antagonist

The growing list of movies dealing with utopian/dystopian issues can not be simply dismissed as a Hollywood capitalization of our consumer need for or addiction to widescreen rehearsals of a humanity in crisis, facing apocalypse or enduring to the point of near extinction: catastrophe. Or rather the need is there but for not obvious reasons. This is what I consider an important point Frederic Jameson makes: ‘Utopia emerges at the moment of the suspension of the political’. Jameson means that while the political, the fabric of which is time i.e history itself, is a continuously changing presence, at the same time its material manifestation congealed and concealed into political institutions creates that strange ‘realist’ sense of their unchangeability and inescapability. Hence the late capitalist or postmodern condition comes across as something inevitable, as a political and economical status quo, locking us into a Weberian cage of calculative rationality. When this point, this status quo is reached, on a cognitive level, it is utopian thinking that generates what Jameson calls ‘mental play’ which consist of thinking through the possibilities under which the political institutions can be genetically recombined into new, possibly even revolutionary, institutional constellations. Jameson therefore agrees with other thinkers in that Thomas More’s Utopia or Roussau’s work appeared as they did at particular conjunctures in time – i.e. the rise of capitalism and the dawn of the preconditions for French Revolution resp. – for a reason, namely that the social configuration of space and time at those conjunctures created exactly the cognitive and affective preconditions of the mental play meant: the sense of a total lock-in in the then current system (political, economical etc).

The question we might be tempted to ask in the current conjuncture of capitalist realism is: which utopia has emerged that will allows us to play freely this mental game yet again only to realize immediately no such utopian mindset did arise. Here, I’d like to suggest an intuition or suspicion: the suspension of the political might be permanent and that our capacity to envision utopia anew has been foreclosed. After 1968, the exceptioned or suspended state of the political has become one of endurance and persistence into the belief that ‘there is no alternative’. Hence new ‘classical’ utopias, will not do, they will not be able to ‘free our minds’ (slight pun intended). Our constant infatuation with doomsday entertainment can be looked upon as sympthomatic for this suspicion.

We can understand this failure for a new utopian mental play to arise by realizing that what sets apart capitalist realism from postmodernism or late capitalism is the idea that CR comes with utopianism built-in. CR works on the basis of structural disavowal as first and most succintly voiced by Octave Mannoni: je sais mais quand meme: I know capitalism is not really the only alternative but still I act as if it is. As German philosopher Robert Pfaller theorized, this kind of disavowal, which Zizek calls fetishistic disavowal is based on the objective existence of the ‘illusions of others’. Why do we act as if capitalism is the only alternative, even though we don’t really believe it? Because, we believe anonymous others believe so. Our illusions are never our own, that for them to be constructive and constituating fantasies they must necessarily belong to others, who we are not able to identify as such. Hence Pfaller concludes that these are illusions without owners, they are orphaned illusions, meaning there is no subject to be found anywhere that these illusions spring from or belong to. The illusions of others, while ownerless, are shared illusions and in this sense I believe they can be properly called utopian. The collective disavowal through these ‘illusions of others’ is what I mean when I say utopianism is built-in.

As a sidenote: contrary to the standard notion of dystopia, negative utopianism is not identical to dystopia. The negativity I’m referring to stems from the either explicit or implicit prevention of the possibility of utopia to arise at all. Or, to put this in apocalyptic terms: the end, the eschaton will never be reached. Fukuyama’s notorious ‘end of history’ thus understood, does not just claim that liberal democracy is an end stage of an evolutionary historical process. With it, what has come to an end is utopian thinking, in that we realize that the end of capitalism will never come and that in an evolutionary sense therefore history is as complete as it will ever be. Or so we are led to believe.

Thus, the question is not which utopia will allow us to think recombination but rather which reconfiguration of utopia, and possibly the built-in utopianism itself, must we realize in order to escape the state of political suspension. I think that in this way, a particular utopia, understood in the terms set out above, has been able to foreground itself in an increasingly plausible manner, namely: communism or rather the hypothesis of communism. However right Badiou is to state the communist hypothesis as a generic or Kantian regulative Idea, thereby dismissing the utopian as a negative qualification of communism – obstructing our cognitive and affective capabilities to even think communism as plausible yet again – a utopian mindset, albeit in a new configuration, remains an important precondition of envisioning a radically different future. I feel, that when he asks us to endure through time, to connect to a different durée with courage i.e ‘the virtue which manifests itself through endurance in the impossible’; this can only be done if we maintain a sense of utopianism. For what else could a durée, a perpetually changing, unquantifiable stream of reiterative and repetitive historical reconfiguration of the same, in which we reconstitute ourselves anew each time, mean but a utopia? Is not this what enables us to think a new future at all?

