. I would even claim that Lewis’ film, despite its temporal priority, can be seen as the tendential REVERSAL of Tarantino’s digital reworking of history. (As perhaps THE ERRAND BOY is in relation to Scorsese’s nostalgic re-creation of early cinema).

Richard Grusin’s talk convincingly rereads Lars von Trier’s MELANCHOLIA as a kind of mourning for the death of cinema. Grusin refers specifically to the death of an atavistic cinema of attractions, and suggests that the film refuses the audiovisual practices of contemporary “fast” cinema. I am not sure I agree entirely with this, since the first half of the film involves a Dogme95-style nervous handheld camera. (Does photographic cinema equate with the primitive cinema of attractions?).

But in any case, the apocalypse figured in the film is also, or perhaps even primarily, a self-reflexive technological one. Grusin thereby reworks my own reading of MELANCHOLIA, by pointing to aspects of the film that I overlooked. Von Trier, in effect, uses digital technologies – especially in the film’s Overture and in its imaging of the planet Melancholia coming towards and finally obliterating the Earth – in order to OBSOLESCE the myths of progressivism that were central to 20th century filmic narrative. He mourns the death of cinema by proleptically welcoming this death and finding it a source of comfort, and an opportunity to act humanely – as it is for Justine within the film. In this way, the film remediates, or RETRIEVES, a kind of archaic pictorialism that is found in images reaching back to the very birth of cinema (of a cinema largely of attractions) – and beyond this as well, to various pre- and anti-modernist visual sources. The affective “pull” of cinema is ENHANCED at the very moment of its disappearance – which is dramatized in the film by the way the end of the film, or of any film, is synchronized with the end of cinema itself. The end of the story is synchronized with the vanishing of the cinematic image.

In place of Grusin’s reference to the Lumiere Bros’ “Arrival of the Train,” and to the final shot of “The Great Train Robbery,” I would rather recall Godard’s WEEKEND, whose final title reads, instead of the usual FIN, rather FIN DU CINEMA. In 1968, Godard felt that he had exhausted the possibilities of cinema, both formally and politically. Recall that Godard also said that a film must have a beginning, a middle, and an end, but not necessarily in that order.

Despite the militant Maoism to which Godard aspired at the time, I think that one can find a despair here that von Trier RETRIEVES in a depressive (instead of angrily nihilistic) mode. In this case, the REVERSAL is a kind of (implicitly endless) living-on of the very scene of catastrophic obliteration. By aestheticizing the disaster in this lyrical way, i.e. by using his digital special-effects technology to give us delicate double-moonlight and double-shadow effects, in contast to the FX apocalypse porn of so many other films, von Trier manages to find a sort of comfort in this final destruction precisely by lingering over it at the culminating or liminal point of its advent. And this means a kind of REVERSAL of the very apocalyptic culmination that he is mourning and deploring: which is precisely the way that the new digital technologies incorporate the atavistic.

Selmin Kara’s account of THE TREE OF LIFE, BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD, and (to a lesser extent) NOSTALGIA FOR THE LIGHT, directly links these films’ technological innovations – and especially the FX sequences of extinct life forms in the first two of these films – to the metaphysical questions that they raise. These films both involve the sort of ways that, as Lev Manovich has recently argued (in contrast to his earlier position) the digital enhances – rather than negates or substitutes for – the analog realism of traditional cinematography.

If these FX inserts are jarring to some audiences, because the compromise the otherwise-maintained sense of naturalism in the films’ depictions of families and their losses, Kara shows that these technological ENHANCEMENTS also work to disturb, and indeed to OBSOLESCE, the humanistic pieties that the films might otherwise seem concerned to maintain. They combine human an nonhuman temporalities. Both films RETRIEVE the sense of what Quentin Meillassoux calls “ancestrality,” or the primordial insistence of that which is irreducible to the human, since we cannot apprehend it even as a past presence; it is rather something that never was and never could have been present, never had the possibility of being “given” to an apprehending consciousness, since it absolutely precedes the existence of any such consciousness.

The crucial ambiguity of these films has to do with the way that this absolute antecedence is nonetheless “given” to us in a certain sense, through the “perceptual realism” of the computer-generated imagery, and through what Kara calls both films’ palpable “nostalgia for a proto-digital sense of naturalism.” I myself have no problems with speaking of speculative realism, despite the fact that the term has been criticized and rejected by the original participants.

