antagonist

Zombyland

Zombies, memories made of decaying flesh. Their hauntic presence a material realism. Sarah Lauro writes a Zombie Manifesto in which “The zombie exists somewhere between the ontic and the hauntic”. She describes an evolution of the undead in terms of the living, Hence an ‘evolution from the Haitian zombi to the Hollywood zombie. 

She proposes the zombii: a conflation of David Chalmer’s p-zed with a Benjamian/Derridian zombie. An über-zombie. Zombii: ‘a zombie that does not yet exist’. 

From this we learn that zombies do in fact exist. She identifies some for us: we have capitalist zombies (Dawn of the Dead), communist zombies (Invasion of the Body Snatchers), viral zombies (28 Days)  and we might add vampiric zombies (I am Legend) or more recently auto-zombified legends of pop (MJ, as per Ian Penman).

The zombii Lauro proposes will canabalize the future. This Über-Zombie, a u-zed, is a spectral post-human swarm organism. Its lack of consciousness is what instills horror. Its Achilles heal is its brain, the cognitive center of our humanity and the zombii’s un- or a-humanity. 

The zombii, neither living nor dead, neither subject nor object, is an in-between creature of negativity. It is suspended in a negative dialectical tension without the possibility of release. The zombii cannot be sublimated, it is the undead aporetic appearance of horror in human form.

But we can take Lauro’s evolution one step further. A zomby is the material realization of the perpetual postponement of humanity. Its not post-human like Lauro’s zombii modeled after Haraway’s cyborg. It has no use for humanity except for nourishment. It’s neither conscious nor unconscious, it has no need for consciousness. It is a thing among things. To some that's the most horrifying prospect possible.

Kafka's Burrow and the Sonorous Body

There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot. For certain engineering purposes, it is desirable to have as silent a situation as possible. Such a room is called an anechoic chamber, its six walls made of special material, a room without echoes. I entered one at Harvard University several years ago and heard two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation. Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music.  John Cage

She is in an unspeakable mood. I try to circumvent her, but her foulness is everywhere. When she moves, space reorients itself around her. I get a sense of vertigo when this happens. I feel sick.

She sighs and some air escapes the pressure between us. She sips her tea, her downcast eyes protecting me unwillingly from what will remain unuttered between us.

I am unable to speak, but still, words wring themselves from me. The silence she returns resounds of me, echoing inside me. It leaves me breathless. Hollow.

It’s not a matter of when a person listens but of where he listens. He listens to the resounding of something within himself caused by something outside himself. Some exteriority is inscribed in his interiority.

Nancy writes that his is a ‘sonorous body’, a body which is ‘always at once the body that resounds and [a] body as a listener where that resounds, or that resounds with it’ (8, my emphasis) . 

We're both listening then, at the same time, but more importantly in the same shared place or rather our listening creates our co-presence in sound. I've never listened this intently to her silence before. I must have never listened to hear before. Something crucial is approaching. Some secret is at stake.

Nancy is in search of an ontological tonality and asks: What does it mean for a being to be immersed entirely in listening, formed by listening or in listening , listening with all his being? (4)

What does it mean indeed? I don’t know, but I know this. I am hollow, her silent exteriority reverberates my interiority, the outside is enveloped by the inside. She is Echo, but I am no Narcissus. 

What reaches me, what extends from me to her and thus vice versa, what travels in res between us, is an echo, a renvoi, something that returns to itself, in itself, by itself. We are rebounding/resounding of each other. When we are ready to return to ourselves we have departed already, again, over and over.

At this point I recall Kafka's Burrow, a parable on the exteriority of the interiority or the interiority as exteriority, a tale of folding/unfolding, of invagination. The burrower obsesses with silence, his burrow must be silent. (There’s a thread in here of the relation between silence, safety and topology)

He is continuously haunted by the omnipresence of rhythmic sounds punctuated by a noise-like hissing which seem to be always arriving in an ever-increasing crescendo without ever reaching its destination.

As he sets out to investigate he is acutely aware of the burrow as a listening body but fails to identify himself as such a sonorous body. His burrow has become an anechoic chamber. He is reverberating with himself.

(What happens to his plan to transform his beloved Castle’s Keep into a hollow separating it from the walls surrounding it, creating an island within his burrow which is already an island?)

He longs to be in his Keep with nothing but the rushing of silence to accompany him. Poor thing. He fails to realize he is not listening i.e. ‘straining toward a possible meaning’ (6) at all. ‘Sense opens up in silence’, writes Nancy, our task, and the burrower’s, is to listen to the ‘silence of meaning’ (26).

‘Silence is an arrangement of resonance’, it is ‘exactly as when in a perfect condition of silence your own body resonate[s], your own breath, your heart and all its resounding cave’ (21).  

The animal deep inside its burrow is experiencing the absolute non-phenomenality of sound, its lack of intentionality. His fear of alterity and exteriority is evoked from his interiority. This animal's haunto-topological predicament consists of ‘acoustic oto-emissions’ (16).

Her silence mingles with these auto-produced sounds of my inner ear. What starts as an itch, excavates me while it burrows deeper into me. It sits in my stomach now, a dense mass of emptiness stretching me from the outside in. 

(Numbers refer to Listening by Jean-Luc Nancy (2007))

An Endless Space of Presence in Absence

Mirrors

When we touch a mirror’s surface and look closely we note the impassability from reflection to reflected. We are witnessing a sublime, unbridgeable rift, an aporia. Our touch never touches but asymptotically. Our reflection never reflects but hauntologically. Our bodies are there but not there, we are what Derrida calls ‘becoming-body’.

