Readers may have noticed that I’ve turned off automatic commenting to the blog. The ever increasing amount of spam, some of which always manages to squeeze its way through the (fairly strong) spam filter, was getting intolerable. I’ve just discovered, however, that a handful of genuine comments from longtime readers also got caught in the spam filter, for one reason or another, instead of going to me for moderation. Sorry about that – I’ll check the spam filter more often. I’ll tone down the filtering if I see the spam level stops increasing. (Is that a possibility, or are we living in a universe pre-destined to choke on its own waste?)
Spammers, if you read at all, please don’t bother sending stuff here, since your messages will get deleted even if one or two of them get through momentarily.
I went to see Lars von Trier’s Antichrist a few days ago. Of the reviews I’ve read, Brent Plate’s captures the way in which the film’s images persist in haunting one’s consciousness. Plate, aptly I think, compares the film to Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, the film that Adolf Hitler called “an incomparable glorification of the power and beauty of our Movement”:
“Like Riefenstahl’s Triumph, Lars von Trier’s Antichrist is a beautiful film. Ultra slow-motion flashbacks and intercuts reminiscent of a Bill Viola video; high-contrast, black-and-white lovemaking; textured, hypnotic, surrealistic scenes of humans intertwined with nature; and extreme close-ups of human eyes, bamboo in a glass vase, and unkempt hair (the camera sporadically zooms in on the backs of heads a la Hitchcock’s Vertigo) all make for a film that is impossible to get out of one’s sensual body. Antichrist’s images and sounds have infiltrated my dreamscape for the two weeks now since I saw it at the New York Film Festival, along with about 700 other attendees. I wish I had their phone numbers; even the disgusted dozens who walked out halfway through. I’d like to call them at 3:00 a.m. and ask what they are thinking about, what they are dreaming, if indeed they are sleeping. I need some therapy. This is one messed-up film.”
I don’t need therapy from seeing the film, but I am convinced that von Trier needs it. It’s a beautiful film, cinematically masterful at times, but it goes off the rails. Whether it’s misogynist (probably, though one could legitimately debate that), misanthropic (no doubt), just troubled (it certainly is that), or merely pranksterish and provocateurial (and self-promoting to the max), von Trier plays, enchantingly, with the power of images in a way that only those who don’t believe in the power of images can fail to be perturbed by. Where Coppolla’s/Conrad’s/Colonel Kurtz’s “The horror, the horror…” was motivated by something tangible (the Vietnam War, the Belgian Congo, war itself, the murky depths humans sometimes descend to), von Trier’s war is a war at the heart of nature, humanity, everything, and it is a war we lost a long time ago.
Slyly dedicating the film to Andrei Tarkovsky, von Trier is Tarkovsky’s demon brother, his evil genius twin. Where Tarkovsky believes in hope against hope, salvation in a universe that sometimes seems stacked against it (though it’s really us who stack it, and in which ultimately time, nature, and beauty redeem us), von Trier’s is a hopeless beauty, a laugh in the face of cruel darkness, which happens to be a cruel darkness he imagines into existence for us and lets us wander around in at our own risk. He’s too good a filmmaker for us to watch as he drives off a cliff; someone ought to rein him in.
Prometheus Unbound raises questions about the atheist spirituality of Symphony of Science‘s star-scientist-studded videos (pun only slightly intended — they are mostly men, yes, but drumming on djembes (!), and it’s well worth waiting to see Jane Goodall tell us about the “wuzzy” line between humans and the rest of nature in the video below, starting at about the 2’30” point).