Formally, TREE OF LIFE remediates, or works as a sort of remake of, Tarkovsky’s MIRROR. And the CGI sequence of creation and the dinosaurs seems to emulate Kubrick’s 2001. But, despite the atavistic reversion to the creation or origin of the universe, Malick’s film has a much lessened sense of thick temporality than Tarkovsky’s does. The scrambling of scenes via disjunctive editing has a thinness compared to Tarkovksy’s time traveling. It also entirely lacks the cynicism (if that is the word) with which Kubrick treats Arthur C. Clarke’s vision of cosmic evolution – despite the fact that Malick refers to Darwinian evolution as well as to Christian creationism. Unlike Kara, I don’t really see a “thanatological” alternative to Christian eschatology here. I don’t necessarily mean to imply that these are artistic failings; it has to do rather with the changes in our very conceptualization of temporality that I have already mentioned.

I think, actually, that this is more ambiguous than Kara says, since to my eyes the CGI doesn’t entirely succeed in its pseudo-naturalism, but retains a certain “uncanny valley” feeling to it. In this way, I think, the films in question (and Malick’s in particular) raise the question of the nonhuman that has become so urgent in contemporary speculative realism, and engage in salutary speculation – but also that they RETRIEVE, or retreat back to, the sort of existential sense of finitude that is precisely what Meillassoux and Brassier reject – Brassier in particular criticizes the adequacy of Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s stances towards death. Malick’s film seems to me to recuperate the nonhuman temporality of cosmic origins into human terms. The question that for me still remains unanswered is to what sort of REVERSAL the tendencies of these at once forward-looking and atavistic films might lead.

Another interview

I am the latest academic to be interviewed on the excellent Canadian website, Figure/Ground Communications. My interview is here. I talk both about my own current research in Whitehead and speculative realism, and in science fiction, and about the current state of academia, at a time when “the university is under threat… from the relentless demands of capital accumulation, which has led to both the defunding of educational institutions, and their instrumentalization and monetization as nothing more than potential sources from which an economic profit may be extracted.”

A Brief Remark on Zero Dark Thirty

Liberalism has often been criticized (rightly, in my opinion) for for its unwavering emphasis upon means rather than ends, procedures rather than goals. As Carl Freedman puts it, in his great account of Richard Nixon:

Liberalism begins by abjuring positive social policy in favor of a formal proceduralism, pragmatically trusting that the application of a certain set of rules will “work” in the sense of yielding the fairest attainable results. But such results are absolutely precluded by the initial liberal move of waiving the question of justice: for justice is a social goal with positive, determinate content…

In other words, liberal proceduralism is concerned that actions must be conducted “fairly,” and not at all concerned with the question of whether the outcome of the action is actually fair. If fairness or justice is a Kantian regulative ideal, then 20th and 21st century liberalism is obsessed with the “regulative” aspect in and of itself, to the point of entirely forgetting the “ideal” which is what really matters.

Liberal proceduralism is one aspect of the “instrumental reason” whose annihilation of true rationality Horkheimer and Adorno warned us of two thirds of a century ago. And if anything, this proceduralism has become even more pronounced today than it was in the mid-20th-century. It has become the nearly unquestioned basis of all aspects of government and social life. Everything from the “reforms” that are currently decimating the US educational system, to the way that American foreign and military policy is conducted, adheres to a strictly procedural logic. (In a full social analysis, we would have to say that there is in fact an end in sight: the further accumulation of capital by the tiny minority that already “owns” it, and the exacerbated dispossession of the “99%” in the US itself, not to mention the much more severely disadvantaged global poor. But of course, this “end” is not publically avowable. And as Marx long ago pointed out, the “end” of capital accumulation isn’t really an end or an aim, since it has no goal in view aside from its continuing exacerbated expansion. On the largest scale, capitalism is itself a “liberal” process of proceduralism without any additional or external aim).

I think that it is because we live in such an overwhelmingly “proceduralist” society that the genre of the *procedural* has become so ubiquitous in television and film. This genre used to be known as the “police procedural,” exemplified today by (for example) the ever-popular CSI group of TV shows. But procedurals have also become the staple genre for some of our most interesting film directors. Thus Olivier Assayas gives us a procedural of terrorism (Carlos), and David Fincher gives us procedurals of detective work beyond the police department (Zodiac) and of corporate strategy in the age of the Internet (The Social Network).

