antagonist

I’ve been sitting on this post for awhile, hoping to expand it into something more elaborate perhaps even an essay. Realistically though, I won’t have the time in the near future, so here it is, unpolished. There’s a lot more to this movie than what I’m touching on here below. In any case, this is my starting point. I’m hoping to return to some of the themes discussed later.

Director Jason Reitman says about his movie adapted from the book Up In The Air by Walter Kirn that ‘The movie is about the examination of a philosophy. What if you decided to live hub to hub, with nothing, with nobody?’ Here I consider this what-if exactly from a philosphical point of view. And if it is about a philosophy, what kind are we talking about? There are several major themes in this movie. One is the obvious one which is about work and the financial crisis. The documentary style filming of people responding to their lay-off picks this theme up convincingly in as much that on occassion I was wondering whether these we’re real interviews. Another theme, slightly less obvious, is about intimacy and its destructive nature. In what follows I’ll refer to a philosophy of intimacy what sociologist Richard Sennett calls: ‘an ideology of intimacy’.

Richard Sennett describes the ‘tyranny of intimacy’ as a tyrannical order in ordinary life. This tyranny boils down to the domination of a principle which takes on the shape and content of a sovereign power. It’s not unlike the Hobbesian leviathan, a deus in terris, who exerts his power through violence. In the same way habits can become a source of tyranny. Habits or standardizations in general beget what Sennett’s calls a ‘seductive power’ over us: we want a single authority to stand over us. The tyranny of intimacy consists of ‘the arousing of a belief in one standard of truth to measure the complexities of social reality’ and furthermore ‘it is the measurement of society in psychological terms.’

The net result of the intimate order is twofold according to Sennett. First, we are increasingly obsessed with motivation. And secondly, disclosure of one’s true feelings becomes destructive. In Sennett’s own words: ‘Narcissism is mobilized in social relations, and the experience of disclosure of one’s feelings to other becomes destructive.’

This picture painted by Sennett acts as an almost seemless background in Reitman’s film starring George Clooney (Ryan Bingham) and an outstanding Vera Farmiga (Alex). Clooney plays Ryan Bingham, a lay-off expert, or as he is euphemistically called: a Career Transition Counselor. He and his firm are called in to expertly and discreetly lay-off people. This background integrated into the financial crisis and the resulting unemployment crisis function together as the backdrop against which Bingham’s narrative unfolds. He is constantly travelling, constantly up in the air, moving between cities across the United States. He touches ground only to lay off people and off he goes again. Not surprisingly then, ‘to know me is to fly with me’ is Bingham’s adagium.

Richard Sennett

Bingham’s lifestyle demands that everything around him is standardized up to the point that the standard becomes a fetish. Needless to say that this kind of fetishization is symptomatically shown as an obsession with brands. For instance Bingham will always insist on a particular brand that will enable his goal to achieve friction-free movement through life, since as he relays in the film somewhere, ‘Moving is living’. His suitcase, his suits, his shoes, the rental car he drives etc. etc. Everthing must be a standard. Furthermore everything only has value to Bingham in as far as it conforms to a measure of standardization namely frequent flyer miles. His obsession to gain 1 million miles is not just a gimmick. The 1 million mark is a quantification of the standards to which Bingham adheres, religiously so, which then becomes the measure of ‘the complexities of the social’. If something does not provide him with miles, it is of no value to him. In a way loyalty to a brand, to a standard, is represented by this number. Loyalty is earned and rewarded as Bingham explains with small ‘systemized friendly touches that keep [his world] in orbit’: swiping his card at various intersections on his travels always relay back the same, predictable repsonse. (But strangely, and perhaps telling, is Bingham’s inability to understand another one of these systemized touches: when a stewardess asks Bingham: “would you like the can, Sir” Bingham misunderstands and instead hears: “Would you like cancer?”). Everything then becomes measured in terms of how many miles it generates. Is is not precisely the ‘measure of society in psychological terms’ as Sennett calls it? As a measure – another way of thinking of a standard – is it not also a limit or boundary? In Kirn’s book we read for instance that Bingham says that the mark provides him with a boundary in life something which he apparently needs.