Spirituality is, of course, in the eye, ear, and body of its beholder. What makes this spiritual is the way it mobilizes music, movement, and poetry in the service of spreading a message, in this case the gospel of science. The use of pitch-shifting and pitch-correction software to “musicalize” the spoken voices of scientists is analogous to the intended poeticization and spiritualization of science. Science in practice is, of course, dry, slow, laborious, and boring. But the results of science can be exciting. This parallels the natural process science itself describes: from the painstakingly slow and boring life of atoms, molecules, things responding to other things, what has built up over time is the world we know. Or, as Darwin famously put it:
The Olympics are many things. Some of them are obvious: a celebration of sport, physical achievement, and excellence; a way to bring nations together in competitive cooperation (or cooperative competition) rather than in war. Others take a few moments’ reflection to notice: they are a way for local, and sometimes national, coalitions of business interests to make lots of money, usually at others’ expense. That’s why the Olympic bidding process is typically accompanied by protest and divisiveness: while the Olympics bring revenue to to some, they require huge investments in infrastructure, which takes away funding from other things, such as public services. And they often require moving things around — people, homes, people without homes — either forcibly or through economic pressure, to create the venues to host them. Vancouver’s Winter Olympics were all these things, though NBC’s coverage showed little of the controversy the alternative media buzzed with.
But perhaps most of all, the Olympics are a way for nation-states, and especially for the host countries, to buttress themselves both in their own internal solidarity (which has been flagging in Canada in recent years) — by ratcheting up the patriotism — and in the profiles they present to the rest of the world, as a kind of technicolor visiting card for tourists and potential business partners from around the world. Canada did well with the first: winning 14 gold medals, a new world record for the Winter Olympics, capped by their overtime hockey win over the U.S., was everything Canadian sports fans could have hoped for. But with the second, they could have done much better.
The Biology Blog’s post on shadow biospheres intrigued me in part because I’ve been reading Charles Sanders Peirce, for whom semiosis is writ large (and small) throughout all things. Musing philosophically about the search for life on other planets, the author, cyoungbull, writes, “Unless we know how to interpret the signs of such life, we may not be able to distinguish it from the natural background.” For Peirce, signs of life are everywhere. Indeed, signs are everywhere, as are meanings, at least for those equipped to bear them. Just as for Whitehead it’s experience all the way down, for Peirce it’s semiosis all the way down. (There are other parallels between Whitehead and Peirce; more on those in a future post.) Whether we can read them or not is the question — a question made all the more poignant when they destroy homes and topple buildings, as in Haiti recently or Chile this morning.
The Bioblog piece links to an Astrobiology article on the signatures of shadow biospheres and to an old Nature article by chaophilic scientists and SF writers Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart, which includes the following (entertaining) list of “canonical answers” to Enrico Fermi’s 1950 question “if intelligent aliens exist, why aren’t they here?”:
Judith Butler’s recent talk on Alfred North Whitehead, which you can listen to here, is very impressive — and a heartening sign of the times. With Butler distancing herself from some of the implications of her earlier work on sex and gender (30-some minutes into the talk) and decisively settling into post-constructivist, non-anthropocentric, process-relational*, immanent naturalist**, vibrant materiality*** land, we can start to wonder: Of those who really shape the terrain of public thought, are there any real social constructionists left?
(*=Whitehead; **=William Connolly, ***=Jane Bennett; but the scope of all of these, which is the theoretical scope of this blog, is much broader.)
It’s a rich talk and I will probably have more to say about it soon. While I may be a little prematurely triumphalist here, it seems to me that the humanities are coming together around a paradigmatic convergence of sorts — a post-constructivist, post-representationalist, post-anthropocentric humanist, and post-Kantian one (I mean one that is post- exclusively each of those, not one in which there is no representation, no Kantian subjectivity, etc.), but whose positive terms have yet to find an agreed-upon center, an identifiable and singular “ism” (which is good). This shift has been long in coming, and I’m convinced it can be a powerful player in the public ‘making sense’ of the twenty-first century. While it still needs to be articulated in ever more coherent forms, a crucial next step — perhaps the crucial one — will be to communicate it across the “two cultures” divide. Because science is an important player in it, though it (unfortunately) hardly knows that yet.
And secondly, a useful new study of the religion blogosphere has come out, with the support of the Social Science Research Council, which is behind the Immanent Frame blog (that I’ve mentioned here before). “The New Landscape of the Religion Blogosphere” provides a very good overview of blogging in general (section 1) and academic blogging more specifically (section 2) before it goes on to map out the world of religious-themed blogs. Jason at The Wild Hunt notes that minority faiths remain sparsely represented, but within the more mainstream faiths, the landscape covered shows some healthy diversity in political orientation, style, and more. The whole report can be downloaded here. I can think of a number of other blogospheres that deserve this kind of study (environment, philosophy, etc.).