And this, to me, is the genius of Zero Dark Thirty. When I wrote before about Kathryn Bigelow, I noted that her characteristic techinque as a director is to immerse herself, and us, in the element, or environment, in which the story takes place (night in Near Dark; the seashore and the waves in Point Break; the realm of inner-psychic-life-as-virtual-reality in Strange Days; and the desert in The Hurt Locker). I also noted that The Hurt Locker marked her move to the genre of the procedural, in order to convey this elemental reality (which seems not to be “political” only because it is, in fact,the necessary precondition and container of the political).

Well, perhaps this is because I am such an unregenerate auteurist, but I find the same principles at work in Zero Dark Thirty as well.

Zero Dark Thirty is the ne plus ultra of proceduralism, its ultimate expansion and reductio ad absurdum. It’s all about the well-nigh interminable process of searching for, and then eliminating, Osama Bin Laden. The premise and initial impetus of this process is of course the mythological demonization of Bin Laden, as the ultimate culprit responsible for Nine Eleven. But in the relentless proceduralism that the film presents to us, this goal or rationale is abraded away. The torture which the film has become controversial for depicting is of course part of this. But so is the process of painstakingly correlating irrelevant information, the accidental discovery of leads in years-old records, the repetitive tracking of the vehicle of the suspected courier, the endless bureaucratic meetings at which officials seek to decide if the information is valid and what should be done about it, and above all the military operation in the last thirty minutes of the film (has military action ever been depicted in the movies with such relentless a focus on operational techniques, in a manner that is utterly devoid alike of the horror of war and of the glory and heroism that are so often invoked to justify it?). The goal has been so absorbed into procedural routine that the ostensible climax of the film, the actual killing of Bin Laden, occurs offscreen; and we barely even get a glimpse of the corpse, zipped as it is into a body bag, which is to say treated entirely (and literally) according to Standard Operating Procedure.

The film makes a sort of feint by implying that its real subject is the passion of its protagonist Maya (Jessica Chastain), who continues to pursue the search for Osama when everyone else has given up on it. But her obsession is itself entirely contained within, and articulated by, the proceduralism which is her job as a CIA analyst, and which seems to be the only world she knows. Every potentially dramatic action in which she finds herself (bombings and armed ambushes included) is drained of drama, and subsumed within proceduralist routine. Every affect, and every reason for doing what one does, is sucked into a black hole. This is why Maya is so emptied out at the end of the film.

We are immersed into an overwhelming environment in Zero Dark Thirty, just as we are in all of Bigelow’s films. But in this case, the environment is the numbingly anonymous one of Big Data, of the numbingly repetitious accumulation of “information” (whether by torture, surveillance, physical search, or collation of records), and of instantaneity (the annihilation of duration) mediated through video screens and telecommunications technologies.

As I was watching Zero Dark Thirty, I found the relentlessness with which all this was depicted almost unbearably intense. I’ve never seen (or heard) so powerful a depiction (or better, I should say,so powerful an enactment) of entropic dissolution and decay. All meaning, and all feeling, was draining away before my eyes and ears, without even the prospect of any sort of negative finality or conclusion. I realize that this weird inverted intensity won’t appeal to everyone; it’s the reason, I think, that many people I know simply found the movie tedious and boring. (But such differences of response are of course, as Kant knew, beyond argument).

In any case, Zero Dark Thirty embodies the truth of liberal proceduralism as an organizing principle of all governmentality and all social life today. Embodying and testifying to a truth in this manner is not the same as offering a “critique.” In this sense, it is perfectly true that the movie does not offer any critique of our government’s systematic use of torture. It is also perfectly true, at least in a literal and banal sense, that (as the filmmakers have themselves defensively claimed) the movie doesn’t “endorse” torture either. But I think that to have an argument on this level is to miss the point. Critique is important, but it isn’t everything. It might well be argued that, at this late date, even the most accurate critique doesn’t accomplish very much; it is itself too much part of an all-too-predictable procedure. Embodying the truth of a situation, as I think Zero Dark Thirty does, has important aesthetic and political consequences, more important perhaps than those that come from making an accurate and moral judgment. Zero Dark Thirty doesn’t show us a way out from the nightmare of liberal proceduralism, but it makes this nightmare visible at a time when its sheer ubiquity might otherwise leave us to take it for granted and thereby ignore it.

