My book Ecologies of the Moving Image takes Andrei Tarkovsky’s Zone, so richly depicted in his celebrated 1979 film Stalker, as a kind of master metaphor for how cinema works and, by implication, how art in general works: it beckons its receiver into following it into a zone where, at best, anything can happen.
The journey into the Zone produces a world whose resonances work on multiple levels including the human or “anthropomorphic” (recreating an understanding of what it means to be human), the animate and biological (which I call the “biomorphic”), and the geographic and terrestrial (“geomorphic”). While most films aren’t particularly creative on any of these levels, the best films, especially those that have reshaped audiences’ understandings of the socio-ecological make-up of the world, do this on all three. They are cinema at its “morphogenetically” most creative.
Readers of my later writing, including Shadowing the Anthropocene, will understanding that this creative, “world-building” conception of art is of a piece with the broader process-relational philosophy I espouse, which resonates with the relationalism of a series of contemporary philosophical trends but more carefully delineates exactly what that means. The world, in a process-relational perspective, is a continual forward movement into “the Zone.” Its significance and value are found in this movement to the extent that the openness of the movement becomes greater and more generative of aesthetic, ethical, and (eco-)logical value and significance.
The Zone, then, is a good metaphor for thinking about life, meaning, and value, especially at times when we feel we may be collectively stepping into a place whose coordinates are difficult to map out and potentially treacherous to navigate. Here I want to argue that the reverse is true as well: that metaphor itself is among the best metaphors for thinking about the Zone.
This is because metaphor is semiosis at its most constructive. Process-relational thinking is constructivist in that it acknowledges that every action, every response to the world, shapes the capacities for future responses. This is not a social constructivism but an ontological constructionism, one that highlights the interactive mutuality and reciprocity between actors (humans and others) and the world they act upon.
Semiosis, in the Peircian sense, is the significatory, in-formational, or meaning-generating aspect of the world in all its forms, from the most basic to the most complex. Human language is a complex form of semiosis: it enables complex and nuanced distinctions to be made whereby humans respond to their worlds, and it facilitates collective coordination across large groups of us.
Language is made up of words and the structured relationships between them, with words being semiotic propositions that turn into equations. Viewed evolutionarily, every word or word combination could be said to begin as metaphor — a proposed, poetically resonant connection between one thing and another (say, between the sound “wave,” or its etymological predecessors, and movement back and forth, then between a wave of the ocean and a wave of the hand, and so on; or between sunlight and the “enlightenment” of a sudden insight or a historical epoch; or between “the world” and “a stage” in Shakespeare’s figuration “All the world’s a stage”) — and to end as literal equation (e.g., when a “bull’s eye” has nothing more to do with bulls, with eyes, or with hunting, but has simply become the center circle on a dart board). (Needless to say, this evolutionary account is itself a metaphor.)
Somewhere on the spectrum between an entirely original metaphor and a “dead” one (nice metaphor) is where we find most semiotic acts. For instance, a term like “mother earth” for some still carries the intended resonance (between maternity and ground, soil, territory, planethood, or whatever), while for others it has become a clunky and worn out, dead metaphor. So those of us interested in revivifying our understanding of our earth(l)iness seek out fresh metaphors — like dub, raking, crash scenes, the wake, the Zone, and so on and so forth.
In a sense, the entirety of the effort to remake our ability to respond to the present situation (or global moment) can be reduced to this: the quest for an adequate metaphor. Werner Herzog once put this as the need for “adequate images” of the current time, without which we will “die out like dinosaurs.” If semiosis can be seen as a continuum of meaning-generating acts stretching from the literal and denotative at one end to the metaphorical and generative at the other, then what we need, in order to collectively come to grips with a novel and challenging situation that is the current and impending socio-ecological crisis, is an adequate metaphor. Or an adequate metaphoric apparatus. (And that is after all what I meant by the moving image.)
With that, I hope to begin a series of posts (over the coming months) examining a few such proposals. Pauline Alexis Gumbs’s Dub: Finding Ceremony will likely be one of them. (What a beautiful book.)
Follow-up note: As I was wrapping up this piece, I was shown Alex Ross’s article on Tarkovsky in the latest New Yorker, which made me wonder if we’re in for another Tarkovsky wave. Ross mentions some of the things I get into in my book; a short version of the “Stalker” analysis can be read here. I also go into the Zone and even a few of those first-person shooter video games Ross mentions in a recent article on Chernobyl. And more on Tarkovsky here.