A reflection is a reflection of form; a mirror forms a reflection of us, but not us. Before a reflection can form, it is formless. This formlessness, this Bataillian l’informe regenerates forms infinitely, tirelessly, without exhaustion, without exhausting us (but supplementing us). The mirror is an endless space of presence in absence.

We touch it again and look closely, again.

Now we note the impassable is ‘pantaporos aporos'. A sublime multitude of bridges, a network of networks and routes, a pantaporia. Everything touches everything, but no shores, no ‘rims of the abyss to be crossed’ (Lyotard) are laid bare to discover. We are suspended over the abyss. Indefinitely.

(Aporos: unable to bridge, no route. Pantaporos, many ways to go through, to bridge, many routes. The phrase comes from Sophocles' Antigone.)

The Listening Eye of Emily Richardson

Some thoughts after watching Cobra Mist, a short film by Emily Richardson.

Shown at the Impakt Festival, Utrecht, The Netherlands.

Cobra Mist is an spectro-poetic essay on landscape and the (de)militarization of space. Director Emily Richardson captures what is left of Orford Ness, Suffolk (UK) after it was used by an unsuccessful, secret Cold War era military ‘over-the-horizon’ radar project. If there is an adequate picture of a Cold War world, Richardson has convincingly recorded it.

 
A time-lapse - a technique deeply linked to showing the animate in what we otherwise would observe as inanimate - brings the terrain of this stretch of land near Suffolk to life. 360 degrees and panoramic scenes are alternated with claustrophobic, interior stills of ghostly structures seemingly held up by nothing but shadows and light. Still lifes composed of left behind objects and strangely amputated buildings on the omni-present horizon start to quiver with live as time is sped up. Richardson’s film shows us a world left behind after an event of apocalyptic proportions.

Similar to Richardson’s film ‘Petrolia’ Cobra Mist shows the effects of human intervention on nature. Martin Heidegger in ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ calls Gestell the result of the human intervention which treats all of nature as a reserve i.e. a Bestand to be exploited. Heidegger does not necessarily condemn technological exploitation as such, - rather what is condemned is calculative reason - but instead points out another way of interacting with our environment through the concept of the fourfold or Geviert. By gathering earth, sky, mortals and divinities Heidegger arrives at the conclusion that such a Geviert is what creates a world in which the thing is able to ‘thing’.

Orford Ness was exploited by a secretive form of calculative reason: the military logic of intelligence acquisition and geo-surveillance through the use of radar. The film take its title from a Cold War era code-name of a project that set out to create and test a so-called ‘over-the-horizon’ radar installation to facilitate long-range surveillance. That is to say, what was exploited at this site was not a fossil resource but a natural resource nonetheless, namely acoustical space itself.

The soundtrack accompanying the film brings this out. Composed and constructed out of ‘found sounds’ at the site itself, by using high-sensitivity microphones left overnight, the soundtrack treats the acoustical space at the site as an archive of sonofacts, sonorous artifacts lingering in the airwaves at Orford Ness. The soundtrack or perhaps more to the point, the soundscape, feels like a sonological archeology. Sound composer Benedict Drew and sound recordist Chris Watson thus jointly unearth a sonic archive of Cold warfare.

Radio-static like noise washes in and out of audible range backed by a disturbing, highly resonant, bass-ic artery. The screeching of sea-gulls and other bird-like sounds seem to oscillate in such a way that they become indistinguishable from high pitched frequency modulation, a technique used in radar technology. And then there’s the rain hitting the camera creating an intimacy, visually enhanced by a hand quickly wiping the lens clean before the sun breaks through.

Cobra Mist joins the two orders of visibility as proposed by Jacques Derrida. First there is the ‘visible in-visible’. Anything we want to keep secret, hidden from sight such as ‘a nuclear arsenal in underground silos’ or in our case an over-the-horizon radar installation belongs to this order of the visible invisible. Secondly what Derrida calls absolute invisibility: ‘that [what] refers to whatever falls the register of sight, namely the sonorous […]’. Something is absolutely invisible when we cannot see it by looking at it. It can only come to us through sound, smell or touch.

Radar, a technology of calculative secrecy, is the sonic or electromagnetic detection of objects afar. Air or microwaves are excited, to carry to and from, to return, information regarding objects which are ‘absolutely invisible’. We cannot see these objects, we can only send signals to them. The signals sent, return, and as such they are revenant.

Radar then is an acoustical gaze and as such a hauntological mirror. Derrida: ‘[It] sees me without me seeing it looking at me’ . And since we cannot see it, it can only be heard. This is similar to what Swedenborg, who in a way haunted Kant, calls the ‘listening eye’ as cited by Lyotard: ‘To the inside of the Ear belong those who have a sight of internal hearing’. That’s the nocturnal look, the listening eye.

Radar: the listening eye. Radar, in its very technicality, gathers earth, sky, mortal and divinities, a conclusion reminiscent of Don Ihde’s phenomenology of the Shoreham nuclear powerplant.

But to return to Richardson’s film: Cobra Mist does not show us a, to use a tired cliche, desolate landscape. On the contrary. As the ‘wholly other’ it renders us desolate or more precisely as Lyotard puts it in Scapeland (The Inhuman): 'landscape leaves the mind desolate'. We lose ourselves in this landscape, this ‘world of sound’ in which ‘hearing breaks down the defenses of the harmonic and melodic ear, and becomes aware of timbre alone’.