Kant and Hegel, yet again

I think that the differend between Kant and Hegel is still crucial, even from the point of view of speculative realism.Basically, Kant posits a limit beyond which thought cannot go — we cannot know things in themselves. Hegel’s critique of Kant is that, since thought is positing the limit, thought must always already be able to see beyond the iimit; for Hegel, the idea of inaccessible things-in-themselves is bogus, because it is our thought that has first posited them *as* inaccessible. This is what Hegel says, and it is repeated time and time again by later Hegelians, e.g. by Zizek.

Now, it has long seemed to me that any modern philosophy needs to begin with a counter-defense of Kant against Hegel. In the terms of SR, evidently, Kant is a weak correlationist while Hegel is a strong correlationist. Hegel’s argument against Kant is very much a form of correlationist argument — it is basically Stove’s Gem — to affirm something is to posit it and thence to know it. Hegel is simply saying that, by thinking that there are things outside of our thought, we are thereby bringing them into our thought. This is precisely the argument that SR most strongly rejects. 

In this sense, even though Kant’s transcendental argument, his Copernican turn, is the locus classicus and foundational statement of correlationism, I think that returning to Kant can give us a way out of correlationism. This is partly what I was trying to do in my Whitehead book (even though I wrote most of that book before I became aware of speculative realism). Once we have made this return, several moves are possible. We may argue that the correlation, as Kant establishes it, is itself contingent rather than necessary (this is what Meillassoux does). Or, we may make a new version of the transcendental argument, asking not what our minds must be like in order for the world to appear the way it does, but what the world itself must be like in order for it to be able to appear to us the way it does (this is what Roy Bhaskar does). Or, we may extend the Kantian argument to all entities: it isn’t just human beings or rational beings that encounter appearances which are different from things in themselves, but every entity encounters all other entities phenomenally only, without being able to reach those entities in themselves (this is basically Harman’s argument that all objects withdraw, and that there is an unbridgeable distinction between sensual objects and real objects). Or, we may rework the transcendental argument as a principle of productivity rather than of essences (this, as far as I can understand it, is what Schelling does, at least in Iain Hamilton Grant’s reading of Schelling). Or else, as I prefer — following Whitehead as I understand him — we can invert the order of the Critiques so that the 3rd critique comes first — becoming, as Whitehead put it, a critique of feeling, which makes the other critiques unnecessary — that is to say, aesthetics precedes cognition — we affect and are affected by other things aesthetically before we cognize those other things, and even (or especially) when we cannot cognize them adequately. We cannot *know* things in themselves, or things apart from their correlation with us; but we can, as Harman rightly suggests, allude to them, i.e. refer to them metaphorically or indirectly. And we can, as well, be aesthetically *moved* by them — indeed, this is the primordial mode ofactual  contact among entities (and in saying this, I am espousing a Whiteheadian version of SR which differs from Harman’s object-oriented ontology). 

The Kingdom of Shadows

The Kingdom of Shadows (just published, as an e-publication for Kindle and Nook) is K. W. Jeter‘s first new full-length novel since Noir (1998). It’s an extraordinary book, though difficult to describe without spoilers. I will do my best.

The Kingdom of Shadows is set just before and during World War II, in Nazi Germany and Hollywood. It could easily be thought of as a historical novel, except for one crucial plot element (which I will avoid giving away here) that pushes it over the line and into the realm of speculative fiction. The “kingdom of shadows” (or Schattenreich, in German) to which the title refers is both the insubstantial world of light and dark (or black and white) that appears on cinema screens, and the world of the Third Reich, in which life has been drained of its colorful variety in the service of a fanatical Idea. Our bodies project shadows, and the ancient philosophers believed that images were emanations from our skin and from the surfaces of other bodies (Deleuze writes of the “particularly subtle, fluid, and tenuous elements” that, according to Epicurus and Lucretius, “detach themselves from the surfaces of things — skins, tunics, or wrappings, envelopes or barks — what Lucretius calls simulacra and Epicurus calls idols”). In the twentieth century, such subtle, almost impalpable emanations were captured by analog photgraphic devices, and then projected as movies.  

It’s well known how the Nazis made use of cinematic mise-en-scene in order to take and consolidate their power. A film like Triumph of the Will exalts the Nazi Party and the German State in terms of an overwhelming, monumentalist aesthetic. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, both ran the German film industry in competition with Hollywood, and helped to organize the society of the Reich as if it were some sort of immense film set. Jeter builds on this to portray all of Nazi Germany as a kind of cinematic epic; the Gotterdamerung of its nihilistic collapse when it loses the war is as much a part of this as was its initial grandiloquent construction. Hollywood is evidently less malign than Nazi Germany — but the technologies of both realms are the same: the cinema-machine as a way of destroying souls by extracting images from bodies, and giving them a monstrous new magnified life on the screen. In this way, the cinema is both a destroyer and a preserver: the kingdom of shadows is both the spectacle of a mutilated life, and the storehouse of our memories, which are the only things we have to counter this mutilation and destruction. 