Perception according to Metzinger

Metzinger, Being No One, page 173:

Phenomenal representations are transparent, because their content seems to be fixed in all possible contexts: The book you now hold in your hands will always stay this very same book according to your subjective experience, no matter how much the external perceptual situation changes. What you are now experiencing is not an “active object emulator,” which has just been embedded in your global model of reality, but simply the content of the underlying representational dynamics: this book, as here (constraint 3) and now (constraint 2) effortlessly given to you (constraint 7). At this level it may, perhaps, be helpful to clarify the concept of transparency with regard to the current theoretical context by returning to more traditional conceptual tools, by once again differentiating between the vehicle and the content of a representation, between the representational carrier and its representational content.

The representational carrier of your phenomenal experience is a certain process in the brain. This process, which in no concrete way possesses anything “booklike,” is not consciously experienced by yourself; it is transparent in the sense of you looking through it. What you are looking onto is its representational content, the existence of a book, here and now, as given through your sensory organs. This content, therefore, is an abstract property of the concrete representational state in your brain. However, as we have already seen, there are at least two kinds of content. The intentional content of the relevant states in your head depends on the fact of this book actually existing, and of the relevant state being a reliable instrument for gaining knowledge in general. If this representational carrier is a good and reliably functioning instrument for generating knowledge about the external world, then, by its very transparency, it permits you to directly, as it were, look “through it” right onto the book. It makes the information carried by it globally available (constraint 1), without your having to care about how this little miracle is achieved. The phenomenal content of your currently active book representation is what stays the same, no matter if the book exists or not. It is solely determined by internal properties of the nervous system.

Now, I agree with Metzinger to a certain extent. When our experience (falsely) seems to be transparent, this is because we are looking through the brain process (just as we might look through a window), without being aware that the window is there, i.e. without being aware that this process is going on (that the window is an intervening medium), So-called “naive realism” is false (as Metzinger rightly insists), because our sense of transparency causes us to ignore the mental medium through which the thing is transmitted to us; and as we know, every medium involves a “translation” rather than an unchanged conveyance.

What I reject from Metzinger, however, is the idea that what we see through the “window” of mental process is itself another mental product. (In Metzinger’s terms: what we see through the representational vehicle is the representational contents). No, I want to claim rather that this doubling is unnecessary. What we see through the brain process (or through the window) is not a “representational content”, but is actually the thing itself on the other side of the window (in Metzinger’s example, the book). The “content” that we see through the vehicle of brain processes (of which we are unaware) is not a representation, but the actual thing that we are looking at. Metzinger’s representationalism causes him to double the process of transmission.

Metzinger posits this doubling because, he argues, we could be hallucinating, i.e. there might not really be a book there at all. But I don’t think this is a sufficient reason to argue that what we are seeing is a mental simulation or representational contents, rather than an actual thing. Just a few pages earlier, Metzinger speaks of hallucinations generated by drugs like LSD: in such cases, he says, phenomenal transparency is interrupted because “what the subject becomes aware of are earlier processing stages in his visual system: the moving patterns [seen by someone hallucinating as a result of LSD] simply are these stages.” So when we are hallucinating, we are still perceiving something actual; it is just that what we are perceiving is our own (usually inaccessible) brain process, as opposed to things that we see with that brain process. This would also be the case if we hallucinate an object that isn’t there, and that our brain might generate via memory traces (there is no book there now, but I have seen books before, so the appearance of the book is part of my perception of my own process of perception).

In short, Metzinger argues from the possibility of hallucination that “your phenomenal life does not unfold in a world, but only in a world-model”; and that when we realize that what we are perceiving is in fact a hallucination, this means that the process of our mental activity (the process of “modeling”, or representing or simulating) itself “becomes globally available.” But I want to argue that this brain process itself is part of the world, and unfolds in the world; and that when we become aware of this, we are perceiving an additional part of what is going on in the world, rather than a second-order representation at a distance from the world.

