Value Experience

Here is the text of one of my talks from the SLSA conference this weekend. It was for a panel (part of a stream) on "Towards a Stengers-Whitehead Lexicon of the Nonhuman."

Alfred North Whitehead writes in "Civilized Universe," the sixth lecture in his book Modes of Thought, that "we have no right to deface the value experience which is the very essence of the universe" (MT 111). Isabelle Stengers remarks, rather sardonically, that this "demand" on Whitehead's part is "foolish," because it "challenges philosophy to refrain indulging its favourite sport, catching commonsensical positions into the clutches of "either… or" alternatives" (Stengers Claremont talk, 12). Stengers then goes on to comicaly imagine a Socrates who accepted and even celebrated the "value experiences" of all his fellow Athenian citizens, instead of striving to deface those experiences by proving that none of his interlocutors knew what they were talking about.

Following Stengers, I'd like to consider what it might really mean to refrain from defacing value experiences. I take it that this largely applies to the "value experiences" of others than ourselves. And respecting the value experiences of others is not always an easy thing to do. I certainly don't want religious fundamentalists who deny the theory of evolution and claim that the Earth is only 6,000 years old to be teaching my children. But living as an atheist in a common world with religious believers, I also reject defacing the value experience of those believers, in the way that "New Atheists" like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens have done.

I also want to work through the implications of Whitehead's claim that such "value experience… is the very essence of the universe." But doing this demands that we pass beyond the human. For Whitehead's claims here, as always, are cosmological in scope — or as Stengers puts it, cosmopolitical. Other entities aside from human beings also have "value experiences" that we have no right to deface. We need to take some account, at least, of the value experiences of dogs and flies and clams, of trees and slime molds and bacteria, and even of pebbles, drops of water, and stars.

To this extent, Graham Harman and the other thinkers of Object Oriented Ontology are right to regard Whitehead as an exemplary anti-anthropocentric thinker, an anti-correlationist avant la lettre. For Whitehead no less than for Harman, "all relations are on the same footing" (Harman 2008, 4). This means that, for Whitehead just as for OOO, the particular relation that is the obsessive concern of post-Cartesian and post-Kantian epistemology — the relation between human beings as subjects, and the objects that they happen to perceive — does not have any unique or special philosophical status. Epistemology loses its centrality, as the problem of knowledge is just one instance of the more general problem of how entities relate to, and interact with, one another. For Whitehead, physical causality and mental intentionality are just two among the many ways in which entities "prehend" one another. For Harman, similarly, both "vicarious causation" and metaphorical "allusion" are instances of sensual contact. For Whitehead and Harman alike, the problem of relations is therefore ultimately an aesthetic one.

Whitehead's anti-anthropocentrism, shared by OOO, also implies that relations among entities — and, in particular, relations of sensation and perception — cannot be reduced, in the manner of British empiricism, to atomistc "sense impressions" in the "mind" of a human observer — or more generally in the mind of one of the entities in the relationship. Harman rightly insists that we encounter, not isolated impressions, but whole objects. Citing Husserl, Harman argues that an "intentional object" is more than just a "bundle of adumbrations" (Harman 2011b, 24). Even though I may only see particular "adumbrations" of a tree, it is indeed a tree that I am actually seeing. The tree is real; it cannot be reduced to the status of being a mere mental construction (as Hume would suggest), or even the sum of its various actual and possible adumbrations (as Merleau-Ponty argues — Harman 2011b, 24-25). It's not the mind that unites multiple perceptions into the figure of a tree; rather, the tree itself is already doing this. For Whitehead, similarly, our "ideas" are always "determined to particular existents," rather than being ungrounded universals (PR 138). In this way, "an actual entity is present in other actual entities" (PR 50). We do not just receive isolated impressions, which we would then only combine in our minds. In any experience, "the datum includes its own interconnections" already (PR 113).

Indeed, Whitehead goes still further than this. He doesn't just claim that the existence of an entity cannot be reduced to the sum of another entity's "impressions" and "ideas" about it. He also argues, beyond this, that the atomistic perceptions upon which British empiricism bases its account of experience are trivial and unimportant. At best, they are just minor refinements of a much more basic form of experience. And this is directly connected with Whitehead's dismissal of anthropocentrism. It may well be, Whitehead concedes, that the "clearly envisaged details" of distinct perception "exalt men above animals, and animals above vegetables, and vegetables beyond stones" (MT 109). But these "details" play only a minor role in comparison to the vague and diffuse "background" out of which they emerge. "If we forget the background," he writes, "the result is triviality" (MT 108). Indeed, consciousness is a highly specialized and extremely rare form of feeling, which "only arises in a late derivative phase of complex integrations" (PR 162). Most thought, or sentience, or sensibility, or experience — both in ourselves and in other beings — consists in "simple physical feelings" that are not themselves conscious (PR 236).

The upshot of this is that we need to stop congratulating ourselves upon the breadth and subtlety of our consciousness and self-consciousness. We ought to recognize, instead, that "thought" is a much humbler, and much more common, phenomenon than we usually assume. Thought — or sentience, or experientiality — happens in many ways and on many levels. It is not just a matter of concepts, or computation, or cognition. It includes all of these, but also extends beneath them, or behind them. Thought doesn't require rational understanding, or a cogito. It doesn't even require a brain — as recent studies of brainless organisms like trees, slime molds, and bacteria have clearly shown.

Deleuzians — starting with Deleuze himself — love to cite Spinoza's dictum that we do not know what a body can do. But it also true, for a symmetrically opposite reason, that we do not really know what thought can do. For often thought does far less, and operates far more diffusely — than we know. Most thought takes place below our threshold of conscious awareness. Cognitive scientists and philosophers of mind are quite aware of this. The cognitivists are entirely right to point up the importance of nonconscious mental processing. My only problem with them is that they are content to stop with cognition. They need to extend their views to also include noncognitive and precognitive experience. This is what Whitehead calls "feeling" — and what Kant already points to in his discussion of aesthetic experience, or intuitions without concepts, in the Third Critique.

Timothy Morton makes much the same point about thought, in the context of OOO. Morton suggests that, when I perceive a pencil lying on a table, my relation to the pencil is not all that different from the table's own relation to the pencil. If I the pencil is the "intentional object" of my thought, then it is a kind of intentional object for the table also. In saying this, I am of course not making the claim that tables are wont to reflect upon ontology. Rather, I am trying to point out that reflecting upon ontology, or contemplating Being, is not that significant a feature of our own mental lives either. Here Heidegger's critique of thematization, and Harman's extension of this, are as much to the point as are Whitehead's observations on how we overestimate "clear and distinct" perception. Our inner mental lives mostly consist mostly of far more mundane and situated practices than conceptualization. The table holds up the pencil; but I am also holding up the pencil, when I contemplate it, or when I grasp it in order to write.

This line of argument also entails that perception and causality are pretty much the same thing; or at least that they are varieties of the same thing. Whitehead distinguishes between "causal efficacy" and "presentational immediacy" (PR 120-121). The former involves the feeling of being caused, or more broadly of cause and effect; while the latter has to do with conscious representation. But for Whitehead, they are both modes of perception, or forms of prehension. Harman also sees causal relations and metaphorical allusions alike as being ways in which otherwise separate entities nonetheless enter into vicarious contact. Timothy Morton generalizes this, when hee describes the aesthetic as the realm of causal relations. For OOO and Whitehead alike, thought is primordially aesthetic, and ultimately inseparable from physical causality. If A contemplates or otherwise perceives B, this means that B is a cause of A.