The plot of The Kingdom of Shadows concerns a small religious minority group, the Lazarenes (invented by Jeter; as far as I know, they had no actual historical existence), who are targeted by the Nazis for extermination on the grounds that they (like the Jews and the Roma) are an “inferior” race. The main character Marte, a young woman of “mixed” Lazarene and “German” blood, ironically comes to embody the myth of “Aryan” supremacy and “purity,” when Goebbels becomes obsessed with her, takes her as his “mistress” (which in this case, really means as his sex slave), and puts her on screen as the Reich’s greatest and most radiant star. As the novel proceeds, she is increasingly separated from herself: turned into a radiant image despite (or secretly because of) the inner suffering and melancholy that almost shines through. Jeter is unsparing in the way that he links the misogyny of Nazi ideology to that of the cinematic machine’s reliance upon women’s “to-be-looked-atness.”

The Lazarenes are visible in Germany as a separate ethnic group because of a genetic quirk: their eyes are always of two different colors. Culturally, they distinguish themselves by a certain secret knowledge transmitted by the elders, and by the tattoos, representing Christ’s stigmata, that all members of the group receive upon initiation into adulthood. The Nazis are obsessed with the Lazerenes’ secret wisdom, which concerns the skin and its images or emanations, and which thereby is related to the cinema as a machinery both of self-perpetuation, and of propaganda and control. The shadow-images that emanate from our skins and get projected on movie screens are flimsy and insubstantial, and yet they are a source of nearly (or potentially) unlimited power. Jeter’s novel moves between the grandiose monstrosity of the Third Reich (and to a lesser extent, of Hollywood) and the inward pain and vulnerability of individual bodies, which is to say of human beings who are entirely exposed to the world through the openness of their skin.

I think that The Kingdom of Shadows is a profound work of media philosophy, due to the way that it draws links between the substantiality and suffering of the flesh, the shadowy impalpability (which is yet not non-existence) of images, and the functioning (both technical and social) of twentieth-century media technologies. The book rethinks the meaning of the horrors of the Nazi era, and their relation to the larger movements of the whole twentieth century (as opposed to the way that all too many contemporary works just invoke Naziism as an easy signifier of ultimate evil). But of course, it is first of all a novel, not a treatise. What really makes the book work is its affective dimension, as conveyed through K. W. Jeter’s dark and melancholy prose. The Kingdom of Shadows is rooted in German Romanticism and (going further back) in the disturbing world of early-Germanic fairy tales, while it also reaches forward to contemporary “dark vitalism” and the poetry of extinction. It’s a devastating book, a descent into the dark night of the twentieth century, from which there can be no easy redemption.

More on (or against) biopolitics

This is something of a followup to what I wrote here, and also here. It is abstracted from an email interview currently in progress. It is pretty rough and undeveloped, but I hope it makes a certain amount of sense.

I both agree and disagree with Hardt and Negri in profound ways. I find their account of the predominance of “affective labor” in the current globalized economy to be incredibly useful. It’s not that such labor didn’t exist before, or that older forms of labor (like industrial labor) have somehow disappeared; but rather that our current social and economic formation is characterized by the hegemony of affective labor processes (together with the hegemony of finance capital over industrial capital, and the importance of continued “primitive accumulation,” or expropriation of formerly public resources, alongside the appropriation and accumulation of surplus value). I think that Hardt and Negri are correct in their observations about “empire” replacing the older forms of imperialism, now that capitalism has truly become global; under this regime, nation-states do not cease to exist, but they play a different role (vis-a-vis an international “market” that they cannot control) than they did formerly. And Hardt and Negri are also right to assert that the extraction of a surplus — which is to say, ultimately, of profit — has now extended well beyond the factory, to encompass all areas of social life, and that this means an increasing appropriation, not only of surplus labor-power, but also of what Marx called “general intellect,” or the accumulated knowledges and capacities of human life as a whole —  including things like habits, everyday practices, forms of know-how, and other potentialities of human (and not just human) “life” in general.