A returning theme in the film is Bingham sidejob as motivational speaker. Bingham’s job revolves around motivating the people he lays of to accept their predicament however great the tragedy and to move on with as little fuss as possible. He doesn’t do this for altruistic reason of course, but simply because it comes with the job to smooth the exit.

Bingham expertly wields the power of bureaucracy in his layoff conversations. It all ends in handing over a package containing documents to the ‘victim’. The package functions as something tangable people can hang on to. Something that will help them get back on their feet. Or so they are supposed to believe. What’s interesting to me is how Bingham’s job as a motivator and motivational speaker connects back to Sennett. From Bingham’s many conversations with the people he lays off, what sticks out is his delibarate aim to focus them not on what they have done, their productivity or performance. In other words, the quality of their jobs. None of that is important. What really matters
is the quantitative aspect namely that jobs have to be cut.

Bingham is quite good at these motivational conversations. So good that he does them on his own account in front of larger audience. This is how the film starts; with the question: “How much does your life weigh?” (Check the speech here)

Imagine for a second that you’re carrying a backpack….I want you to feel the straps on your shoulders….You feel them?

Now, I want you to pack it with all the stuff you have in your life. Start with the little things. The stuff in drawers and on shelves. The collectables and knick-knacks. Feel the weight as it adds up. Now, start adding the larger stuff. You clothes, table top applicances, lamps, linens, your TV. That backpack should be getting pretty heavy at this point – Go Bigger. Your couch, your bed, your kitchen table. Stuff it al in … Your car, get it in there…. Your home, whether you have a studio apartment or a two story house, I want you to stuff in into that backpack.

Now try to walk….

Kinda hard, isn’t it? This is what we do to ourselves on a daily basis. We weigh ourselves down until we can’t even move. And make no mistake – Moving is living.

Bingham’s motivational talk ‘What’s in your backpack’ acts as an allegory for his aversion for the tyranny of intimacy. In this capacity it shows what Sennett describes as our obsession with motivation, a result/effect of relations being based on tyranical intimacy: ‘the suspension of ego interests has grown into a systematic encouragement of narcisstic absorption by centering social transactions on an obsession with motivation’.

Bingham asks his audience to image putting everything they care about including their relations with other people in the backpack. The backpack then becomes to heavy to carry. The thought-experiment continues when Bingham asks what you would take out to make it lighter. In particular he asks to take out photos of past events and to burn them. This is precisely what Sennett is asking us to do: culture, society and the intimacy of the family is what makes us heavy and instills a fatalistic sense of regret, a dangerous longing for things past. Incidently, when watching Pixar-Disney’s Up I was reminded again of this weight theme so to speak: Mr. Fredrikson’s house will only become airborne if Mr. Fredikson empties it, literally, of all memories. He has to dump all furniture, pictures etc. from the house. Fredrikson’s living room literally becomes a moving room: ‘moving is living’. Is this not what Marx meant, as Marshall Berman reminds us, when he writes that ‘all that is solid melts into air’ in the Communist Manifesto? Are standards not another kind of solid? Ossified habits, coagulated masses, patterns of intimacy?

The burning of memories, the photos, takes us up another related theme (incidently, perhaps ironically, in Kirn’s book Bingham tells us he started out as a salesman, selling (computer) memory). Bingham is asked by his sister to carry around with him a cardboard cutout of his other sister and her soon to be husband so that Bingham can take those cheesy, fake vacation spot photos. At the wedding, when Bingham puts up the photos on a map of the US, his sister tells him that they can’t afford a proper wedding trip so instead they asked for these pictures which is believed to offer a consolation by providing the illusion that they did travel to all those places for real. A beautiful example of defensive disavowal.

This thread, weaved throughout the movie (Bingham travelling around taking the cutout with him to take picture something which genuinly upset his aim for friction fee moving through life by way of as much standardization as possible: the cutout does not fit in his suitcase) summarizes the themes of the movie in a succint way: the fakeness of the pictures perhaps related to the inauthenticity of family life; standardization, here presented as the standard and obligatory honeymoon pictures; the cut-out taken literally as a removing of oneself from the family, but not really; passively travelling and enjoying the joy of ‘having been there’ but again: not really; as well as the requirement that in order to use the cut-out, the camera should be close enough for it to frame the cut-out and the background in a reasonable believable way, resonating with the the theme of closeness and intimacy.