(This is not a review. For an excellent one visit KDD on Shutter Island)

Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island is a timely movie. It’s reaching audiences at a time when the deep structure of collective (capitalist) disavowal is increasingly problematic. Scorsese’s adaptation of Dennis Lehane book is also a a tribute to the gothic, the b-movie and pulp fiction. Set in 1954, it is infested with the paranoid atmosphere of McCarthyism. Though the Red Scare itself is not a theme in the movie, it’s atmospheric import is backing the noire-ish cloak and dagger narrative nonetheless.

US Marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo di Caprio) sets out to find an escaped and mentally insane convict, Rachel Solando, who has drowned her own children, from Shutter Island where psychiatrists, John Cawley (Ben Kingsley) and Jeremiah Naehring  (Max von Sydow) run Ashcliffe, an experimental institution for the extremely dangerous, mentally insane. Cawley summarizes their work on Shutter Island almost in Foucauldian terms as ‘a moral fusion between law and order and clinical care’. From this very basic premise an intricate and intriguing multi-layered plot unravels which ends in a revealing finale.

At the heart of the movie there’s the concept of trauma which in the psycho-analytical sense refers to an event that overturns a person’s natural (normal) defense mechanisms into a state of durable psychic distress and disorganization well after the actual event. Sigmund Freud’s play on the German word ‘traum’ and the Greek word for wound ‘trauma’ is well-known (and etymological nonsense). In any case, it plays a pivotal role in Shutter Island. It is repeated by Doctor Naehring when he explains to Daniels  his predicament. Daniels’ trauma consists of the murder of his three children by their mentally deranged mother after which Daniels kills her. This trauma is enhanced or triggered by a previous one which Scorsese masterfully weaves into main narrative. Images of WWII holocaust victims and the liberation of Dachau blend into Daniels surreal working through of his trauma.

The most surrealistic and haunting scene is Daniels vision of his wife. The first thing he asks when she appears is whether she is real, to which she replies she’s not. In an objective manner, this admonition of the subjective, fantasmic content of the vision/hallucination is already signalling what is to come. The vision is staged inside a burning lake house where she and her children will die as we learn later. As she turns from Daniels to view the lake we see a gaping wound in her lower back. A smoldering void conjuring up associations with the Lacanian manque. In a shot which could have been modeled after some Renaissance painting we finally watch her falling apart, turned to ashes, literally in Daniels’ arms. On a metaphysical level the scene is in another way admirable. Daniels’ hallucination constructs an ontological anomaly. Even though his wife is burning, she’s also soaking wet, a clear reference to the drowning drama that has occurred in actuality. The anomaly or paradox is visually stunning as it is intellectually fascinating.

The movie can be viewed as a paranoid Bildung through Daniels’ disavowal of the trauma inscribed in his mind by the events in Dachau and the lakehouse. What is of particular interest to me is the deep structure and inescapability of this disavowal. What Daniels has to come to terms with – through a process which is being forced by his doctors in the form of an elaborate role play that plays into Daniels paranoia (exposing the Rachel Solando narrative as part of Daniels’ hallucination) –  is the fact that he killed his wife (a third trauma, if you’re keeping score).

After a dramatic confrontation, Daniels seems to have come to terms with his own delusions. In the very last scene we realize that Daniels has regressed yet again. Or has he? The pull of his original and fundamental fantasy turns out to be too great. Before it is suggested that Daniels has regressed, he  asks his doctor ‘is it better to live like a monster, or die a good man?’ In other words, Daniels presents his ‘monstrosity’ as seemingly objective even though he now knows it does not seem so to him.  Scorsese’s movie excels at showing us the tragedy of this objectively subjective disavowal. Like The Sixth Sense and The Others the suspense is kept until the very final seconds. What makes Shutter Island stand out is that unlike the brutal and raw encounter with the reality of disavowal in the two mentioned movies, here, Daniels willful regression is true to the tragedy at the core of disavowal.

In Franz Kafka’s novella The Castle the protagonist K. is desperately trying to find his way into the Castle. Zizek draws a structural analogy between Kafka’s Castle and an interactive CD-ROM game modeled after the book. The point Zizek wanted to make is that by solidifying K.’s desperation into a game, where the player must guide K. past the Castle’s gatekeeper, Kafka’s original nightmare is transposed from the realm of existential horror to merely something pleasurable. The gamer’s goal is not to enter the Castle at all but to gain pleasure and thus, according to Zizek, the function of the Master in the game is suspended.

In the scifi movie Gamer, Ken Castle has replaced his own brain cells with broadcast only nanotech. His brain is unilaterally wired into the brains of others. In this way Ken Castle is an embodiment of K.’s desperation to reach the Castle. In a very real sense, he is just as unreachable as the Law or the Castle.