So in this sense I appreciate many aspects of what Hardt and Negri mean by biopolitical power, or the appropriation of the laboring activity of bodies and affects, not just in places of work, but in the overall compass of “life” as a whole. Yet this is also the point at which Hardt and Negri become disturbingly unsatisfactory to me. For what they are describing, under the rubric of biopolitics, affective labor, and the “real subsumption” of all aspects of social existence — and indeed of “life itself” — under capital, is a living nightmare, or a situation of unmitigated horror. For what it means is that we (meaning, by this “we”, everybody who works, whether in an office, a school, a factory, or some other institution, as well as everybody who is unemployed or underemployed, i.e. who does not even get the opportunity to work) — that we, so described, are not just being exploited nine-to-five, but rather all the time, 24/7: in our leisure as well as our work, when we are not being paid as well as when we are being paid, indeed even when we are asleep. This is what it means for capital to appropriate general intellect, and to capture, commodify, and sell not only quantifiable goods and services, but also such impalpable things as atmospheres, feelings, ways of being, or forms of life.

What I find inexplicable in Hardt and Negri is that they describe this situation of hyper-oppression and hyper-exploitation as one in which we are closer than ever to liberation, so that the self-determination of the multitude, as an active, affirmative, constitutive power, is somehow just around the corner — or is even, somehow, already in effect. This sounds suspiciously to me like the old-fashioned Marxist belief (never held, as far as I can tell, by Marx and Engels themselves) that “objective” economic conditions will somehow produce a transition from capitalism to socialism all by themselves, without the need for any sort of political action.

The view that economic processes will lead to revolutionary change all by themselves is precisely what used to be criticized, in many Marxist circles, as “economism.” And yet, I think that the problem with Hardt and Negri’s position is actually the result of their taking “biopolitics” too seriously, instead of subordinating it to economics. The reason for their unearned optimism is because they think that what capital is today exploiting can be designated, all too simply and holistically, as “life.” Where Marx saw labor being expropriated in the commodified form of labor-power, they see “life” as being expropriated directly. But I think this is wrong. There has been no shift from labor to life as a whole. Rather, leisure activities, and even mere sleeping, have been themselves transformed into new particular forms of labor. This allows them to be purchased in the form of labor-power, so that a surplus may be extracted from them.

To appeal to “life” beyond such specific forms of labor is an empty gesture. Indeed, the very idea of “life” in Western thought and culture is an exceedingly problematic one, as Eugene Thacker demonstrates in his brilliant recent book After Life. I am inclined to suggest that “life,” as posited in various discourses (not only those of Hardt and Negri) on biopolitics and biopower, does not exist. It is just an empty hypostatization, a transformation of forces and processes into a supposed essence. If we posit that such an essence has been alienated by practices of governmentality embodied in biopolitics, then it becomes all too easy to fantasize a disalienation that will return “life” to its essence. But this obscures the various forms of production and expropriation that are actually taking place, and puts the focus on tactics of “governmentality,” instead of examining the more basic processes of surplus value extraction and  capital accumulation.

I do not want to sound too harsh here. In fact, Hardt and Negri pay considerably more attention to economic expropriation and exploitation than most other contemporary theorists do. (It is important to note that they do focus on these processes, whereas other radical thinkers — Alain Badiou is the most notable example — programatically bracket and ignore them). But I still think that there is a certain imbalance that comes from their overvaluation of what they call biopolitics.

Also, I’m aware that what has today come to be called “neo-vitalism,” in various configurations, is concerned precisely to emphasize force and affect, rather than essence, in its understanding of how the world works. Evidently, I am largely in accord with this impulse. But I still think that it is dangerously confusing to hypostasize “life” per se in any way. The nineteenth century vitalists wrongly claimed that there was some sort of basic distinction between life and nonlife. They imagined some special process that drove living things, in contrast to the merely mechanistic forces that were supposedly all there was to the inanimate world. Today, this dualism is inadmissible. We should rather say, following Whitehead — and also Latour, Bennett, and the speculative realist philosopher Iain Hamilton Grant — that all materiality, or all of existence, nonliving as well as living, is intrinsically active and agential. It might be better to say, not that everything is alive, but that everything thinks in one way or another. This is the thesis, not of vitalism, but of panpsychism.

The Alchemists of Kush

I haven’t finished reading Minister Faust‘s new novel, The Alchemists of Kush. So I am not going to discuss it in the same detail as I did with his previous novel, From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain. Let me just say, based on what I have read so far (I am about 50% of the way through), that The Alchemists of Kush is another brilliant work of speculative fiction (though it is closer to Minister Faust’s first book, The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad, than it is to Dr. Brain).

The Alchemists of Kush is a work of triangulation: ancient African myth is juxtaposed with the lives of young (teen-aged) African immigrants (from Sudan, Somalia, and elsewhere) in present-day Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. I can best describe the novel in terms of a musical analogue: it’s as if you were to make a kind of mutant crossing between, on the one hand, the cosmic jazz of Sun Ra, with its invocation of ancient Egyptian deities, and on the other hand, the gritty urban hiphop of the Wu-Tang Clan, with its doubling of naturalistic detail into the modern mythologies of martial arts films and comic books.