What about the second structural feature of Sennett’s intimate society? That when feelings are disclosed mayhem ensues? Zizek writes somewhere that ‘Another standard example of interpassivity is provided by the role of the “madman” within a pathologically distorted intersubjective link (say, a family whose repressed traumas explode in the mental breakdown of one of its members): when a group produces a madman, do they not shift upon him the necessity to passively endure the suffering which belongs to all of them?’

In a way Bingham in this madman. When his family is confronted with the trauma of a broken marriage before it even becomes a marriage it is Bingham who’s supposed to make it right. The naive reading of this as we can see in the movie is Bingham’s efforts to consolidate the two future spouses to get back together. That’s all fine of course. But what is more interesting and what takes us to interpassive suffering is Bingham’s own psychological response to these events. He awakes from his own dogmatic (intimacy is bad) slumber and decides to, entirely narcissistically, disclose his feelings for Vera. Of course this ends badly. When the fantasy of his idealized relation with Vera breaks, the confrontation is too much and Bingham regresses into interpassive suffering. By breaking the rules, the standard which made the fantasy possible in the first place Bingham takes upon him a responsibility. Marriage is such a fantasy as well. While Bingham breaks, his ‘bourgeois nuclear family’ gets to disavow as usual.

A philosophical tribute is what I believe to be the fitting tribute. A tribute that signals the gap and gives it a power of its own. In order to pay that tribute, I need a few preliminaries, and I will give them here in an extremely simple form.

A justified simplicity. For there was, beneath the astonishing volatile fluidity of his writing, an authentic simplicity about Derrida, an obstinate and unchanging simplicity. That is one of the many reasons for the violence of the attacks on him, just after his death, especially in the American press. The attacks on an ‘abtruse thinker’ and ‘incomprehensible writer’ were no more than the most banal anti-intellectual insults.

Let us call the insults ‘Texan’, and say no more about them.

-Badiou in Pocket Pantheon

I see the theology of he Historians, which I said was wretched, as indirect, vicious subordination of the ephermal to the permanent. Octave’s relation to Roberte, in Klossowski’s work, would belong to this subordination (LE, 36)

In ‘The Theologians’, Borgès imagines two heresies by non-repitition: one is the act of certain sects called Histrions … (LE 35).

My examples are of suffering; they could have been of elation. There are labyrinths of joy, the latter no less mad than suffering, very close to it. Around the armchaim from the Marriage of Figaro, Beaumarchais traces some dazzling mazes, where pieces of bodies expelled from their shelters flee and get lost, by by laughing. Joy is constructive, concentratory; it is an elevation around a supremee addressee, but incredulous and insolent joy is the laughter of metamorphoses that awaits no-one’s recognition and enjoys only its ductility. It is a horizontal laught, without assent (LE 39).

(LE = Libidinal Economy)

… or The Work of Art in the Age of Genetic Replication

In both Michael Bay’s The Island and Curarón’s Children of Men, a painting by Pablo Picasso is shown. In The Island we see Femme Assise (Jacqueline) in the office of Dr. Merrick while in Children of Men we see Picasso’s heartfelt depiction of Franco’s fascist crimes against Guernica reduced to mere dining room wallpaper. The use of Picasso’s paintings act as cultural tags, markers, that confirm the viewer’s suspicion that he is dealing with some sort of Brave New World-ish utopia that will turn out to be quite its contrary. In other words, Guernica and Femme Assise, implicitly describe a political context for us.

To Dr. Merrick clones are product. They are to be harvested for their organs and prodigy. According to him they lack feelings or emotions, in short: humanity. The Picasso in his office is what makes this belief work for him. He knows very well the clones are human, in fact all too human. Through the painting he can keep a save distance from their humanity, but more importantly, from his own inhumanity.