This also leads back to what Whitehead calls “nonsensuous perception.” Metzinger distinguishes between intentional and phenomenal contents of perceptual experience. What Metzinger calls “intentional” is what happens when the perception is cognized. But, as Whitehead suggests, cognition is only a very belated and complex result of integrating many prehensions: i.e. it is only a derivative (which only happens in certain especially complex cases) of the far more basic pre-cognitive “prehension” of the thing. And this nonsensuous and precognitive sort of perception corresponds, more or less, to what Metzinger calls the “phenomenal” level of experience. Metzinger’s phenomenality (the most basic sort of “consciousness”) is the noncognitive (or precognitive) and affective basis of perception. This is what I think of as the nonphenomenological and nonintentional — or “autistic” — level of primordial experience. Because it preceides cognition, it is singular and not susceptible to representation: it is, in a Kantian sense, “aesthetic” rather than a matter of “understanding.” Metzinger mentions many sorts of noncognitive perceptions or experiences in his book; think, for instance, of “Raffman qualia,” or shades of color that can be phenomenally experienced by not identified, recognized, recalled, or remembered. Such basic or noncognitive perceptions are in a certain sense, as Metzinger suggests, “internal,” and capable of taking place as hallucination, even in the absence of an actual outside object. But even in the case of hallucination, “experience” on this level is, I insist, a process of prehension, and not a “representation.”

A few pages later Metzinger adds that “it is interesting to note how cognitive availability alone is not sufficient to break through the realism characterizing phenomenal experience. You cannot simply “think yourself out” of the phenomenal model of reality by changing your beliefs about this model. The transparency of phenomenal representations is cognitively impenetrable; phenomenal knowledge is not identical to conceptual or propositional knowledge.”

Now, I think that this is entirely right. My only disagreement is that think Metzinger gives too small a role to nonconceptual experience. Such experience precisely isn’t “knowledge”; but in order to deal with it, we need to break free from the prejudice that only the cognitively functional aspects of mentality matter.

Melancholia ebook

My long (18000 words) essay on Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, previously available in the open-access, online film journal Sequence, is now available as well as a free ebook (in epub, mobi, and pdf formats).

Tony Scott Project

The second half of mubi.com’s Tony Scott Project is now out, including my contribution.

Dark Eden, by Chris Beckett

I have just submitted a proposal to give a talk on the SF novel Dark Eden, by Chris Beckett.

Here it is:

Chris Beckett’s novel Dark Eden is not literally an adaptation, but in fact it “adapts” and rewrites a number of foundational Western texts regarding the origins of human society and civilization. Its sources range from the Book of Genesis, through Robinson Crusoe, and on to major 18th- and 19th-century works of social theory by such prominent thinkers as Rousseau, Bachofen, Nietzsche, and Engels.

The novel is set on a dark planet, one that does not circle any sun. The only energy source is geothermal, arising deep within the planet’s core. Plant and animal life forms have evolved, using this energy for fuel. “Trees” and other plants draw up heat energy from deep beneath the planet’s surface, and provide the ecosystem with warmth and light. Animals either forage on this plant life, or prey upon other animals.

A small number of human beings — five hundred or so — live on this planet; they are all descendents of a founding heterosexual couple, astronauts who were stranded on the planet, unable to return to Earth. The novel deals mostly with the social organization of this group. At first they live in a tightly-bound, matriarchal, “primitive,” and more or less egalitarian society. But in the course of the book we witness the splintering of this society: a “fall” from a putative “state of nature” into a more “historical” situation.

This “fall” is the result of a number of pressures: most importantly, environmental stress (as a result of overexploitation of limited resources), and the frequent appearance of detrimental recessive genetic traits (cleft palate and clubfoot) due to the restricted nature of the gene pool, combined with adolescent restlessness, and a certain drive against tradition and in favor of innovation.

The consequences of this “fall” include the “invention” of rape and murder, the transition from egalitarian matriarchy to hierarchical patriarchy, a growing tension and discordance between generations, as well as between men and women, and an energetic burst of exploration and technological invention.

In recounting these developments, the novel gives us an updated version of what I would like to call speculative anthropology. Following the classical thinkers I have already mentioned (Rousseau on the origins of inequality; Nietzsche on the origins of morality; Bachofen and Engels on the origins of family structures and differentiated gender roles), Chris Beckett speculates about “primitive” society and the development of the social institutions that today we take far too readily for granted.