Thus far I have been pointing out the similarities between Whitehead's metaphysics and that of OOO. But this discussion also leads us to a crucial difference between Whitehead's philosophy and OOO. And no, I am not referring here to the well-known dispute over what Harman calls "relationism," or what Levi Bryant calls the difference between internal and external relations. Far too much ink has been spilled on this point already, and I do not think the discussion is profitable any more. Rather, I would like to suggest that the really important difference between Whitehead and OOO has to do, not so much with whether and how we prioritize relations, as it does with the ontological status of this humbler form of thought that they both espouse.

Things think, for Harman, but only under certain conditions. Harman rejects panpsychism, according to which — he says — "anything that exists must also perceive." Harman instead argues that "anything that relates must perceive… This means that entities have psyches accidentally, not in their own right" (Harman 2008, 9). Even shale and cantaloupe perceive and think and display intentionality, Harman maintains, insofar as they come into contact with us, or with one another. But according to Harman, such contact is merely contingent. Conversely, even human beings do not perceive and think and intend in their inner depths, but only on their outer surfaces. Thought, for Harman as for the phenomenologists, is always necessarily intentional. To think means to think about something, and therefore to relate to something — and indeed to correlate with something. But as such, thought for Harman is necessarily vicarious, or occasional (Harman 2009, 221).

To state this in other terms, it is always possible, according to Harman, that a particular entity does not relate to anything at all. Harman tells us that "the name for an object that exists without relating, exists without perceiving, is a sleeping entity, or a dormant one… Dormant objects are those which are real, but currently without psyche. Each night we make ourselves as dormant as we can, stripping away the accidental accretions of the day and gathering ourselves once more in the essential life where we are untouched by external relations" (Harman 2008, 9).

When I hear this, I cannot help asking: to sleep, perchance to dream? To the extent that dreaming is internally generated, its very possibility shows us that the psyche exists and functions even in the absence of external perception or stimulation. And, to the extent that dreaming does respond to events outside the dreamer, we have evidence that what Harman calls "withdrawal" is never total or absolute, even when the dreamer is not explicitly conscious of these external events. Harman seems to envisage ontological withdrawal as an impossibly dreamless sleep, one altogether devoid of thought or sensation, and therefore blissfully free from any sort of correlation whatsoever.

Whitehead, in contrast, never envisages such a blank utopia. Things don't need to relate, in order to dream or to feel. They do so intrinsically, as part of their very being. Panpsychism claims that anything that exists must also think; but — contra Harman — this does not necessarily mean that anything that exists must also "perceive." At least not if we understand "perception" as a matter of intentionality and presentational immediacy. If ontological equality means anything, it means that all entities in the universe, without exception, are sentient or experiential. In other words, where OOO claims that everything is an object, Whitehead rather claims that everything is a subject: "apart from the experiences of subjects there is nothing, nothing, nothing, bare nothingness" (PR 167).

Now, of course this distinction is not quite as absolute as it sounds. "Subject" and "object" are only relative terms: unsurprisingly, since they form a system together. Subjective experience in Whitehead perpetually perishes, and thereby passes over into the "objective immortality" of being a datum for subsequent acts of experience. Conversely, objects in OOO exhibit their own sort of subjectivity, insofar as "intentionality is not a special human property at all, but an ontological feature of objects in general" (Harman 2007b, 205). For OOO, all entities have their own inner being or "alien phenomenology" (Bogost).

Nonetheless, there is still a significant difference between the two positions. For Harman and Morton, causality and aesthetic experience are restricted to what they call the "sensuous" realm. The deep inner essence of objects remains untouched. For Whitehead, however, the conflation of causality and aesthetics is universal; there is no deep "substantial" (or "real") realm in contrast to the "sensual" one. "Experience" cannot be so restricted, because it is a common, generic feature of all entities. As long as there is something rather than nothing, there is, at the very least, an instance of simple physical feeling. That is to say, "thought" exists — or better, it happens — even in the absence of what the phenomenologists call intentionality, and of what the empiricists call "perception."

My current project is to work out what it might mean to thus posit an "image of thought" (as Deleuze would say) that is nonintentional, and thereby noncorrelational or uncorrelated. I take a hint for this from the way that Deleuze suggests a contrast between Husserl — for whom, as Deleuze puts is, "all consciousness is consciousness of something"), and Bergson — who "more strongly" asserts, Deleuze says, that "all consciousness is something" (Deleuze 1986, 56). As I have already mentioned, I agree with Whitehead that "thought" cannot be equated to "consciousness"; this would require some revision of Deleuze's formulas. Nonetheless, I maintain that the more primordial modes of thought — or of sentience, or experience, or "feeling" — can be something before they are about something, before they establish anything like a correlation with things outside of themselves. Such modes of thought are not solipsistic, because they do not refer back to themselves any more than they refer to other things. They are "vague" and indistinct, as Whitehead says, but for this very reason they are no more self-contained than they are outwardly referential.

A better "image" of this sort of thought might be that which is found in autism. I say this on condition that we cease to regard autism pejoratively, as a failure to adhere to neurotypical norms, or as the medicalized incapacity to develop a "theory of mind." Instead, we must understand autism as an original mode of being in the world — as the neurodiversity movement has advocated, and as scholars in the field of disability studies are beginning to understand (Savarese & Savarese 2012, 1). In working through the consequences of this new understanding, Erin Manning suggests that, in point of fact, autistics are stigmatized for not approaching the world "according to standard human-centered expectations" (Manning 2013, 227). Instead, she says, autistics are in fact acutely sensitive beyond the human. They are responsive to "resonances across scales and registers of life, both organic and inorganic"; the testimony of autistics themselves indicates that, for them, "everything is somewhat alive," and therefore an object of empathy and concern (225-226). We might say that autistics are inherently non-correlationist; they do not focus their intentionality upon particular chosen objects, but exhibit a more diffuse and wide-bandwidth sort of sentience. While there are risks in any metaphorical extensions of aspects of human experience to entities in the world more generally, I would still suggest that autism offers us a more adequate "image of thought" than the one provided by phenomenology.

Manning goes on to suggest that autistic experiences may provide us with "a transversal, ontogenetic concept of the ethical," — one that "can never begin with the human, or with the body as such" (Manning 2013, 255). I would like to suggest that such a concept of the ethical is close to what Whitehead means by "value experience." For value, so understood, in intrinsic to the primordial feeling that is the heart of experience, to some extent at least, for every actually existing entity. It isn't just human beings (or even just human beings and other mammals) who have value experience. Trees and slime molds have values and meanings too; and so even do rocks and stars and neutrinos, at least to a minimal extent. This is why "value experience" is the very essence of the universe, and why Whitehead says that we have no right to deface it. For Whitehead, value is immanent to experience as such. Valuation is a universal activity, rather than a specifically human imposition upon an object-world that would otherwise be passive, inert, valueless, and meaningless.

Whitehead insists upon the immanence of value and meaning to the immediate, everyday experience of all the entities in the world that have experience. This puts Whitehead at odds both with moral absolutists, for whom the only acceptable values and meanings are their own, and to relativists, for whom values and meanings are nothing more than arbitrary, extrinsically imposed norms. Whitehead's ethics is neither categorical and absolute, nor is it merely empirical. Rather, Whitehead subordinates ethics to aesthetics, and derives his ethics only from aesthetics. This is something that many people find difficult to accept. But today, as we come to realize that — in the words of Bruno Latour — "we have never been modern," and as — in the face of ecological and economic crises alike — we are no longer at liberty to ignore what Stengers calls the cosmopolitical aspects of our situation, Whitehead's aestheticist account of value experience shows its full relevance. It is from within Whitehead's aesthetic envisagement, not just of human life, but of the cosmos, that we must understand the ethical injunction I cited at the beginning of this talk: that "we have no right to deface the value experience which is the very essence of the universe."