The Alchemists of Kush is about poverty, violence, and racism; but it’s also about hope, inspiration, and transformation. It doesn’t separate the personal from the political and social, but grasps life from a point at which these dimensions both inhere, even though they also remain separate. Neither is reducible to the other, but at the same time neither is independent of the other. The novel might be described as both Afrofuturist and Afrocentric; but precisely thanks to this stubborn particularity, its aspirations and attainments are universalist.

The Alchemists of Kush goes on sale as an ebook (both Kindle and Nook formats) tomorrow — June 15, 2011 — for $2.99.

And also — If the book hits the Kindle Top 100 on launch day–June 15, 2011 — Minister Faust will donate the first $500 of sales to the South Sudan Development Foundation’s efforts to ship thousands of books (including the 300 he donated) to the Dr. John Garang Memorial University in South Sudan, which currently has no library. Good works for a good book.

Abstract: consciousness and sensation

Here’s the abstract I wrote for a paper I propose to give (if it is accepted) at the SLSA conference this coming September:

In this talk, I would like to take a speculative (Whiteheadian and cosmopolitical) look at recent scientific and philosophical debates about the nature and function of consciousness. Cognitive science and philosophy are haunted by the figure of the philosophical zombie: a being who would be outwardly indistinguishable from other sentient beings, but who would not be conscious (would not feel pain, experience qualia, etc). Though thinkers like David Chalmers and Daniel Dennett have argued about the logical possibility, and the implications, of this figure, arguably the most adventurous appearances of the philosophical zombie have come in recent science fiction. Peter Watts’ Blindsight (2006) is a “first contact” novel that posits humanity’s encounter with alien beings who are technologically superior to us, but devoid of consciousness. Project Itoh’s Harmony (2009, translated 2010) presents an oppressively utopian future world in which the complete extinguishing of consciousness becomes the final solution to human suffering and dissatisfaction. Tricia Sullivan’s Lightborn (2010) presents an alternative history in which human and animal consciousness can be directly manipulated by the biological equivalent of computer viruses. Scott Bakker’s Neuropath (2008) explores the disturbing consequences of the argument, proposed by Thomas Metzinger and other thinkers, that consciousness is entirely delusional and has no causal powers. All these novels explicitly present consciousness as merely epiphenomenal; and yet they all suggest (perhaps in spite of themselves) a certain affective intensity and efficacy of nonconscious, noncognitive thought.

George Molnar, Powers

I just finished reading George Molnar’s extraordinary book Powers. Reading an analytic philosophy book like this one reminds me, once again, that I am not a philosopher, even though I frequently write about philosophical texts. Good analytic philosophy tries to provide basic logical grounds or arguments for all of its assertions — something that I am incapable of doing. And it almost totally ignores what is interesting about classical philosophical texts: which is the implications of the metaphysical assertions. The point is that I am sure that any good analytic philosopher could point to the logical errors or ungrounded assertions in great speculative metaphysicians such as Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, and William James. But such errors do not negate what is genuinely challenging and thought-provoking about these thinkers. (I am crudely echoing, here, some of the remarks that Graham Harman has made many times on his blog. But then, Harman really is a philosopher, albeit of the continental rather than analytic kind — which means that he is doing the kind of thing the aforementioned great speculative philosophers do, rather than what the analytics do. I, in contrast, am doing something that is closer to speculative fiction than to speculative metaphysics. I respind to philosophy texts in the same way that I do to science fiction novels). 

Nonetheless, although his book is mostly concerned with the usually analytic statement of the particular arguments needed to establish his assertions, Molnar’s metaphysical assertions are themselves fascinating and suggestive, and contribute a lot to current debates in “speculative realism.” (Indeed, I came upon Molnar in the first place because he was mentioned in the context of SR by Ben Woodard). (Molnar is also footnoted in the introduction of The Speculative Turn, in connection with Iain Hamilton Grant’s attempt to produce a “powers” metaphysics; but Grant himself doesn’t seem to mention Molnar, either in his essays in that volume or in his own book Philosophies of Nature After Schelling).