I call Beckett’s “adaptation” of these sources an updated one, however, for several reasons. In the first place, Dark Eden is definitely “hard” science fiction; it revises the famous mythological and philosophical accounts upon which it draws in the light of our contemporary understanding of Darwinian constraints. In the second place, Dark Eden forcibly calls our attention to the way that the “origin” it recounts is not a true beginning, but remains parasitic upon previous human social developments. Marx famously observed that Robinson Crusoe does not really build civilization from scratch; he starts out with both his already-ingrained bourgeois assumptions, and the large amount of material that he is able to salvage from the shipwreck that threw him on his island. Dark Eden makes this structure of antecedence entirely explicit: the lives of all the human beings on the planet are dominated by a kind of social memory, in the form of the myths, legends, gossip, and practices that have been handed down to them from the founding couple’s reminiscences of life on Earth.

There is no true origin, therefore, but only a repetition or “adaptation” (using this word both in the literary sense and in the biological one). The realm of myth is itself the consequence of historical contingency. Dark Eden is an unsettling book, not just because it offers a pessimistic and nonutopian account of human potentialities, but also because it strips this very account of any mythic, originary authority, and places it instead in a context of chance, arbitrariness and existential fragility.

Notes on Muriel Combes’ book on Simondon

Here are the notes that formed the raw material for my presentation at SLSA on Muriel Combes' book on Gilbert Simondon (newly translated by Thomas Lamarre, and to be published by MIT Press in October). I guess I don't have the time & energy to write them into more finished form; but hopefully they will give some sort of indication of what I found to be valuable in the book, and how it relates to current discussions about speculative realism, systems theory, ontology, etc.

The book is very short and very dense and concise. I am less interested in asking whether it is an accurate account of Simondon — though it has certainly played a great role in my understanding of Simondon — than in asking what it can do for us, where it can bring us.

The crucial point: Initial non-identity of being. Being is not one. The important question to ask in such circumstances is: Excess or deficiency? In Combes' account, being is always in excess, it is always more-than-one. "Being is constitutively, immediately, a power of mutation… because being contains potential, and because all that is exists with a reserve of becoming, the non-self-identity of being should be called more-than-identity. In this sense, being is in excess over itself." (3) Contrast this excess to deficit or negation in the dialectic. What are the implications of seeing excess, or unfulfilled potentiality, rather than deficit?

STIEGLER, CAPITALISM, MARXISM

This formulation in the opening chapter relates to Combes' critique of Stiegler towards the end of the book. Stiegler sees technics as a prosthetic for an originary deficit. Combes rejects this, since she says that, for Simondon, alienation is the result of excess unrealized potential rather than of a deficit or lack.

Against Stiegler's theory of the prosthetic. This is because each individual's incompleteness is itself something positive, the continuing existence of a reservoir of potentialities. (49-50 & 67ff). "Stiegler does not seem to countenance the possibility that humans share more than default or lack… If human individuals should not be conceived on the basis of fixed bioanthropological nature, I do not see why they should be conceived on the basis of original defect that we then take pains to call originary in entirely metaphysical nostalgia for foundations." (69)

Both Stiegler and Simondon are problematic from a Marxist point of view. One might criticize Stiegler for turning a particular historical situation (that of alienation under capitalism) into an originary characteristic of the human species in general. While much in Stiegler's critique of capitalism is spot-on, he turns cultural symptoms into to basic existential situations, while omitting to consider capital accumulation & exploitation as the motors of capitalism. This is what's weak (although not false) about his saying that capitalism short-circuits vital processes of individuation. In terms of Combes' analysis, Stiegler fails to articulate the way in which all new individuations, and especially group and collective ones, work by undoing or going before previously accomplished individuations. "Any collective individuation wherein a subject is constructed begins with disindividuation" (69).

Of course, Simondon himself (according to Combes' account) criticizes Marxism. He thinks that Marxism is too economistic, and too wedded to Labor, to be able to grasp the transversal relations between human beings and machines, or to understand the real source of alienation (which comes from human beings seeing themselves as either superior or inferior to machines, instead of existing in equality alongside machines). However, Combes adds that "at the very moment he critiques Marx, Simondon is far closer to him than he thinks." (72-73)."

For me, if this is the case it is because Simondon expresses a utopian vision in which "technical activity" becomes a "model of collective relation" (77), in a process of reticularity against hylomorphism (69). A transindividuation involving both human beings and machines, in equality: this to me matches Fourier as a vision of a "socialism" that would be radically different from our capitalist present. — But also, Simondon's vision is only thinkable in a situation of the real instead of merely formal subsumption of labor (and everything else) under capital, together with the sort of machine embodiment of general intellect envisioned in Marx's fragment on machines — in other words, Simondon-via-Combes makes thinkable what I otherwise haven't found convincing: Hardt & Negri's claim that real subsumption & general intellect make a reversal into communism possible. — The point being that this has to be, not the old dialectical reversal, but one that has to do with reservoirs of potential. In this respect Simondon is further away from Hegelianism, and less in danger of reverting to it, than are Hardt and Negri.