Melancholia; and film open access scholarship

Today marks the inauguration of REFRAME, “an open access academic digital platform for the online practice, publication and curation of internationally produced research and scholarship” on film, media, and music. REFRAME is edited by Catherine Grant, of the School of Media, Film, and Music at the University of Sussex; she also runs the invaluable Film Studies for Free blog.

Among other things, REFRAME is publishing Sequence: Serial Studies in Media, Film, and Music, a new, peer-reviewed open-access scholarly journal.

And I am proud to say that the first issue of Sequence features an article of mine about Lars von Trier’s 2011 film Melancholia, entitled “Melancholia, or the Romantic Anti-Sublime”. This is the most sustained work I have done since my 2010 book Post-Cinematic Affect; it is about 18,000 words long — which is too long for a conventional academic article, but too short for a book. I am thrilled, therefore, that it can now be published digitally, as the online format allows for more varied lengths than is possible with conventional print. I am also thrilled that this publication is open access: which is something that, I strongly believe, all academic work should be. In this way, my essay is available to contribute to future work by others, who may respond to it in all sorts of ways.

On Gyorgi Palfi’s Taxidermia

Just out from Wiley-Blackwell: A Companion to Eastern European Cinemas, edited by Aniko Imre. However, the book for the moment is hardcover only, at the ludcrious price of $175.13 (this is the Amazon price, a bit less than the official list price of $199.95). My own contribution to this anthology is “Body Horror and Post-Socialist Cinema: Gyorgy Palfi’s Taxidermia.” It is an expanded and vastly improved version of the article, which initially appeared in the open access journal Film-Philosophy. Since the book is so expensive, I have made the revised/expanded version of the article available here.

Secret Life of Objects

I will be at this conference in Rio de Janeiro later this week. 

Here’s the abstract for my talk:

THINKING BLIND

Sentience beyond the human: what might it mean? Maureen McHugh’s science fiction short story, “The Kingdom of the Blind,” adresses this dilemma. The story concerns a computer programmer who comes to suspect that the software system for which she helps provide technical support just might be “aware.” The story is something of a speculative realist fable, as it moves from the epistemological question of how we might know that a piece of software is sentient, to the ontological one of what such sentience might be, in and for itself, apart from any correlation with our own thought, or our own ability to understand it and communicate with it. The story does not provide any definitive answers, but it suggests the possibility of a different (nonhuman) model of thought: one that is non-cognitive, non-intentional, non-phenomenological, and “autistic” (taking this latter word without the usual pejorative connotations).

Forms of Life

In her science fiction novel The Highest Frontier (2011), Joan Slonczewski poses the question of what it would mean for plants to have a sense of humor. A biologist “clones a set of genes” into an Arabidopsis plant, in order to make the plant grow neurons. This allows the plants to develop neural networks attuned to various mental states. One group of plants “has a laughter network. It detects a stimulus and finds it funny.” The plant “laughs” by shaking its leaves back and forth. The question then arises, what might a plant find funny? The answer turns out to be an inverted light spectrum. The plants laugh at this, because “it contradicts a established norm, that of the solar spectrum,” to which the plants are generally accustomed.

The scenario of plants with a sense of humor is an extrapolation, of course; but it isn’t as farfetched as it might seem. Anthony Trewavas, Daniel Chamovitz, and other biologists have established that plants are in fact sentient: they may not be conscious, but they think and feel. Plants actively sense what is happening in the world around them, and respond flexibly to the conditions they encounter. Although they do not have brains or neurons, their cells communicate with one another, employing the same neurotransmitters as animal and human nervous systems do. In other words, the chemical basis for feeling and cognition is already there in plants, just as it is in animals. When Slonczewski’s fictional scientist adds genes for the production of neural cells, she doesn’t endow the plants in question with entirely new capacities, so much as she allows for the enhanced outward expression, in visual, tactile, and “semiochemical” forms, of processes that are already taking place. The interposed neurons allow the plant’s feelings to be translated into a form that we can comprehend.

Wittgenstein wrote that “if a lion could talk, we wouldn’t be able to understand it.” The issue here is also one of translation. Wittgenstein doesn’t say that the lion is mindless, or that it lacks the sort of interiority that human being possess. The point is rather that the lives of lions (as of Arabidopsis plants) are quite different from those of human beings. It is hard for us to imagine what a lion would care about, just as it is hard for us to imagine what plants would find funny. And since “to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life,” we cannot expect to comprehend a lion’s or a plant’s speech, unless we can bridge the gap between its “form of life” and our own.

What does Wittgenstein mean by “forms of life”? The difficulty is that these are both collective and singular. On the one hand, forms of life are always shared. No entity can subsist in isolation. All life, all existence, takes place in complexly organized societies. And these societies — as Latour shows us, and as Whitehead’s use of the term already implies — are never simply or exclusively human. Rather, they always involve a complex assemblage of all sorts of human and nonhuman actors.

My body, for instance, is a “society” that includes innumerable bacteria in addition to my own cells, which themselves are differentiated into many forms. And this body-assemblage in turn cannot subsist without the nourishment and protection it receives from the societies, of various sorts and sizes, that exist all around it: from the air I breathe and the food I eat to the unjust economic system in which I am forced to function, and on up to the worldwide ecological network that includes the Earth’s crust and the atmosphere, and that ultimately binds me to lions and to Arabidopsis plants.

Thus, multiple forms of life are intertwined in my very existence; I am always engaged in many of them at the same time. Forms of life, and languages, cross all sorts of boundaries. They have fuzzy outlines, and resist precise definition. And they are promiscuous, generating what Latour calls a “proliferation of hybrids.” Forms of life stretch out everywhere; they do not respect the borders between entities, between types, or between species.

At the same time, however, forms of life are never holistic or total. They are always particular, always restricted in focus. They overlap, but they do not coincide. Preparing and consuming food is one form of life; writing philosophical essays is another; working in a factory is yet another. Atheists have different forms of life than do religious believers; well-to-do Americans have different forms of life than do shantytown dwellers in the global South. Human beings in general have different forms of life than do lions or Arabidopsis plants. Often these different forms of life are even antagonistic to one another. The forms of life of Anopheles mosquitoes and of investment bankers, for instance, are directly deleterious to my own survival and flourishing.

These disparate forms of life all inhere in a common world. “We find ourselves,” as Whitehead says, “amid a democracy of fellow creatures.” Forms of life involve multiple forces and practices, continually jostling up against one another in what Whitehead calls a “disjunctive diversity.” I cannot “withdraw,” or close myself off from all these encroaching entities; I cannot simply walk away from the bankers and the mosquitoes. For as Whitehead puts it, “we seem to be ourselves elements of this world in the same sense as are the other things which we perceive” (emphasis added). This means that we cannot break the world down according to an opposition between observing subjects on the one hand, and objects of perception on the other. We cannot count on the givenness or manifestation of the world, with ourselves as the privileged recipients of this gift. Whitehead is an anti-correlationist avant la lettre: the world does not “depend on us,” he says, precisely because we do not have any special place within it. We exist in the “same sense” as do all other entities.