Molnar’s basic argument is that things (or OOO’s objects) possess causal powers that are ontologically real, and not just confined to the instances in which they are manifested. Salt contains the power of being soluble (dissolveable) in water; this power is a veritable property of the salt, even if it never encounters water and never actually gets dissolved. In insisting that powers are actual independently of their manifestation (even if they can only be described in terms of their manifestation), Molnar rejects the skeptical (empiricist, and especially Humean) hypothesis that talk of powers has no meaning apart from the conditional statement that, e.g., if the salt is put into water, then it will dissolve. The classic Early Modern reproach to medieval philosophy was to ridicule the latter for allegedly saying, for instance, that opium puts people to sleep because it has a dormative power — and to claim that this sort of explanation is utterly meaningless. Molnar is arguing, in effect, that opium really does have something like a “dormative power.” This is not to deny that such a power can be analyzed, e.g., in terms of particular neurochemical events that take place in the brain of somebody who has smoked opium. But such an analysis of the “dormative power” does not get away from the attribution of powers, since it simply replaces the power of opium per se with a more detailed account of the powers possessed by particular molecules in the composition of opium. 

In this way, Molnar asserts a realist ontology, one that is directed against the skeptical empiricism of the whole tradition derived from Hume (and one still adhered to by a large number of analytic philosophers today). The parallels with speculative realism go further; Molnar insists, as much as Graham Harman does, that a thing, or an object, is not just a bundle of properties or characteristics, but exists in its own right apart from and in addition to these. (Although Molnar, unlike Harman, endorses the basic scientistic move of reducing objects to their ultimate subatomic constituents, he doesn’t make the claim that this somehow renders objects of the sort that we can see and touch illusory). 

In this way, Molnar offers something like the actualism, and the “flat ontology,” insisted upon by Delanda, by Latour, and by OOO (in contrast to the eliminativist impulses, both of many analytical philosophers, and of Ray Brassier or other more scientistically-inclined speculative realists). But there’s a difference. Molnar writes: “While ontologically there is nothing over and above individuals and their properties (actions), causally there is.” (George Molnar). The insistence on actual causality, and on actual relations (causality being one form of relation), makes for a significant difference between Molnar and Harman. Contra Harman, Molnar rejects any sort of “occasionalism”; he insists that causality is direct — and not merely “vicarious.” Like Harman and against Deleuze, Molnar claims that powers, even when they are not being exercised, are entirely actual qualities of things — they cannot be regarded as “virtual” or “potential.” They fully exist even when they are not manifested in particular events, as a result of particular relational encounters. But against Harman, Molnar insists that relations are as primary an ontological category as things or objects are. 

To put this another way: Harman, in his critique of Latour, opposes the Deleuzian notion of the virtual (together with related notions of the potential) to what he sees as Latour’s “Megarian” actualism. Although he applauds this actualism, he rejects what he claims is Latour’s relationalism, or denial that his discrete entities have any nonrelational substance. But Molnar adds another option to this picture. For Molnar, things do have a substantial reality that is outside of, and anterior to, relations — but this substantial actuality is largely composed of “powers,” or of causal abilities to do things (and thereby to interact relationally with other substances). There is nothing besides individuals and their properties; but since many of these properties of individual things are powers, they make direct causality possible, i.e. when they do contingently encounter other things or substances, they produce real effects.

Molnar asserts that “laws of nature” are supervenient upon the powers of actually-existing things. Against post-Humean skepticism, “laws of nature” are objective features of the world, not mental impositions. This thesis is therefore, once again, realist and anti-correlationist; it affirms that reality is mind-independent and human-independent.  But, in opposing Hume, Molnar also implicitly opposes Quentin Meillassoux’s return to, and alleged solution of, “Hume’s problem.” Something like Leibniz’s law of sufficient reason, or Whitehead’s ontological principle, is preserved against Meillassoux’s all-too-Humean insistence that anything can happen with no reason whatsoever. This is because, for Molnar, it is not that things obey pre-existing laws of nature (which is the thesis that Meillassoux rejects), but rather that “laws of nature” are themselves the consequence of the actual powers actually possessed by individual entities. We might say therefore, that Molnar’s powers are like Spinozian/Deleuzian abilities to affect, and to be affected by, other things. (The Spinozian part of Deleuze, unlike the Bergsonian part, does not involve virtuality). 

In addition to all this, Molnar claims that powers need not be grounded, and indeed that the ultimate powers of things are ungrounded. He argues this on an empirical, rather than a priori basis: the subatomic particles of which, according to contemporary physics, the universe is composed, do not seem to possess any grounding. An electron or a photon is nothing over and above its powers. If the powers of “composite” or everyday objects are themselves grounded (e.g. in physical, non-dispositional properties of these objects), the grounding does not continue downwards infinitely, but ultimately meets the ungroundedness of the powers of elementary particles.