First, for anyone living in a JonStewartless alternate universe… Stewart (and Samantha Bee) giving Glenn Beck a history lesson (about progressivism) was pretty funny. Beck may be a cheap target, but it’s also a cheap (free) history lesson. Take this country back, Glenn, way back…
Next, Denmark’s new tourist ad campaign by Lars von Trier (well, if only…), courtesy of The Onion. (Thanks to Graham for the tip.)
Finally, this discussion about Avatar: while Glenn Kenny delights in “Pandora’s bestiary of psychedelic monsters” and “the way all these elements moved, and the way Cameron’s cameras, those virtual and those real, moved around them,” curmudgeonly Jim Emerson provides a hilarious counterpoint:
“The letdown for me came from feeling that this wasn’t anything I hadn’t seen before: on those Yes album covers by Roger Dean in the 1970s, on backlight posters in my childhood friends’ bedrooms, in the Thomas “Painter of Light” Kinkade shop windows at the mall, in the floral fiber-optic lamps at Thai restaurants, on the comic-colored packages for Sea Monkeys. I wanted a world of mystery and wonder; instead, I saw a retro-cartoon rainbow of fairyland clichés in fluorescent blue, purple, pink, yellow and green. That phosphorescent Astroturf jungle is enough to make Werner Herzog, seeker of new images to transcend the ones pop culture has exhausted, want to poke his eyes out with a glow-stick.”
(This post has been sitting in my Drafts folder for several days, but since it mentions The White Ribbon, which I just named 2009’s best film, I thought I might as well share it.)
I just got around to reading Timothy Snyder’s brilliantly lucid article Holocaust: The ignored reality, fittingly after recently seeing Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon. Snyder’s piece puts a fresh face on what we take for granted and don’t much think about anymore.
One of the things that struck me while reading it was the absolutely systematic nature of the Nazi death factory. Snyder’s analysis is like a historian flying over a war zone long after the battle, drawing connections that one couldn’t have possibly made from the ground. For those who were caught up in it, none or little of this may have been visible: glimpses of horror, and of humanity, are what make a war for those living it (which is why even the brightest individuals, like Martin Heidegger, can say they knew little of the things we know now). After the fact it’s less helpful to assign blame than it is to try to understand what happened and why it happened. Those causes have been much discussed and debated, and Haneke’s film, while not making an original argument, is probably as good a cinematic distillation of one of those arguments as any. Specifically, The White Ribbon is a kind of Freudo-Reicho-Foucauldian dissection of the repression that makes us enjoy the violence of authority and that nudges us toward the fascism in our hearts. (I say “us” and “our” because Haneke has said he doesn’t mean for the film to be just about turn-of-the-century Germany.)
The other things that struck me in Snyder’s article concern the territories, those soft pieces of dank earth, that were most bloodied by virtue of their being caught between the two great bone-crushing machines (the Red and the Brown): Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus. (I have some familiarity with those areas, in addition to ancestry, and understand the difficulty of exhuming their pasts and dealing with their ghosts.)
Despite the deadliness of the Nazi machine, both Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union were systematic attempts to realize a certain political ecology, that is, to organize its production of material goods (food and fuel) from the ground up so as to feed and sustain a certain organization of social power and authority. Understanding the way such a social organism, such a body politic, comes to life remains one of the challenges of our time. That understanding requires taking into account not only social processes, but affective, somatic, and ecological processes and the ways these all interact. One might think of this as a kind of golem construction, the making of an artificial creature out of production practices (the ways the earth is turned into food and fuel), somatic and affective orientations, and social structures, all of them premised on certain delineations between an inside and an outside, an us and a them, a certain identification of the enemy, and certain local and global goals. As Snyder writes:
The decade isn’t really over yet: there was no “year zero,” which means that the year 2000 was the two-thousandth year of its calendar, and that this year is the 2010th, the last of the third millennium’s first decade, not the first of its second. But I’ve seen so many “ten best films of the decade” lists already (thanks partly to the last issue of Film Comment, which has over a hundred of them), that I feel helplessly encouraged to throw together my own.