Forms of life may be inimical to one another (what Hegel calls contradiction), or even entirely incommensurable with one another (what Leibniz calls incompossibility). And yet they all inhere in the world together. “Bifurcations, divergences, incompossibilities, and discords belong to the same motley world,” as Deleuze says in his commentary on Whitehead. This is why translation is such an urgent problem. As Latour puts it, “there are no equivalents, only translations… the best that can be done between actants is to translate the one into the other.” There is no pre-established harmony among “incommensurable and irreducible forces.”

Translation is then inherently problematic, because it is not just a matter of moving from one code, or one language, to another. Rather, translation involves the violence of codifying, or putting into language, a reality that stands outside of all languages and codes. Translation endeavors to make an equivalent for that which has no equivalent. It forces an exchange between incommensurables. “If there are exchanges,” Latour says, “these are always unequal and cost a fortune both to establish and to maintain.”

This means that the problem of translation is really one of aesthetics. Kant established the basic antinomy of modern aesthetics in his Third Critique. On the one hand, every “judgment of taste” is entirely singular: it is non-cognitive, it has no concept behind it, and it cannot be generalized. On the other hand, every “judgment of taste” aspires to — or even demands — the assent of others. It makes a claim, Kant says, to be “universally communicable without mediation by a concept.” We may understand translation, therefore, as the endeavor to capture singularity within some universal medium of exchange, in order thereby to compel acceptance by everyone. For Kant, this takes the form of a sensus communis as the non-cognitive basis for the very possibility of cognition.

Kant’s antinomy of aesthetic taste is central to modern thought. What happens when incommensurables are measured together, or captured in the same universal code? Can disparate singularities be brought into contact, without being effaced? This question haunts — among others — Marx, Wittgenstein, and Whitehead. For Marx, Kant’s sensus communis is materialized in money as a “universal equivalent.” Wittgenstein’s critique of the notion of “private language” is rooted in Kant’s questions about “the communicability of sensation.” And Whitehead answers Kant’s antinomy with the founding principle of his own aesthetics: the injunction to convert exclusions and oppositions into contrasts.

In his near-future short story “Deodand,” the science fiction writer Karl Schroeder also addresses this dilemma. A computer company is having trouble with its autonomous robots. They refuse orders to kill animals and to chop down trees. The robots have “several categories for objects: person, tool, property, and standing reserve.” The problem, from the company’s point of view, is that the robots regard cats and trees as “persons,” instead of relegating them to the (Heideggerian) status of mere “standing reserve,” disposable at will.

It turns out that this situation is a result of ubiquitous computing, or of what Bruce Sterling calls “the Internet of Things.” Everything in the environment is tagged with sensors, which collect “fantastic amounts of data” and upload them to the Internet. Every object broadcasts information about its location, its activities, and its state of being. For the robots, all this activity indicates personhood:

the trees were people; so were the cats. The hillside itself had a vast icon hovering over it, as if some heavy, slumbering spirit lay under it. And the icons merged and split, identities shifting according to relationships and patterns whose roots lay hidden in the networks that gave rise to them… Your team thought [the robot] was mistaking things for people. But it’s the things themselves that are telling him they’re human.

Where Sterling assumes that all these trackable data are just “for us,” human Internet endusers, Schroeder’s story proposes that the data given off by things are reflexively available to the things themselves. An object attains personhood when it is rich enough in data. Digitization is a kind of abstraction: it translates the singularity of things into a universal, inter-exchangeable code.

Gennady, the human protagonist of Schroeder’s story, is ambivalent about this; he tires of the accumulation — and the sameness — of virtual data, and treasures his moments of direct bodily contact in the outdoors, when he can walk around “without augmented senses.” But at the same time, Gennady is forced to admit that, thanks to ubiquitous data collection, “the whole physical world is waking up.” We tend to believe “that there’s only two kinds of thing, people, and objects.” But actually, things are always “a little bit of both.” And thanks to data translation, “we can’t ignore that fact anymore.”

Just as the neural networks added to plants in Slonczewski’s novel allow the plants’ experiences to be translated into humanly-apprehensible terms, so the digital data generated by sensors in Schroeder’s story work more generally, to translate objects and subjects — or things and persons — into a medium where they can more fully apprehend one another, and interact on close-to-even terms. The traditional dualisms are effaced: for we all inhere, in the same sense, in a common world. And exclusions and oppositions are converted into aesthetic contrasts; they are rescued from their isolation, without being subsumed into an overarching Totality or Whole.

Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

Samuel R. Delany’s new novel, Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders, is over 800 pages, which makes it the longest book he has ever written (even longer than Dhalgren). It is also one of the best novels by anyone that I have read in quite a long time. Indeed, I would go so far as to say (as I already put it on Twitter) that it is the best English-language novel that I know of, of the 21st century so far.

Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders tells the story of Eric Jeffers and his life partner Morgan “Shit” Haskell. Eric is white, though he has been brought up mostly by his black stepfather; Shit is black, though he has been brought up mostly by his white father. We meet Eric and Shit when they first meet, as teenagers; and we follow them for seventy years, until extreme old age. The location is a kind of backwater, a (fictional) small town on the Georgia coast, with little going on economically except for the summer tourist trade. The novel starts more or less in the present, in 2007 when Eric is just a few days shy of his 17th birthday; and it ends in the 2080s, when Eric is in his nineties. To a degree, the novel is science-fictional; we hear of future cultural ferment (the 2030s sound a lot like a freer and more advanced 1960s), of changes in social mores (though homophobia hasn’t disappeared, same-sex marriages are legal everywhere, and pretty much taken for granted); of terrorist nuclear attacks, of colonies on the Moon and Mars, of gas-free automobiles, of new telepresence and virtual reality technologies, and so on. But all of this happens in the background, and only affects the main characters at second hand (as they live their lives in a backwater, and are largely unconcerned with contemporary media). The emphasis remains firmly on the uneventful happenings of everyday life.

There’s an enormous amount of sex in the book — on a level that at least equals that of The Mad Man, and that is only matched within Delany’s oeuvre by his early “pornographic” novels, Hogg and Equinox. The book is therefore very much of a hybrid — between what might be called mainstream literary ambitions, and those of the two “paraliterary” genres (as Delany has called them in his critical writing) pronography and science fiction. It remains to be seen how this will affect the book’s overall reception. Its ambitions, and its achievements, are immense in ways that recall, and equal, the great novels of the 19th and 20th centuries; but it differs from these because, most notably, its pages are filled with so much gay sex.

Delany’s writing of sex is itself one of the most noteworthy, powerful, and original things about the novel. There is a stylistics to it that already appeared in The Mad Man, but that is brought to a pitch of perfection here. I don’t know how to explain it except to say that Delany is the most materialist fiction writer I have ever encountered. His evocation of sex is very much of a piece with his evocation of other sorts of sensuous details of life and experience. Delany’s autobiography is called The Motion of Light in Water, and descriptions of shimmerings and shadings, of delicate preceptual differentiations, and indeed specifically of sunlight reflecting off the waves at the seashore, are quite prevalent in Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders, as in many of Delany’s texts. And these are not so different from his descriptions of bodily/sexual sensations. In the present book, Delany gives us an intensely vivid, sensual  and materially thick description of “bodies and pleasures” (to use a phrase from Foucault). A wide range of sexual acts among men are described: from sucking and penetration to snot-eating and piss-drinking, to masturbation and nail-biting (something that comes up in many of Delany’s novels), to various sorts of voyeuristic arousal, to the enjoyment of funky body odors, to just plain cuddling. The only thing uniting them is that they are all exclusively among males, and that they are all consensual.