Now, this might well be the place where OOO thinkers would argue that Molnar reveals himself to be a scientistic reductionist after all, but I think that such a criticism would not be entirely fair. This can best be understood, perhaps, by looking at the role that ungrounded powers play in Iain Hamilton Grant’s metaphysics (see Grant’s response to Harman in The Speculative Turn; this is also the place where Ben Woodard, as cited above, associates Molnar with Schelling and Grant). The crucial point we can take from Molnar is that powers need not be grounded in order to be real; and this makes for a crucial step in Grant’s argument, against Harman, that one can trace the anteriority of forces that generate objects, without thereby “undermining” objects and reducing everything to some sort of undifferentiated blob. From another direction, Molnar’s sense of ungrounded powers might also be used to defend Latour’s ontology against Harman’s criticisms. When objects are understood as possessing intrinsic powers, they can be separate and actual without being “withdrawn” in Harman’s sense. Objects possess real forces, which they exert against other, equally real forces being deployed by other objects. Without going so far as to make the difficult claim that Latour and Grant can be reconciled with one another, I think that they both can be defended against Harman’s various criticisms of them on the basis of an appeal to something like Molnar’s insistence upon the actuality, and not-needing-to-be-groundedness, of causal powers.

There’s also another, weirder direction in which one could take all this. For Molnar, subatomic entities like electrons and photons have intrinsic powers, but they don’t have any intrinsic qualities other than their powers. Indeed, this is precisely what he means when he asserts that their powers are ungrounded. If the powers of salt and opium and human beings and (to use Harman’s examples) tar and hailstones are grounded, this is because such entities have intrinsic qualities that are not powers, in addition to their intrinsic powers. I think, however, we can reduce the difference between subatomic entities and the sorts of entites that we can apprehend directly by adopting some form of panpsychism (as I have argued before — of course, Molnar would have hated this). That is to say, I want to argue for a thesis that Molnar explicitly rejects, but which is not incompatible with his main points. The thesis is what Molnar calls “dual-sided theory”: “all properties [of objects] have something about them that is irreducibly and ineliminably dispositional [i.e. is a power], and something (else) about them that is irreducibly and ineliminably non-dispositional or ‘qualitative’… A power is only a face/facet/side of a property that also has a qualitative face/facet/side.” Molnar rejects this thesis primarily because he doesn’t think that subatomic particles (or “field-densities”) have a qualitative side: they are only dispositional (they only have powers without any “grounding” or innerness). But a major argument of 20th century panpsychists, from Russell on to Strawson, is precisely that all entities must have an inner as well as an outer side, even if physics only gives us the latter. For panpsychism, there is a qualitative or experiential dimension to everything, including electrons and photons; just as there is a “dispositional” dimension, or the intrinsic possession of powers, to everything. Such a dual-aspect theory would grant interiority to subatomic particles, while also suggesting that the interiority of mesocosmic and macrocosmic entities need not be thought of as the “ground” of these entities’ powers, but as coextensive with them. Such an account both rescues Molnar’s overall argument from the vestiges of “smallism,” while at the same time preserving the intrinsicality and independence of objects without asserting that they are “withdrawn,” and without asserting that their causal relations are merely “occasional” or “vicarious.” For me, this is a way of taking Harman’s questions seriously, while at the same time giving more credence to the assertions of Latour (on the one hand) and Grant (on the other hand) than he is willing to; and of taking Meillassoux’s critique of correlationism seriously, without accepting his claims that mathematics = the absolute, and that things can and do happen for no reason. The occasionalism of both Harman and Meillassoux is rejected in favor of a Whiteheadian duality of determination and decision.

 

 

The Universe of Things

Gwyneth Jones’ short story collection, The Universe of Things, has just been published by Aqueduct Press, and is available for purchase here (at a reduced price until Jan 25). (Amazon lists the volume here).

I’m proud that I was asked to write the Introduction to the volume. Jones is one of the greatest and most important science fiction authors writing today, and she still hasn’t gotten quite the level of recognition that she deserves. 

The volume is named after one of the stories therein. The phrase “the universe of things” comes originally from Shelley’s poem “Mont Blanc.” In addition to writing the Introduction to Jones’ volume, I have also myself written an essay called “The Universe of Things”; the essay cites both Jones’ story and Shelley’s poem in the course of arguing for a Whiteheadian understanding, or revision, of the claims of object-oriented ontology. I now seem to have written several essays more or less on this theme; I am working, hopefully, towards a short book that will address the question of “Whitehead in the light of speculative realism”; and that book, if I manage to finish it, will probably also bear the title, The Universe of Things, thus continuing the semantic chain.

Black Swan

I really loved Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan. It joins Splice, Toy Story 3, Scott Pilgrim, and Enter the Void as one of my favorite films of 2010. (I missed too many things this year to offer anything like a top-ten list; I still haven’t seen Inception, or True Grit, or The Social Network, for instance — just to mention some of the general-release films that other people have been talking about).