What separates the clones from the likes of Merrick i.e the humans, is not simply their love of art. It is their capacity as human beings to appreciate art in the first place. A capacity clones must necessarily lack and which as Merrick clearly shows in a short dialogue with Mr. Laurent – the mercenary hired to retrieve the escaped clones but instead helps them ‘liberate’ themselves – is suspect to be absent in other ‘lesser’ people i.e Mr. Laurent. What art marks here, what is tagged, is that art points to the affirmation/negation of humanity.

An interesting contrast to this line of thought can be found in Kazuo Ishigiro’s most Kafkaian novel so far Never Let Me Go. The story is told by Kathy, a clone, and unfolds in a late nineties Britain of the previous century. Cloning has become common and as in The Island clones are mined for body parts or offspring. They have been reduced to what Heidegger said man’s primary condition in the Gestell is: Rohstoff. Man is literally a human resource and the clones in Ishiguro’s novel know it. The book tells the stories of the clones, euphemistically called students or donors, growing up at Hailsham, a boarding school. Of particular interest is that they are stimulated, even required, to create art. Every now and then the best artworks are picked out by the mysterious Madame and taken away. At the start of the book nobody knows why. Only much later is it revealed that the art and Hailsham in general was an experiment setup to show the humanity of the clones. Their art was taken away ‘because we [teachers at Hailsham] thought it would reveal your souls. Or to put it more finely, we did it to prove you had souls at all.’

Why was it necessary to show the humanity of the clones? Because as is explained to the students: ‘How can you ask a world that has come to regard cancer as curable, how can you ask such a world to put away the cure, to go back to the dark days? […] So for a long time you [the students] were kept in the shadows, and people did their best not to think about you. In other words: “How can you ask a world that has come to regard capitalism as the cure for everything, to leave capitalism behind. As long as we keep deluding ourselves through defensive disavowal we can avoid this aporia.” (It is no accident that this ‘logic’ is quite similar to Mark’s observation about Theo’s friend in Battersea (Children of Men) who when asked ‘how all of this [the art] can matter if there’s no one to see it?’ answers ‘I try not think about it’.)

So, the point here is that the clones need to be kept in dark, meaning they need to be kept oblivious about their humanity in order to perpetuate their status as replicated gene pools. Their humanity is kept from them which is why the mysterious Madame had to sneak away their art. It was too revealing in a sense. By keeping the clones unaware, by keeping them from properly assessing their own art, this seemingly allowed the non-clones, i.e. the cloned ones to maintain their fantasy that they were not doing something inhuman. ‘Art is a mirror’, Kafka wrote and thus a reflective medium and hence brings about reflection. By keeping the clones from the means to reflection it was hoped they did not attain, if you like, their proper class consciousness.

So what does art signal in Never Let Me Go? I venture to propose it marks the loss of humanity. By defensively disavowing and blocking the path to reflexivity, and thus emancipation, humanity is lost. The more pressing question is: whose humanity? Ironically, it is not the social class that is seemingly kept unreflexive that has lost their humanity, in fact they find it. The clone class, thought in this way, can be seen as a literal ‘living negation of capitalism’.

If we look only at the (re)production of humans or human tissue in the three mentioned examples (The Island, Never Let Me Go, Children of Men) we can start to discern a schema: in Children of Men man cannot procreate, in The Island procreation is delegated as is in Never Let Me Go (also Atwood’s Handman’s Tale comes to mind). A third element can be added to this schema by taking out or rather suspending the need for procreation completely as is done by Michel Houellebecq in The Possibility of an Island.

Houellebecq’s grand project is to eradicate the source of all human suffering i.e. desire which in his Dickian-Lovecraftian world can be wholly reduced to senseless sex, lethal lethargy and buffonic boredom. Sex as commodity is the materialisation of all suffering, a ‘system of differentiation completely independent of money’ which is closely linked to man’s obsession to overcome his own finite existence and thus the instinctive drive for reproduction. In order to escape the everexpanding domain of constant struggle as the title of one of Houellebecq books suggests (Extension de domaine de la lutte) man must break the evolutionary chain of being i.e man must abandon sexual reproduction for the sake of reaching nirvana through a kind of innerwordly asceticism sans protestant ethic. This is the story of The Possibility of an Island where the practice of cloning is reformatted in an eternal-return-of-the-same messianic cosmo-ontology: we travel with protagonist Daniel through his various self-cloned reincarnations while he awaits the return of the Supreme Sister and The Future Ones.