Although the explicitness of the sexual descriptions in Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders certainly qualifies as “pornographic”, the ethos of Delany’s sex-writing is vastly different from what is commonly understood either about “pornography” or about its more respectable upscale cousin “erotica.” Some readers will find parts of Delany’s descriptions arousing, and others will not — there is no way to assume just who the “reader” is, after all; but in either case the point is much more to describe the arousal of the characters undergoing these acts, than it is to produce arousal in the (ideal or actual) reader. Another way to put this is to say that — even if the sheer plethora of available sexual acts in the world of the novel is something of a fantasy (or better, a fairy tale) — the orientation of the sex-writing is towards desire-fulfilled-as-bodily-pleasure, rather than towards the fantasy of desire-projected-beyond, or desire-that-exceeds-any-possibility-of-fulfillment. It’s desire as concrete production of affects, as in Spinoza, rather than desire as “lack” (as in Hegel and Lacan). We have multiple, concretely- and bodily-rooted arousals and satisfactions, rather than some furious drive towards some infinitude (whether of repletion or of self-annihilation). The characters often speak of doing “nasty” stuff, but there is no sense of (say) Bataille’s transgression or Genet’s willed abjection. I myself regard Bataille and Genet as among the greatest writers of the old past century; but I think it’s important to see that Delany is doing something new and different here, something that is as far from such 20th century art pornography as it is from more commercial (straight or gay) pornography.

Delany’s descriptions/evocations of multiple bodily arousals and pleasures also shade into descriptions or evocations of interpersonal relations, or of what is sometimes called “community” (a word I resist, because it has censorious implications in many contexts; but I cannot find a better word here). The sexual acts that Delany describes also involve, and create, forms of affiliation between people. These affiliations are grounded in bodily pleasures, in the pleasures of sharing, and in the multiple ways that people can find mutually enabling forms of contact. It’s a vision of both bodily desire, and human sympathy or being-together, that seems to me in an odd way more reminiscent of the utopian socialist Charles Fourier than it is of Freud. Each person’s particular twists of desire are what enlivens him or her, without having to be “accounted for,” or matched to any norms—so that they are entirely singular and autonomous to but also with the open, outward-looking potentiality of creating affinities with other people who have similar and/or complementary desires (someone who likes to drink piss meets someone who likes to piss in other people’s mouths; and in turn they meet someone else who likes to watch this . . .). With all these singularities of desire, nobody is ever drearily “the same” as anybody else; but also, with the widening circles of these singularities, everyone is likely to find at least some other people with whom to share at least something that moves, excites, or arouses them. It is in the midst of such continual fluctuating action that Eric and Shit, and also some of the other couples or threesomes (or more-than-threesomes) that we meet in the course of the novel must negotiate, both their primary emotional relationships with one another, and their sexual-emotional engagements, of various longer or shorter durations, with other people as well.

With all this, I don’t mean to imply that the novel is only about sex. It is about sex overwhelmingly, but it is also about lots of other things. The key point is that sex is part of the everydayness of Eric’s and Shit’s lives, and of the world they share. What really makes the novel so powerful is the sheer accumulation of incidents and everyday habits in Eric’s and Shit’s lives, over some 800 pages, or over the 70 years that they live together. There is lots of repetition, but also all sorts of subtle modulations of perception, habit, interest, and desire. As the characters get older, the sex diminishes, and also our sense of time gets changed — so that longer periods of time seem to pass more quickly. Reading the novel, we come to live and feel along with Eric and Shit, just because so much of their lives are given to us in the course of those 800 pages — we get the motifs and endless variations which are at the heart of what it means, for anyone, to “have a life.” It’s amazing to have this sort of feeling in a long book where, in a sense, “nothing happens” — there are no great deeds, no striving against mighty dangers, no special adventures — just the adventure which is the stuff of living itself, no matter how quietly and uneventfully. Eric and Shit are not important players in the history of the world, and they know that they are not. They spend twenty years as garbagemen, then thirteen years as managers of a porno movie theater, and finally forty-odd years as handymen on an island off the coast that has found semi-prosperity as a lesbian artists’ colony.

In all these settings, Eric and Shit do their work; they find both sexual (with other men) and simply social (with women) ways to associate with others and feel some sense of community; they have lots of fun (or sexual/sensual enjoyment); and also they strive to help other people when necessary, and to be kind to others, as much as possible. As Spinoza might put it, they work toward ever-greater compositions of positive affects. Indeed, Spinoza is something like the tutelary spirit of the novel. Around the middle of the book (or around the middle of Eric’s life), an older gay man gives Eric a copy of Spinoza’s Ethics; and for the rest of his life (or the rest of the novel), Eric reads this text over and over again. He originally finds it incomprehensible; but gradually he comes to make sense of it. We aren’t directly given Eric’s thoughts about Spinoza; but gradually we discern that the whole impulse and organization of Eric’s life, with his cultivation of positive affects, of widespread generosity, and of ever-widening affiliations with others, is very much a Spinozistic one.

And this leads me to the one major aspect of the novel that could be called “utopian,” or a “fantasy,” in the sense that (even more than wide general acceptance of the sexual acts portrayed throughout the book) it is something that, unfortunately, is scarcely imaginable in America today. Eric and Shit and their friends are able to lead the sorts of lives they do because they receive the discreet backing of the Kyle Foundation, an organization set up by a black gay millionaire, in order to give support to the lives of gay men of color. Because of the Foundation’s backing, Eric and Shit and their entire community have access, even when they are most poor and deprived, to living space and food and good medical care. Also, they encounter & suffer from far less homophobia and racism (though it of course remains present, and comes up at several points in the course of the novel) than would be the case in the “real” world as we know it today. In this way I think the novel suggests that the possibility of a humane life for all really depends upon at least this minimum of protection from the vagaries, not just of bigotry, but of “the market” as well. In effect, this makes the novel into an argument for socialism, as well as for the humane pleasures of nonprocreative sex. And this has something to do, in turn, with the kindness or generosity which is so big a feature of Eric’s life and actions, and is the ethos of the book as a whole.

By the end of Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders, I found my reading experience to be pretty much overwhelming. Over the course of the book, we get to know Eric and Shit as intimately, and as well, as we have ever gotten to know any of the great characters in the history of modern Western literature. I mean this less in the sense of “depth” than in that of breadth. (“Depth psychology” I think is overrated — and it is far rarer a thing to encounter, whether in “real life” or in novelistic and cinematic narratives, than we often suppose. Neither Hamlet, nor Raskolnikov, nor Leopold Bloom, nor Proust’s narrator have anything to do with depth psychology. They are all defined as rich characters by the range of the discourses and affiliations associated with them, as well as by the absence of any master key to who they are. This is what makes them so, well, lifelike). As we read Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders, we gradually accumulate, around Eric and Shit, a wealth of perceptions and sensory impressions and likes and dislikes; of habits and wishes and preferences and physical inclinations; and also of affiliations and alliances, and points of both contact and distance — and it’s often hard (and not really relevant) to discern which of these are internal and which external, which are private, which are shared by the two of them, and which are shared more widely. And with this wealth of connections, with this broad web of feelings and meanings, particular new facts or meetings or happenings or encounters often take on a weight that they could not have just by themselves. Memories surprisingly return in full intensity; but they also weaken, wear away, become general instead of specific, fade or get confused. The latter parts of the novel are rich because of how they follow from, and draw upon, everything that has come before. But they also register a powerful poignancy that comes from people dying, from changes that cannot be reversed, and finally from the very experience of aging, with the gradual lessening of physical vigor and of sexual excitement; the novel goes into great detail on the facts of how getting old changes our relationship to the past, and even to what we most vividly remember.