BEING & BECOMING; OBJECTS & OOO; INDIVIDUATION & AUTOPOIESIS

Combes' account of Simondon also gives us a different perspective on the arguments about substance and relation which have come up in connection with OOO, and about the functioning of systems in connection with theories of autopoiesis.

Harman would undoubtably say (& I think he does in fact say someplace) that Simondon "undermines" objects by reverting to the primordial undifferentiated flux out of which objects would emerge, and back into which they would revert. — But I think that this is too simple. Simondon complexifies Harman's binaries.

For one thing, I think that Simondon's basic question of where individuals come from, how they come to be, is an unavoidable one. I don't think that OOO answers this adequately (though the best OOO answer would be to say things emerge from Lucretian clinamens — does Bryant maintain this?). Simondon presents an account of emergence that actually works in detail, as opposed to the usual hand-waving invocation of emergence to explain anything that can't be explained otherwise. Becoming, for Simondon, is not a characterless flux (as Bergson's becoming is sometimes accused of being, e.g. by Bloch as well as by OOO people); it is rather a particular and well-defined OPERATION (or series of operations). "Being only is in becoming, that is, by its structuring in diverse domains of individuation (physical, biological, psychosocial, and also, in a certain sense, technological) through the work of operations." (4).

The preindividual out of which an individual emerges is itself a particular energetic state (or metastable equilibrium of states). Because it is metastable, it is extremely sensitive to initial conditions (in this way Simondon prefigures theories of chaos and complexity).

There is an initial nonindividuated state. But I want to argue that this is a situation in which Harman's opposition between distinct entities vs total undermining indistinction doesn't really apply. One can see this even, or especially, in Simondon's explicit treatment of Anaximander's apeiron. This is because, as Combes says, "apeiron, nature indetermined because still nonstructured, is charged with potentials: indetermined is thus not synonymous with undifferentiated" (49). Individuation is a process of DEPHASING (4). This involves the playing out of incompatibilities that are not oppositions, but that unfold in the process of crystallization.

RELATION: "relation would no longer be conceived of as something that "springs up between two terms that are already individuated": in effect, within the theory of individuation, relation is redefined as "an aspect of the internal resonance of a system of individuation" (IG, 27; IL, 29). In this respect, it has a "rank of being" and cannot be considered as an entirely logical reality" (16). — So, for Simondon, being is always relational, but this relationality is not absolute & cannot be pejoratively defined as OOO tries to do (nor can we simply make a division between internal and external relations). Indeed: "Already at the level of physical beings, that relation is constituting means that interiority and exteriority are not substantially different; there are not two domains, but a relative distinction; because, insofar as any individual is capable of growth, what was exterior to it can become interior. We may say then that relation, insofar as it is constituting, exists as a limit. As a function of this constituting power of the limit, the individual appears not as a finite being but as a limited being, that is, as a being in which "the dynamism of growth never stops" (IG, 91; IL, 93)." (20) — so, relations actually constitute the separation of interior from exterior, and guarantee that this border is itself never fixed.

The radical temporality of relations is why Harman's & Bryant's critiques of determining relations does not apply here. Relational processes determine the interior as separate from the exterior, i.e. these relations determine the individual as that which is not pre-defined by its relations.

Against predicates or qualities: "the characteristics of individuation that appear when we study the formation of crystalline forms of a same type (here: sulfur) are not "qualities" insofar as "such characteristics are prior to any idea of substance (since we are dealing with the same body)" (IG, 75; IL, 77). Transparency and opacity in particular can characterize the same form (sulfur crystal) in succession as a function of the temperature imposed on the metastable system at the moment of crystallization. Transparency and opacity thus cannot be thought of as qualities of a substance, but as characteristics appearing in a system undergoing a change of state. We must cease to apprehend being as a substance or a compound of substances if we are to cease understanding relation as that which links, within thought, elements separated within being." (16-17) — Thus relations are real, rather than being mental impositions upon objectively separate mental impressions.
"Being itself now appears as that which becomes by linking together." (17)

Simondon "takes great care to distinguish the notions of adaptation and equilibrium, which he rejects, from notions of evolution and invention" (62); this is why individuation must be opposed to autopoiesis. The linking of individual and milieu in Simondon is reminiscent of, but actually different from, the structural coupling of system and milieu in Luhmann-via-Bryant. Because potential transductively crosses the membrane or boundary, so that there is no question of operational closure. Difference between individuation and either conatus or autopoiesis. (This is a hesitation or ambiguity in Deleuze).