In any case, Black Swan was one of those movies that just touched and jolted me in all the right ways — I became totally entranced by it. I really need to see it again, however, before I can comment on its cinematography — which struck me as key to its effectiveness, in the way that it both drew us into, and yet distanced us from, the intimate world of its protagonist. I think that some variety of cinematic free indirect discourse was at work here (I am thinking of Pasolini’s adaptation of this literary term to describe Antonioni’s cinematography, and then Deleuze’s generalization of the term, to get at a mode of presentation that is neither subjectively expressive, nor omniscently objective, but somehow in between). There’s a crucial relation between the autonomy of the hyperactive camera (and also the horror-film-esque shock cuts, and the use of subliminal sound) and the way the tortured flesh of Natalie Portman is at the center of the film — but I will need to watch the movie again before I can hope to pin this down. In the meantime, I will try to say something more general about how, and why, the film affected me so strongly.

Black Swan could be described as either a female equivalent to Aronofsky’s previous film, The Wrestler; or else as a sort-of remake of All About Eve. Natalie Portman’s character, like Mickey Rourke’s character in The Wrestler, has made a mess of her life. But she sacrificially redeems herself through ballet, the only thing that she is good at, just as Rourke does through wrestling. In both films, brilliance in the blatant artifice of intensely embodied performance compensates for what is otherwise an inauthentic self; perfection of the work substitutes for the impossibility of perfection of the life. Both Black Swan and The Wrestler thus preach and practice what I can only call a delirious kitsch aestheticism. In saying this, I do not use the word “kitsch” pejoratively. Rather, I insist that the aestheticism must be kitsch, in order to avoid falling into the void of a high-minded and self-congratulatory elitism. 

Black Swan resembles All About Eve in being a bitchy and overheated backstage melodrama. Just as Ann Baxter manipulates her way into supplanting Bette Davis as a lead actress (and, in the final scene of the movie, is set up to be supplanted in her own turn), so Natalie Portman displaces Winona Ryder as prima ballerina (leading to Winona’s attempted suicide), and is threatened in turn with displacement by her rival (and supposed good friend) Mila Kunis. The cold cynicism displayed in All About Eve by George Sanders is mirrored in Black Swan, at least somewhat, by Vincent Cassel as the manipulative ballet director. These echoes probably have something to do with why the film has been described by some critics as being camp (or criticized, as here by Dennis Lim, for not even being successful as camp). 

However, I think that the whole camp reading of the film is wrong. In fact, Black Swan is emotionally and wrenchingly intense, in a completely unironic way. Of course, this intensity is not “high art”; it is entirely lurid and hysterical, in a way that has its roots in pulp writing, and B- or exploitation-filmmaking. And this may be why some critics have trouble in receiving it unironically; there’s the unfortunate and wrong sense that some cultural elitists have that nothing can be taken seriously unless it is, well, “serious.” I’m putting that latter word into quotation marks, precisely because it connotes an attitude that cannot take anything with pulp energies, or with the kind of dogged and even corny conviction that Black Swan manifests, except “in quotation marks.” I am suggesting, to the contrary, that Black Swan works as powerfully and beautifully as it does, not in spite of, but precisely because of, its emotional excess, and its glossy reveling in that excess.

To put this in another way: Black Swan fully fits within the categories of what the film theorist Linda Williams calls “body genres.” These are films that are aesthetically disreputable, precisely because they overtly work to incite physical responses in the viewers. Williams lists three main body genres: pornography, horror, and melodrama, which move audiences to sexual arousal, chills of fear, and bouts of weeping respectively; and Black Swan is actually all three of these. The film moves from an initial creepiness to a culminating full-blown body horror; but along the way it titillates us with the phantasmatic, faux-lesbian scene of Natalie Portman’s full-blown orgasm. This softcore scene marks both a breakthrough (an overcoming of sexual repression) and also a breakdown (as Portman’s character finally learns that she can only fulfill her quest for aesthetic perfection at the price of her own existential self-destruction), and thus provides the bridge between horror (the revulsion of bodily metamorphosis, linked with the white swan – black swan duality of the Swan Lake ballet) and melodrama (the tears of unfulfillment, tied to a utopian negation of life as it is, in which every success is also a failure). 

The first half of Black Swan powerfully expressed a sort of creepy nervousness, discomfort, emotional awkwardness, vulnerability, and embarrassment. These are all evident in Natalie Portman’s relationship both to her mother and to the ballet director, as well as in her general malaise (or sense of being ill at ease) whenever she is not dancing — when she is riding the subway to and from Lincoln Center, for instance). This is the sort of mood that I find myself exquisitely attuned to in the cinema, when it is done well. It’s almost unbearably painful, but in an oddly detached and mediated way; the pain becomes pleasure when it is right there in front of you, objectified and articulated on the screen. 