But first, as we wind our way to the Oscars, for what it’s worth, here are my five favorite films of 2009. (There are only so many great movies made in a year, o Academy Award givers.)
1. The White Ribbon (dir. by Michael Haneke, Germany/Austria)
2. A Single Man (Tom Ford, USA)
3. A Serious Man (Ethan and Joel Coen, USA)
4. Goodbye Solo (Ramin Bahrani, USA)
5. Coraline (Henry Selick, USA)
The White Ribbon is a brilliantly cast, acted, photographed, and paced dissection of the social fabric of a pre-WW1 Protestant German village. But it’s also about the ecology of authority and social control that, in different permutations, underlies any social order — and about the impossibility of coming to know that ecology without a gap or question mark at the heart of the inquiry, that gap here represented by the teacher who is the not-fully-reliable narrator recounting the events years later. And while it largely conforms to Haneke’s grim, cerebral and joylessly clinical vision of humanity, there are moments of compassion and tenderness that transcend that – which is something I don’t remember from his previous films, though it’s possible I’ll forget what they were here as well. (As an antidote to that vision, I recommend seeing The Last Station, if only because that film’s Slavic anarchist earthiness does provide a feel for a possible alternative to repressed, authoritarian pre-war Germany.)
The video above (included there) is a Studio 360 piece on Bill Morrison’s found footage collage film Decasia, which is one of the best examples of film, or art, that comments on its own materiality, including its origins and, in this case, its inevitable demise. I’ve blogged about the ecologies and temporalities of images a few times here (with more to come), but thinking about Decasia makes me realize that my recent post on Bergson neglected to mention this materiality of the image.
It may be true, as I wrote there, that “the past is divisible into the era of reproducible images and the era that preceded it: BP (before photography) and AP (after),” or more generally, Before Recording and After Recording, with different extension and limit points for different types of recording — oral, literate, electromagnetic, et al. It may also be true that our technologies of archaeological retrieval, interpretation, and restoration are digging ever deeper into the materiality of the world, making more of it available virtually for new actualizations in the present and future. But it is also true that those materialities all have their half-lives, their temporalities of decay and disintegration, and that there won’t ever come a time when the past is rendered fully open, a pure and transparent archive in which nothing has been lost, nothing has slipped away or disappeared in an invisible stream off the edge of the universe. Things do slip away.
I’ve been thinking about this slippage of things since Graham Harman posted a note in reply to Steven Shaviro arguing that Bergson’s intuition about time “isn’t really grounded in reality”. The point of difference between relational and object-centered accounts, according to Harman, “is whether a thing’s process of genesis is inscribed in its current reality” or not, to which he says “no”: “Much of its genetic history does leave traces, but a great deal of history is forgotten by reality in every moment.” I had begun to respond to him, thinking to myself that this Bergsonian intuition is very much a matter of debate, and that it isn’t just relational and processual philosophers like Bergson and Whitehead who believe that everything at one moment of reality gets incorporated, in some form, into the next moment; that reality, in other words, moves forward — developing, evolving, changing, or enduring, as the case may be, rather than dropping off into an abyss. Where, after all, would it go?
I’m reading, and being very impressed by, John Protevi’s recent book Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic. The book brings together a lot of recent work on affect with the best of the cognitive sciences (embodied/embedded/distributive/enactive cognition), complexity and nonlinear dynamical systems theories, and a strong grounding in philosophy, from Aristotle to Kant to Deleuze and Guattari. Protevi’s main source of strength is Deleuzian theory, and here he draws very much on Manuel Delanda’s efforts to synthesize Deleuze with complexity theory (as did his very good co-authored book on Deleuze and Geophilosophy). But he also perceptively accounts for the strengths and weaknesses of these very differently rooted research/theoretical programs as he tries to build a synthesis out of them — one that would account for affect (and affective cognition) at multiple levels of the “body politic,” from the neurophysiological to the subjective/intersubjective and “up” to the civic, cultural, “populational” and societal. Chapter One is a gem of summative concision. I haven’t gotten yet to the case studies — Terry Schiavo, the Columbine high school massacre, and Hurricane Katrina — but having read his earlier writing on Katrina, I expect these will be good.