I don’t know how to conclude this brief account except by reiterating how rich the novel is, and also how generous — in the sheer profusion of what it offers us as readers, and allows us to share. Conservative critics (I mean this both politically and aesthetically) often like to go on about universal values that great works of art are supposed to inculcate. But Delany confirms what Proust and Deleuze already knew: that the only “universality” worthy of the name is one that rejects bland generalities, and instead affirms and passes through the most singular of passions. Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders is not a book about capital-L Love, but rather one about two boys who fall in love with one another at least in part because they both so greatly enjoy chewing on their own, and each other’s, snot. Something like that might seem disconcerting for those of us (myself included) who are not snot-eaters — or simply for those of us who are not accustomed to talk about such things. But such are the details, or the singular affects, that are composed together to make up an actual life, as well as the fictional depiction of such a life. And it is this sense of actual life — not of something special or heroic or earthshattering, but just of a life — that Delany’s novel brings us.

Sight and Sound greatest films poll

This year, quite to my excitement, I was asked to participate in Sight and Sound magazine’s once-per-decade poll of film critics to determine “The Ten Greatest Films of All Time.” (Previous decades’ results can be found here).

Making lists of this sort is always somewhat arbitrary. I added to the arbitrariness by saying only one film per director. In any case, six months from now the list I would make might well be quite different. Also, when I make a list like this, I inevitably forget and leave something out; there are always omissions that I later regret. Nonetheless, here is the list that I sent in this week:

  1. Vertigo (Hitchcock)
  2. Sansho the Bailiff (Mizoguchi)
  3. The Nutty Professor (Jerry Lewis)
  4. Rules of the Game (Renoir)
  5. Two or Three Things I Know About Her (Godard)
  6. Ordet (Dreyer)
  7. Red Desert (Antonioni)
  8. Golden Eighties (Akerman)
  9. Imitation of Life (Sirk)
  10. Mouchette (Bresson)

Notes: Fassbinder is my all-time favorite director, but I couldn’t decide on a particular single film. Probably I should have included Berlin Alexanderplatz, but since it is a long TV miniseries, I am not sure that it would count. — I also hesitated over which Bresson film to include; I could see voting instead for A Man Escaped or Au Hazard Balthasar or The Devil Probably or L’argent.– I also regret the non-inclusion of a few runner-ups (runners-up?): Andrei Rublev (or maybe Stalker), Playtime, Celine and Julie Go Boating, India Song, The Devil is a Woman, Shock Corridor, Beau Travail, Daisies, WR:Mysteries of the Organism, Three Crowns of the Sailor, Teorema.

Just Out: Jerry Lewis in La furia umana

The new issue (#12) of the film journal La Furia Umana is out; it’s a special issue on Jerry Lewis! There are 23 articles (!!!) on Jerry, including my new piece on his late masterpiece Smorgasbord (aka Cracking Up). (Besides the Jerry Lewis material, the issue also contains, among other goodies Kim Nicolini on Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, and something I haven’t read yet by the great film critic Nicole Brenez).

UPDATE: Since the pdf available from the Furia Umana site has formatting problems, a  cleaner pdf of my article on Smorgasbord is available here.

In other news, my web posting about “work for hire” has been translated into Haitian Creole by John Obri — for which much thanks.

Post-Continuity: full text of my talk

Here is the talk I gave last week at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference in Boston. (I published the abstract for the talk when I originally submitted it last summer here.)

In my 2010 book Post-Cinematic Affect, I coined the term “post-continuity.” I used this term to describe a style of filmmaking that has become quite common in action films of the past decade or so. In what I call the post-continuity style, “a preoccupation with immediate effects trumps any concern for broader continuity — whether on the immediate shot-by-shot level, or on that of the overall narrative.”

In recent action blockbusters by the likes of Michael Bay and Tony Scott, there no longer seems to be any concern for delineating the geography of action, by clearly anchoring it in time and space. Instead, gunfights, martial arts battles, and car chases are rendered through sequences involving shaky handheld cameras, extreme or even impossible camera angles, and much composited digital material — all stiched together with rapid cuts, frequently involving deliberately mismatched shots. The sequence becomes a jagged collage of fragments of explosions, crashes, physical lunges, and violently accelerated motions. There is no sense of spatiotemporal continuity; all that matters is delivering a continual series of shocks to the audience.

This new action-movie style has not been unnoticed by film critics and theorists. The first writer to come to grips with this new style, as far as I know, was Bruce Reid in the Seattle weekly newspaper The Stranger. More than a decade ago (2000), Reid wrote, with tongue not quite in cheek, of Bay’s “indefensible” vision:

“I had to train everyone to see the world like I see the world,” Bay states in the DVD commentary to Armageddon. That world is apparently one of disorienting edits, mindless whip pans, and rack focuses that leave the background in a blur to reveal the barrel of a gun. Colors are treated with equal exaggeration: Entire scenes are lit in deep blue or green with no discernible source for the reflection. It is an anarchic, irresponsible vision, despite all the macho, patriotic chest-thumping.

Reid went on to slyly suggest that, despite being a “crushingly untalented” hack, Bay nonetheless shared with avant-garde filmmakers like Stan Brakhage and Bruce Conner “the same headlong thrill of the moment, the same refusal to dawdle over or organize their material.”

Much more recently (2008), David Bordwell has complained on his blog. of the way that in recent years,

Hollywood action scenes became ‘impressionistic,’ rendering a combat or pursuit as a blurred confusion. We got a flurry of cuts calibrated not in relation to each other or to the action, but instead suggesting a vast busyness. Here camerawork and editing didn’t serve the specificity of the action but overwhelmed, even buried it.

More recently still, in the summer of 2011, Mattias Stork gave a well-nigh definitive account of these changes in action editing in his two-part video essay “Chaos Cinema,” which led to a storm of commentary on the Internet. (A third part of the video essay has since been added, in which Stork replies to many of his critics). Stork directly addresses the transformation from action sequences (like those of Sam Peckinpah, John Woo, and John Frankenheimer) which offered the view a coherent sense of action in space and time, to the sequences in recent action films that no longer do this. Stork says:

Chaos cinema apes the illiteracy of the modern movie trailer. It consists of a barrage of high-voltage scenes. Every single frame runs on adrenaline. Every shot feels like the hysterical climax of a scene which an earlier movie might have spent several minutes building toward. Chaos cinema is a never-ending crescendo of flair and spectacle. It’s a shotgun aesthetic, firing a wide swath of sensationalistic technique that tears the old classical filmmaking style to bits. Directors who work in this mode aren’t interested in spatial clarity. It doesn’t matter where you are, and it barely matters if you know what’s happening onscreen. The new action films are fast, florid, volatile audiovisual war zones.

Stork’s video essay is extremely interesting and useful. He really makes you see how action editing has changed over the course of the past decade or so. I have been showing it to my students in order to explain how editing styles have changed.

But I can’t help feeling that Stork’s focus is too narrow, and that his judgments — about the badness, or “illiteracy,” of “chaos cinema” in comparison to the older action-editing styles of Peckinpah, Woo, et al. — are too simplistic and unequivocal. Stork deliberately adopts a provocative and polemical tone, in order to get his point across. But he only talks negatively about the new style; he points out what it fails to do, without giving enough credit for the positive things that it actually does. To my mind, it is inadequate simply to say that the new action films are merely vapid and sensationalistic. Ironically, Stork’s dismissal of action films today sounds rather like the way in which, in years past, Hollywood fare in general was disparaged in comparison to self-conscious art films.