But Black Swan doesn’t stay there. In the second half of the film, everything accelerates into full-blown body horror. Things spiral completely out of control. Natalie Portman moves from a minor obsession with eczema-like wound marks on her body, to a full-fledged crisis in which she seems to be growing feathers, the better to suit her for her “black swan” role. She imagines both having sex with, and then murdering, Mila Kunis, who is trying to steal her role. The film remains ostensibly “realist” enough to suggest that this is sheer hallucination on the part of Portman’s character — e.g., Kunis shows up again unharmed and unaffected, after Portman has apparently beaten her to a bloody pulp. But to the extent that “seeing is believing,” and that — in the suspension of disbelief with which we watch movies — we cannot help accepting what is plainly and viscerally shown to us on screen, the sex and the murder and the body horror are as real to us as anything else in the film. They are continuous with, and as compellingly actual as, the feelings that provoke them: self-disgust, the drive towards an impossible perfectionism, sexual jealousy vis-a-vis Kunis and resentment and feeling-betrayed vis-a-vis the mother. By the end of the film, it is impossible to say — and meaningless even to try to decide — whether Portman’s culminating wound (menstruation? vaginal mutilation?) is real or phantasmatic. We are swept away — or, at least, I was — in the vertigo of a hallucinatory, emotion-twisting, body horror/ecstasy. (And by “hallucinatory,” I mean something like “intensified”, rather than something like “unreal”).

The emotional tonality of Black Swan combines horror with melodrama: more specifically, horror’s body panic and hysteria with melodrama’s embarrassment and overstatement and weepiness. I think that Aronofsky really knows what he is doing here. He is using horror in order to update the old Hollywood melodrama, to make it more believable for the 21st century. He is making new equivalents for the parts of melodrama that might otherwise now seem antiquated, and therefore (to some viewers) campy. In this way, he is very smartly keeping the emotional center of melodrama intact. In this way, Black Swan is a contemporary version of what used to be called the “women’s picture” in the old Hollywood. Such films were frankly oriented towards middle-class female audiences; they also often became points of identification for gay men (which, of course, is partly where the association with camp comes from).

Now, the “women’s picture” is one genre that has never gotten the degree of recognition that it deserves. Some feminist film theorists took it seriously in the 1980s and 1990s, and wrote insightful things about it; among contemporary filmmakers, Todd Haynes has shown considerable interest in it. But overall, the women’s picture has remained disreputable; it is still generally condescended to by “serious,” high-minded critics who insist on regarding it as “trash” — even when they find it to be enjoyable trash. I always think of this in terms of what I like to call the Tarantino Test. Quentin Tarantino loves to make revisionist updates of “disreputable” male-oriented genre films, by making strong female protagonists the heroes — he does this in with blaxploitation in Jackie Brown,  with martial arts films in Kill Bill, with the car-racing genre of the 1970s in Death Proof, and with the war movie in Inglorious Basterds. But I cannot quite see Tarantino ever remaking, or offering a revisionist version of, a “disreputable” female-oriented genre film (though I am still, and always, waiting for him to surprise me). Aronofsky is to be praised for fearlessly entering this territory, and for pushing it all the way, without defensive irony. 

Postscript: it’s worth noting that another one of my favorite films of the past year, Gaspar Noe’s Enter the Void, has gotten some of the same negative or reserved reactions from critics and bloggers as Black Swan, and for similar reasons. In some ways, these two films could not be more different; Enter the Void is as male-centric as Black Swan is female-centric. But they have both been regarded as somewhat chintzy, cheesy, and corny: as being too “obvious” to be accepted as Great Art. Critics of Enter the Void, in particular, have accused its mindblowing visual and sonic textures of just being coverings for an ultimate banality; they have see the film as just an empty display of technique (or of digital technologies). I think that such reactions, like the critical reactions dismissing Black Swan as glamorous trash, betray a continuing discomfort with movies in which psychophysical stimulation and affective intensity overwhelm plot and theme. To my mind, in both films, the psychophysical intensity is the point; and thematic concerns are deliberately flattened and simplified, so they do not interfere with this. (Noe is following the example of 2001, which is evidently his main cinematic reference point; Aronofsky, I think, is simply following his salutary pulp instincts). In the end, of course, it comes down to how particular, individual films affect me; but the power of both of these films reinforces my sense that a certain cinematic maximalism is a better way to go than the reserve of slow or contemplative cinema.