While awaiting the future Daniels read the life account of the original Daniel, a radical comedian who spent a lifetime venting his islamophobia and eventually commits suicide after a life haunted by the search for the possibility of love.

Daniel’s self-imposed solipsicism is occasionally lifted by communicating with other clones via ‘email’ (the digital or virtual world in The Possibility of an Island is not pixelperfectly photorealistic but rather coarsely pixelated and text based.) Daniel writes poems which he leaves at an ip address; his only means of communicating with other clones. This is how art appears in TPI: as poetry. The ‘original’ Daniel (Daniel1), the comedian who in the end will take his own life, only starts to write poetry after he’s met Esther, one of the two women in his life narrative. When the other woman, Isabelle commits suicide, this does not provoke the need for poetic catharsis. Instead after the death of Fox, his dog, about whom Iggy Pop aptly sings that he is ‘a machine for loving’, does Daniel write poetry again and strangely, perhaps absurdly, it is dedicated to Esther. The last poem Daniel writes, just before he takes his own life is not a Daniel1 chapter but rather is relayed to us by Daniel25, the last clone of Daniel:

Et l’amour où tout est facile,
Où tout est donné dans l’instant;
Il existe au milieu du temps
La possibilité d’une île

The official English translation of the last stanza is a bit different from the Dutch one. First the English:

And love, where all is easy,
Where all is given in the instant;
There exists in the midst of time
The possibility of an island.

This is a quite literal translation. Here’s the Dutch translation retranslated into English:

And love, happiness without strife,
Where all is given instantly;
There exists a possibility
Of an island within time.

Why did the Dutch translator opt for translating using the word ‘happiness’. It does not appear in the French. But I think its import is correct. What makes love easy? Love that does not require struggle, which thus does not require strife or battle to obtain and maintain. In other words, this is love which cannot possibly exist, not in Houellebecq’s universe at least. The possibility pointed to then does not refer to as one reviewer put it ‘the impossibility of being an island’ but rather to the impossibility of the possibility an-sich. (Perhaps Houellebecq’s utopia is best described as an antitopia: a place which resists being a place in the first place?).

There can be no mistake about the return of the Future Ones and the Supreme Sister: it will not be. It cannot really be expected. It is abundantly obvious that the myth of their return is a fabrication, something which Daniel is all too aware of. In this way, it is a ‘messianique sans messianisme’: a qualitative experience of the non-present in which the present is both always already past and always arriving at the same time, which is to say that it is haunted. The Shakespearian out-of-jointness of time means that time is never present with or to itself. However much Houellebecq relegates Derrida to the domain of nonsense (as well as Foucault, Deleuze and Lacan), the messianism in the form of a messianicity structured in the return of the Future Ones and the Supreme Sister (i.e a messiah that has not existed and will not exist) can be thought of exactly as the kind of messianism Derrida had in mind. Daniel25′s wait for the Supreme Sister is in a way quite similar to Derrida’s messianic wait. Drifting in the ocean, towards what Caputo calls an ‘the futural possiblity of impossibility’ he is, as Derrida writes: ‘[A]waiting without horizon of the wait, awaiting what one does not expect yet or any longer’.

Some concluding remarks (or rather a conclusion without conclusion). Derrida “shun[s] the word ‘utopia’”. Instead messianicity is a ‘universal structure of experience which … is anything but utopian’. However he also claims that “one could not so much as account for the possibility of utopia in general without reference to what I call messianicity”. In The Possibility of an Island art shows this reference. It brings out messianicity and with it a pure hope (Ernst Bloch), which for lack of better word can be named utopia. I’m hoping to develop this a bit better in a later post. For now you can have a look at a very promising paper on Derrida’s Spectres and Bloch’s Principles and the idea of utopia here.