When I showed “Chaos Cinema” Part 1 to my Introduction to Film class earlier this semester, the students agreed that they could really see the stylistic differences that the video put on display. But many of them also said that, having grown up with “chaos cinema,” they enjoyed it and weren’t bothered by the failings of which Stork accused it. New forms and new technical devices imply new possibilities of expression; I am interested in trying to work out what these new possibilities might be. This will involve picking up on Bruce Reid’s not-entirely-facetious suggestion of ties between the most crassly commercial recent filmmaking and the historical projects of the avant-garde.

In the third part of his “Chaos Cinema” video essay, responding to criticisms by Scott Nye, Stork grudgingly admits that Tony Scott’s Domino (2005) — surely one of the most extravagant examples of post-continuity style — is not devoid of aesthetic value. But Stork complains that, because of its radical “abstraction,” Domino doesn’t work in a genre context — it isn’t really an action film. I note, however, that Bruce Reid had already credited Michael Bay with pushing filmmaking “to the brink of abstraction,” and yet making movies that mass audiences love. Stork complains that Domino is an avant-garde experiment; the avant-garde, he says, is “a hermetically sealed environment,” with “different audiences, reception spheres and ambitions” than the commercial genre film. But I am rather inclined to agree with Reid; the mass vs. avant-garde distinction just doesn’t hold any longer. After all, there isn’t a technique used by Jean-Luc Godard that hasn’t become a mainstay of television and Internet commercials.

One way that we can start to work out the potentialities of post-continuity styles is by looking at their genealogy. Stork notes, as I also do in my book, that what he calls “chaos cinema” is an offshoot, or an extreme development, of what David Bordwell’s intensified continuity. Bordwell demonstrates how, starting with the New Hollywood of the 1970s, commercial filmmaking in America and elsewhere has increasingly involved “more rapid editing… bipolar extremes of lens lengths… more close framings in dialogue scenes…[and] a free-ranging camera.” But although this makes for quite a different style from that of classic Hollywood, Bordwell does not see it as a truly radical shift: “far from rejecting traditional continuity in the name of fragmentation and incoherence,” he says, “the new style amounts to an intensification of established techniques.” It still tells stories in the classical manner — only more so, with a vengeance.

I think that Stork and I are both arguing that this is no longer the case with the 21st-century developments of action cinema. (And Bordwell himself might even agree with this, as witness the blog posting I quoted earlier). In my book, I suggested that intensified continuity has “jumped the shark,” and turned into something else entirely. We might call this, in the old Hegelian-Marxist style, a dialectical reversal involving the transformation of quantity into quality. Or we might see it as an instance of Marshall McLuhan’s observation that every new medium retrieves an earlier, supposedly “outdated” medium; and then, at its limit, reverses into its opposite. In the 21st century, the very expansion of the techniques of intensified continuity, especially in action films and action sequences, has led to a situation where continuity itself has been fractured, devalued, fragmented, and reduced to incoherence.

That is to say, the very techniques that were developed in order to “intensify” cinematic continuity, have ended up by undermining it. In using the word continuity, I am first of all referring to continuity editing as the basic orienting structure of Hollywood narrative cinema. But I am also pointing toward a larger sense of the word, in which it implies the homogeneity of space and time, and the coherent organization of narrative. It is continuity in this broader sense, as well as in the narrower one, which has broken down in “chaos cinema.”

Michael Bay himself can be quoted on this point: “when you get hung up on continuity,” he says, “you can’t keep the pace and price down. Most people simply consume a movie and they are not even aware of these errors.” It’s noteworthy that Bay seems equally concerned with “pace” and “price,” and that he sees his movies as objects which the audience will “simply consume.” As far as Bay is concerned, the frequent continuity violations discovered in his films by hostile critics are not “errors” at all; they are just nitpicky details that only matter to those few of us who analyze films for a living. It’s easy enough to ridicule this sort of attitude, of course; and I have done so as much as anybody. But beyond ridicule, the crucial point is that the classical values of continuity simply don’t matter to certain contemporary filmmakers any more.

This is why I prefer my own term, post-continuity, to Stork’s “chaos cinema.” Film today is post-continuity, just as our culture in general is postmodern — or, even better, post-literate. Even if weve discovered today that “we have never been modern,” this discovery is itself a product of modernity. And it’s not that we don’t read anymore, but rather that reading itself has been recontextualized, and subsumed within a broader multimedia/audiovisual environment. In the same way, it is not that continuity rules are always being violated or ignored; nor are the films made in their absence simply chaotic. Rather, we are in a “post-continuity” situation when continuity has ceased to be important — or at least has ceased to be as important as it used to be.

You can still find lots of moments in post-continuity films in which the continuity editing rules are being carefully followed, as well as moments in which they are thrown out the window. And it’s also true that, as Stork notes, continuity cues that are not provided visually are instead provided subliminally on the soundtrack. (The role of sound in post-continuity cinema is something that I will need to address elsewhere). In any case, however, the crucial point for post-continuity films is that the violation of continuity rules isn’t foregrounded, and isn’t in itself significant. This is in sharp contrast to the ways that jump cuts, directional mismatches, and other violations of continuity rules were at the center of a film like Godard’s Breathless more than half a century ago. Today, neither the use of continuity rules nor their violation is at the center of the audience’s experience any longer.

In other words, it is not that continuity rules — whether in their classical or “intensified” form — have been abandoned, nor even that they are concertedly violated. Rather, although these rules continue to function, more or less, they have lost their systematicity; and — even more — they have lost their centrality and importance. And this marks the limit of Bordwell’s claim, in his “Intensified Continuity” essay, that even the flamboyant camera movements and ostentatious edits and special effects of the “intensified” style still serve the same ultimate goal as classical narration: putting the audience in the position of “comprehending the story” and “surrendering to the story’s expressive undertow.”

Continuity structures, however, are not just about articulating narrative. Even more importantly, perhaps, they work to provide a certain sense of spatial orientation, and to regularize the flow of time. Where Bordwell sees the establishment of spatiotemporal relations as crucial to the articulation of narrative, I am inclined to think that the actual situation is the reverse. Even in classical narrative films, following the story is not important in itself. It is just another one of the ways in which we are led into the spatiotemporal matrix of the film; for it is through this matrix that we experience the film on multiple sensorial and affective levels.

I am making a rather large theoretical claim here, one that I will need to justify, and further develop, elsewhere. But I think it has major consequences for the ways in which we understand post-continuity.

In post-continuity films, unlike classical ones, continuity rules are used opportunistically and occasionally, rather than structurally and pervasively. Narrative is not abandoned, but it is articulated in a space and time that are no longer classical. For space and time themselves have become relativized or unhinged. In this sense, Bordwell is wrong to claim that “in representing space, time, and narrative relations (such as causal connections and parallels) today’s films generally adhere to the principles of classical filmmaking.”

Part of what’s at stake here is the relation between style and significance. Of course, we know that it is impossible simply to link a particular technique, or stylistic device, with a fixed meaning. This is why Bordwell rejects the sort of theorization that I am pursuing here; it is also, I think, why Stork can only say of the “chaos cinema” style that it is poorly made. But against this, I’d like to cite some remarks by Adrian Martin. Martin begins by giving Bordwell his due:

In his droll 1989 book Making Meaning, the American scholar David Bordwell makes fun of a standard procedure in discussing film. Let us take shot/reverse shot cutting, proposes Bordwell. Critics like to say: if we see, as part of the same scene, one person alone in a shot, and then another person alone in another shot, it means that the film intends us to see them as emotionally far apart, separated, disconnected. But (Bordwell continues) it can also be taken to mean the exact opposite: the rhythm of the cutting, the similarity of the positioning of the figures in the frame – all that signals a union, a oneness, a deep connection between these two people! Bordwell repeats the same mock-demonstration with camera movement: if a panning or tracking shot takes us from one character, past an expanse of space, to another character, critics will unfailingly say either that this means they are secretly connected, or (on the contrary) that there is a gulf between them.