It’s the kind of book I would recommend for a reading group (graduate class or online cross-blog sort of thing). Others in that category might include Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (which I’ve so far only read bits and pieces of that have appeared elsewhere); John Mullarkey’s excellent, perhaps even field-defining Refractions of Reality: Philosophy and the Moving Image, which I recommend to anyone interested in film, the image, and philosophy; and Sean Esbjörn-Hargens’ and Michael E. Zimmerman’s Integral Ecology if only to see where they succeed and where they fail in synthesizing the various extant forms of ecophilosophy. I’ve yet to get to the latter book, and reviews I’ve seen have been mixed, which isn’t surprising given the authors’ almost devotional indebtedness to integral philosopher Ken Wilber (quite a shift from Zimmerman’s earlier Heideggerian/Continentalist work). But we need syntheses like it, so I expect the effort, even if flawed, to be valuable.
(Note: After a query from an editor friend, who is unfamiliar with recent research on affect, I’ve decided I should preface this post by saying that no, I don’t mean “effects” with an “e,” but “affects,” accent on the “a.”)
It’s been fascinating to watch the unfolding public conversation about Avatar (much of which, come to think of it, my early review had anticipated): environmentalist celebrations of how it portrays the Earth rising up against the megamachine of capitalism and patriarchy; critiques of how the film perpetuates the stereotyping of indigenous people and reiterates tropes of their salvation by white male messiah figures; the Vatican’s and religious right’s denunciations of its pantheism; the film’s advance of technological wizardry into the domain of a virtual hyperreality, like The Matrix but replacing that film’s gnosticism with a pantheistic new age science of networks and neural systems; and debates over the balance struck in the film between good spectacle (the high-tech stuff) and bad narrative (poor writing, flat characterization, stereotypes all over), or between bad spectacle (Spielbergian gee-whiz stuff) and good narrative (such as the film’s allegorization of global capitalism’s destruction of indigenous communities). Film Studies for Free has usefully summarized the various allegorical readings of the film proposed so far, many of which get articulated in conversations and comments by viewers in various blogs, op-ed commentaries, and social networking sites.
The religious debate has been interesting in part because of the negative reactions that have greeted some of the conservative commentators like Ross Douthat and others who lament the film’s pantheistic nature spirituality and its associated “anti-Americansim” and “anti-humanism”. In his New York Times op-ed, Douthat wrote that “the human societies that hew closest to the natural order aren’t the shining Edens of James Cameron’s fond imaginings. They’re places where existence tends to be nasty, brutish and short.” About 90% of his 146 commenters disagree, sometimes vehemently, with his assessment, generally by sympathizing with the film’s pantheism and seeing in it either something deeply American (in Transcendentalism’s line of descent), much more broadly religious (such as “panentheism” or some mixture of animism and stewardship), or just eco-pragmatically commen-sensical. And while some of the Christian movie sites that typically like to bash Hollywood liberalism do trash Avatar, others (reviewers and commenters alike) are surprisingly positive about the film. Defenders can also be found among more sophisticated conservatives, like the localist Front Porch Republic, and even the libertarian Cato Institute has defended it as an argument on behalf of property rights, the very foundation of capitalism.
What’s more surprising and interesting about the film, however, is how it’s not only breaking box office records around the world, but also may be setting off waves of emotional contagion in its wake — from spurring the launch of numerous fan groups and blogs to providing encouragement and fuel for environmental and indigenous activists as widely dispersed as South America, South and East Asia, and Palestine (portrayed above), to creating something that’s been called “post-Avatar depression.” But let’s start with the politics.