PERCEPTION, AFFECTIVITY, COGNITION

"To perceive is not primarily to grasp a form; rather it is the act taking place within an ensemble constituted by the relation between subject and world, through which a subject invents a form and thereby modifies its own structure and that of the object at the same time: we see only within a system in tension, of which we are a subensemble." (27) — Perception defined in system terms, instead of in phenomenological terms. But this system is quite different from those of the structuralists or from that of Derrida or Luhmann.

"The reality of psyche is transductive, that of a relation connecting two liaisons. This relation, as we have seen, operates in the individual as individualization; and it is operated through affectivity and emotivity, which define the "relational layer constituting the center of individuality" (IPC, 99; IL, 248). By situating the center of individuality in affectivity and emotivity, Simondon distances himself from the majority of conceptualizations of psychic individuality, which rely on a theory of consciousness or on the hypothesis of the unconscious." (30). — The psyche is a double process of (inner & outer) individuation, driven noncognitively by "affectivity & emotivity".

"The liaison between relation to self and relation to the world" takes place in "the affectivo-emotive layer, the domain of intensities" (30). Combes links Simondon's affectivity to Spinoza's "capacity to affect and to be affected" (30-31). This implies "an understanding of the subject wherein relation to the outside is not something coming to an already constituted subject from without, but something without which the subject would not be able to be constituted" (31). The individual needs an outside in order to be constituted at all. It doesn't encounter an outside in contrast to its own constituted insideness.

"Simondon opens a perspective in which "psychic reality is not closed upon itself. The psychic problematic cannot be resolved in intraindividual terms"." (31)

"Affectivity, the relational layer constituting the center of individuality, arises in us as a liaison between the relation of the individual to itself and its relation to the world. As such, it is primarily in the form of a tension that this relation to self is effectuated: affectivity, in effect, puts the individual in relation with something that it brings with it, but that it feels quite justifiably as exterior to itself as individual. Affectivity includes a relation between the individuated being and a share of not-yet-individuated preindividual reality that any individual carries with it: affective life, as "relation to self," is thus a relation to what, in the self, is not of the order of the individual. Affective life thus shows us that we are not only individuals, that our being is not reducible to our individuated being." (31).

"The elaboration of psychic individuality is transindividual… individual cannot psychically consist in itself." (40) "It is not relation to self that comes first and makes the collective possible, but relation to what, in the self, surpasses the individual, communicating without mediation with a nonindividual share in the other" (41). The social "is neither a substance, that is, one term of a relation, nor a sum of individual substances, but a "system of relations" (IPC, 179; IL, 295)." (43)

For this reason, neither psychologism nor (Durkheimian) sociology is valid — neither individuals nor society are preconstituted & self-contained. "In sum, if psychology and sociology misunderstand the reality of the collective, it is because, when they apprehend it from the angle of the individual or that of society, which are but two polar extremes, both of them forget that this reality consists principally of "relational activity between inside group and outside group" (IPC, 179; IL, 295)." (43) — & note that "relational activity" = processes of individuation.

How does this relate to Latour's Tarde-against-Durkheim?

Emotion: "Properly speaking, emotion coincides so entirely with the very movement of constitution of the collective that we may say, "there is a collective to the extent that an emotion is structured" (IPC, 211; IL, 314; emphasis added). The collective, as Simondon understands it, is born at the same time as emotion is structured across many subjects, as structuration of such emotion" (51). — "This reversibility of individuation of the collective and structuration of emotion makes clear that the most intimate of ourselves, what we always experience in terms of inalienable singularity, does not belong to us individually; intimacy arises less from a private sphere than from an impersonal affective life, which is held immediately in common." (51) — Hence an idea of the common (again cf Hardt & Negri)

How Simondon undermines the rigid distinction between life & nonlife (Lamarre). (Cf Hayles' praise of OOO for doing this).