However, Martin suggests that there is more to it than Bordwell is able to properly recognize; and in this, he moves from Bordwell to Deleuze:

Maybe we are not asking the right question. It might be enough to answer Bordwell by pointing out that such meanings, of interconnectedness or disconnectedness, are not just the handy hallucination of the critic; and that each film, in creating its own dramatic context, will subtly or unsubtly instruct us on how to read the emotional and thematic significance of its stylistic devices. OK, argument settled – at least within the framework of an essentially classical, organic aesthetic. But there is another way to attack this matter, and it is more philosophical. Let us turn to Gilles Deleuze’s meditation on the films of Kenji Mizoguchi in his Cinema 1: The Movement-Image: “this seems to us to be the essential element in what have been called the extravagant camera-movements in Mizoguchi: the sequence-shot ensures a sort of parallelism of vectors with different orientations and thus constitutes a connexion of heterogeneous fragments of space, thus giving a very special homogeneity to the space thus constituted. (…) It is not the line which unites into a whole, but the one which connects or links up the heterogenous elements, while keeping them heterogeneous. (…) Lines of the universe have both a physics – which reaches its peak in the sequence-shot and the tracking-shot – and a metaphysics, constituted by Mizoguchi’s themes.”

What a concept to boggle Bordwell’s mind: the camera movement which is (to paraphrase Deleuze) a line which connects what is disconnected, while keeping it disconnected! Yet this is precisely the complexity of what we are given to see, as spectators, in a film by Mizoguchi or so many other filmmakers: this ambiguous or ambivalent interplay of what connects or disconnects, links or unlinks, the people and objects and elements of the world.

Without necessarily endorsing Deleuze’s particular mode of analysis, I’d like to suggest that Martin gives us the way in which we can indeed assign some broader significance to the larger phenomenon of post-continuity: to see what it connects and what it disconnects. In classical continuity styles, space is a fixed and rigid container, which remains the same no matter what goes on in the narrative; and time flows linearly, and at a uniform rate, even when the film’s chronology is scrambled by flashbacks. But in post-continuity films, this is not necessarily the case. We enter into the spacetime of modern physics; or better, into the “space of flows”, and the time of microintervals and speed-of-light transformations, that are characteristic of globalized, high-tech financial capital. Thus in Post-Cinematic Affect, reflecting on Neveldine and Taylor’s Gamer, I tried to look at the ways that the post-continuity action style is expressive of, as well as being embedded within, the delirium of globalized financial capitalism, with its relentless processes of accumulation, its fragmentation of older forms of subjectivity, its mutiplication of technologies for controlling perception and feeling on the most intimate level, and its play of both embodiment and disembodiment.

I think, however, that there is much more to be said about the aesthetic sensibility of post-continuity styles, and the ways that this sensibility is related to other social, psychological, and technological forces. Post-continuity stylistics are expressive both of technological changes (i.e. the rise of digital and Internet-based media) and of more general social, economic, and political conditions (i.e. globalized neoliberal capitalism, and the intensified financialization associated with it). Like any other stylistic norm, post-continuity involves films of the greatest diversity in terms of their interests, committments, and aesthetic values. What unites, them, however, is not just a bunch of techniques and formal tics, but a kind of shared episteme (Michel Foucault) or structure of feeling (Raymond Williams). It is this larger structure that I would like to illuminate further: to work out how contemporary film styles are both expressive of, and productively contributory to, these new formations. By paying sustained attention to post-continuity styles, I am at least trying to work toward a critical aesthetics of contemporary culture.

I would like to conclude by suggesting that the notion of “post-continuity” may well have a broader cultural scope, rather than just being restricted to what Stork calls “the woozy camera and A.D.D. editing pattern of contemporary [action] releases.” Consider, for instance, the following:

  • On his blog, the cinematographer John Bailey interviewed Stork and commented extensively on the ideas from his video essay. Bailey proposes that the real hallmark of “chaos cinema” is “spatial confusion,” even when this is accomplished without “eruptive cutting.” He therefore suggests that even films that “embrace the long take”, and mimic the hypercontinuity of first-person computer games, may also partake of what I am calling post-continuity. Gus van Sant’s Gerry, for instance, accomplishes “such a complete spatial dislocation that it slowly, inexorably becomes the heart of the film.” Bailey’s observations are quite congruent with work that I have been doing on how space time relations, as well as audiovisual relations, are radically changed by the new digital technologies (cf. my essay “Splitting the Atom,” forthcoming).
  • Dogme95-influenced handheld cinematography also produces a post-continuity style. Excessive camera movements, reframings without functional justification, and rough, jumpy editing lead to a vertiginous sense of dislocation. Writing about Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia on his Twitter feed, Adrian Martin complains: “I tend to dislike almost every stylistic decision made by Lars von Trier. Other things can be interesting, but the style! Where is the craft in this MELANCHOLIA thing ? Some of the actors are great, but nobody is being directed, it’s an amateur movie!!” Now, I value this film quite highly, as Martin evidently does not. But I think that his discomfort bears witness to something that is genuinely true of the film: its indifference to, and even feudal of, the traditional aesthetics of continuity, and the sorts of meanings that are produced by such an aesthetic. My own argument is that this is altogether appropriate to a film that rejects modernity altogether, and envisions the end of the world. (I try to discuss the positive effects of Von Trier’s post-continuity style in my essay “Melancholia, or the Romantic Anti-Sublime,” forthcoming).
  • I think that post-continuity is also at work in the minimalism and stasis of such recent low-budget horror films as the Paranormal Activity series. These films are evidently not dislocated, as they are shot, and take place, in single locations. In each film, the point of view is restricted to the rooms and grounds of one single-family home. But these films are entirely shot with home-video and home-computing equipment; and the machines that capture all the footage themselves appear within the diegesis. This means that everything comes either from jerky handheld video cameras, or else from the fixed locations of laptop cams and surveillance cams. As a result, the patterns of traditional continuity editing are completely missing: there are no shot-reverse shot patterns, and no cuts between establishing shots and close-ups. Instead, we get a point of view that is impersonal, mechanized, and effectively from nowhere. Nicholas Rombes argues that the Paranormal Activity films are in fact avant-garde works, due to their use of fixed or mechanically-controlled cameras. (For further discussion of this, see the Critical Roundtable on these films, featuring me, Rombes, and Julia Leyda, and moderated by Therese Grisham, in a recent issue of La furia umana).

Although I have yet to explore any of these more fully, it strikes me that the following might also be considered as instances of post-continuity.:

  • The casual, throwaway style of “mumblecore” slice-of-life films.
  • The widespread integration of graphics, sound effects, and mixtures of footage emulating video games, that we find in a film like Scott Pilgrim.
  • The promiscuous mixtures of different styles of footage that we find in such films as Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers and Brian De Palma’s Redacted.

In all of these cases, the films do not altogether dispense with the concerns of classical continuity; but they move ‘beyond’ it or apart from it, so that their energies and their investments point elsewhere. What is common to all these styles is that they are no longer centered upon classical continuity, or even the intensification of continuity identified by Bordwell. We need to develop new ways of thinking about the formal strategies, as well as the semantic contents, of all these varieties of post-continuity films.