A spyware program interrupts the network link between Kable’s brain and Castle’s control enabling Kable to escape from gamespace into meatspace. It’s ironic that Kable is only able to take Castle down after the link has been reestablished and Simon (Kable’s player) regains control over Kable.

The movie’s ending is ambiguous though. Is it really Simon’s help that allows Kable to finish Castle. What to make of Kable’s invitation to Castle to imagine his own death?

I’m comfortable with the idea that Castle’s death, his seppuku, is a kind of twisted tragic Cartesian death: “I think it, you do it”. Thus, when Kable forces Castle to think his own death, death so ensues.  Ironically then his death is envisioned and executed for him. No eagle is necessary anymore to debowel this Promethean who gave the gift of interpassivity to a future humanity in its most literal and thus ultimate form.

(A remarkable post on Gamer here)

I’m not a big Luke Vibert listener. Even his critically acclaimed work as Wagon Christ or Plug never did get me going so to speak. The only album that created enough discomfort to keep me listening is his collaboration with Jeremy Simmonds ‘Weirs‘. Weirs was the final accumulation of a particular sound and ambience which to me started with Dick Raaijmakers’ ‘Electronic Music’ (1981), made almost mainstream by Richard D. James, epitomized by Mike Paradinas, especially on his debut album, and finally laid to rest by Vibert & Simmonds (Wisp is just an anomaly). This is the sound of machine melancholy, the austere aestheticism contained in the weird wiring together of machines and human emotion through frequency modulation and scruffy beats.

Vibert & Simmonds Path T’Zoar (Weirs)

The track listed here is not the best track on the album but it’s certainly the one that captures the particular sound I’ve referred to best. The track builds around a simple sine-wave in an almost pure form representing the steady pulse of a heartbeat sounding through an EKG machine. In aural culture we’ve come accustomed to this particular sound escalating into the flatline, the electrocardiogram that signals death. It has become something to be expected. As the anticipation of death, the pulse is a mnemo-perceptive effect as philosopher Jean François Augoyard classified it. Entranced by the precision of its military timing, we pre-hear death itself.

The flatline is a test tone. What it tests, is the existence, or rather the presence, of vital signs. The lack thereof creates the monotonous, electronic, disaffected tonality of death. In other words, the test tone is a sonological rendering of being onto death, it is a Klang-zum-tode.

Here it slows down, opening a dysphoric contemplative sphere of claustrophobic intensity. Locked inside, circled by a high pitched, almost eerie, wavelike sound of solidified serenity, backed by a testosteron fuelled beat, the listener finds something like solace. There’s comfort in the realization that machines and emotions can be grafted onto each other, that there is beauty in and beyond the ‘machinic’.

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.

The rule I have adhered to, that I hold my students to, and that has been the most productive constraint I have experienced in my own practice, is to never just theorize but always to allow the object ‘to speak back.’ Making sweeping statements about objects, or citing them as examples, renders them dumb. Detailed analysis – where no quotation can serve as an illustration but where it will aways be scrutinized in depth and detail, with a suspension of certainties – resist reduction. Even though, obviously, objects cannot speak, they can be treated with enough respect for their irreducible complexity and unyielding muteness – but not mystery – to allow them to check the thrust of an interpretation, and to divert and complicate it. This holds for objects of culture in the broadest sense, not just for objects we call art. Thus, the objects we analyze enrich both interpretation and theory. This is how theory can change from a rigid master discourse into a live cultural object in its own right. This how we can learn from the objects that constitute our area of study. And this is why I consider them subjects.

Mieke Bal Travelling Concepts in the Humanities (p. 47)

I was completely unknown for thirty years, my books did not sell at all. I was comfortable with that situation which worked well with my view on things. The only important years are the years of anonymity. To be unknown is a voluptuousness which has its bitter sides sometimes, but it is an extraordinary state.

Emil Cioran in conversation with Michael Jakob, 1988

(Reproduced here with Alan Sondheim’s kind permission.)

I want to ask Jacques Derrida a question.

It is question about death, not in particular his death.

But a question concerned with the aporia of death, not necessarily his own.

Such a question, which would have been possible several years ago,

is no longer possible.

We are thrown back on the words of Jacques Derrida

We are immured there.

It would have been simple: Jacques, here is what I want to know.

Do you have a minute of your time.

The body of Jacques Derrida still exists.

His body, phoric, carries the aporia.

The aporia is not his own, nor can he speak and return an unraveling.

Today, words are never set in stone, and questions go unanswered.

Today, questions disappear, and their occasion disappears.

The occasion of a question: a gap, as in a detective story.

As if the question were sutured by an answered,

when in fact it is sutured by any reply at all.

An answer responds to a question; a reply responds to the occasion of a question.

I remember Jacques Derrida, and would have tapped him on the shoulder,

saying, excuse me, but …

There is an image I have of this tapping: the softness of his jacket,

the slight giving away of the flesh beneath, and he turns towards me.

When I move my hands, everything is empty.

Jacques Derrida is a remnant of matter.

… “If death” … “names the very irreplaceability of absolute singularity (no one can die in my place or in the place of the other), then all the _examples_ in the world can precisely illustrate this singularity. Everyone’s death, the death of all those who can say ‘my death,’ is irreplaceable.” … (Derrida, Aporias)

When I move my hands: when my hands are moved for me,

are only moved for me:  mise en scene, a scenario or occurrence, chora.

I do not collapse time, Jacques, in order to speak to you: I speak to you.

I do not collapse space, in order to speak: I touch you lightly on your shoulder,

I wait until you turn around, your glance moves in my direction,

momentarily you are caught up in my gaze,

you hesitate whether or not to return your own,

your reply to my question, you return such, as if such is returned,

an exchange of gifts or misrecognition.

Of the good, there is the edge of a knife, and the fall which surrounds it;

of the spoken, there is a comprehension, empathetic alignment, then nothing.

Of the spoken, the knife edge separates the question I give to Jacques as a gift,

an awakening, and the reply which shatters after a particular time,

calculable, unattainable.

Of the question:

all questions are a permanence: It is impossible to answer a question.

Jacques turns;

I look at his shoes. Thinking of Van Gogh, of Heidegger, of Jacques Derrida,

I take several photographs. They are remnants, indices with lost referents;

they are abject.

I am silent; I say nothing to him, to Van Gogh, to Heidegger.

Repeatedly I raise the camera; eye-level, I aim downward,

towards an incalculable earth. The images, lost, are digital;

they never were. Between one pixel and another,

a hole, precisely the width of death.

By Alain Sondheim

(translating bits and piece from Boris Groy’s Das Kommustische Postskriptum)

(4/30/2010 not necessary anymore, Verso has published an excellent full translation)

It is only when destiny is no longer mute and no longer ruling on a purely economic level, but from the start formulated within language and determined in a political way (as it was in communism) that man can become a being determined in and through language. At that point, man is given the opportunity to argue, to protest or agitate against decisions that would have otherwise been tragic. Such arguments are of course not always effective. They are often ignored or even repressed. But still, they are not without meaning. In any case, it is meaningful and justified to turn oneself against a political decision through language as a medium because these decisions themselves are captured in that same medium. Under the conditions of capitalism however, every criticism or protest is de facto meaningless. Because within capitalism language itself is a commodity, that is to say, language is essentially mute. Critical statements and protests are successful when they sell well and they are bad when they don’t. These statements do not in any way differentiate themselves from any other commodity in as far as they can be sold.

Capitalism does not operate within the same medium as its critique. Because capitalism and its discursive critique are incommensurable qua medium the two will never meet. For them to meet one must change society. One must make society a linguistic construct in order to change society in a meaningful way. Marx’s thesis that philosophy’s task is not to interpret society but to change it, can thus be formulated as follows: to change society it must first become communist. This explains the affection the critical mind has for communism. Only the communist total linguistic revolution of the human condition allows for the possibility of a fundamental critique.

One can think of the communist society as a society where power and the critique of power operate within the same medium.When you now ask whether the regime in the former Soviet-Union must be thought of as communist – and this question seems virtually unavoidable when speaking of communism – then the answer in light of the above given definition is affirmative. From a historical point of view, the Soviet Union has pushed the realization of communism further than any other society before it. In the thirties every kind of private property was abolished. This gave the political leadership the possibility to take decisions independent from private economic concerns. It was not the case that the private concerns where repressed. They simply didn’t exist anymore. Every citizen was a servant of the Soviet State, lived in a State house, shopped at a State shop and travelled through State territory using public transport which was State owned. What economic concerns could a man possibly have? His only concern was the welfare of the State, so that every citizen, regardless whether this happened in a legal or illegal way, which is to say through labour or corruption, could enjoy maximum benefit from the State. Thus, in the Soviet Union there existed a fundamental identity between private and public concerns. The only outward concern was of a military nature: the Soviet Union had to defend itself against foreign enemies. Already in the sixties it became clear that the military potential of the Soviet Union was such that a foreign threat no longer realistically existed. ‘Objectively’ speaking then, the Soviet Union no longer had any conflicts. There was no internal opposition and an external threat was highly improbable. This is why it could permit itself to rely on its own political considerations and internal convictions for practical decisions. This political reasoning, because of its own dialectical nature, persuaded the Soviet leadership autonomously to abandon communism. This decision however does not change the fact that communism had been realized in the Soviet Union. As will be shown in what follows, it was this decision that completed the embodiment, the incarnation of communism.