Author alert: Sheryll Vint & the question of "animal alterity"

Derridata, I think I can start to get back to you on some ideas for a collaborative journal publication that we discussed yesterday. I notice that the above author has an upcoming book on animal alterity and science fiction, and it would be fascinating to do something with that as a way of extending the themes of this blog (I think she also edited an animal themed issue of Science Fiction Studies). Vint engages too with the Wess' Har series of novels by Karen Traviss, as you can see here (Google had to use a cached page so I hope this link works). Traviss has used her novels as a platform to explore ethical issues related to identity, including those related to clones in the Star Wars universe. This is the kind of stuff we've tried to talk about before using the umbrella term "seriality". So I can see real potential for branching out in some interesting directions. I put it here rather than email though as it may be easier to keep track of material as it comes to hand.

Moving along to a not entirely unrelated topic, I remember years ago, I think it was even in your Re/Search Industrial Culture Handbook, reading about Graeme Revell's post-SPK sound experiments with "insect musicians". Well, I've just come across the Criminal Animal website and there are some pretty interesting resources to be found there, especially under the category of "genetic music". I love the following description particularly:

Algorithmic Arts Software for Generative Music
http://www.algoart.com/dnamusic/

"Interesting b/c you can hear samples of protein sequences! -nice for the ears and gives a good idea of what molecular music is all about -eerie sounding but pretty amazing".

Incidentally, the concept of molecular music reminded me too of the "Prima Belladonna" story in Ballard's Vermilion Sands, which featured singing plants. Furthermore, as much as the film Silent Running has a compelling central premise, (the pathos of a lonely astronaut tending his garden heterotopia floating in space), I felt the film failed in its choice of music. Clearly a more innovative organic ambient style score would have worked better in that context. Sadly though, there was no Linda Long or Jeff Greinke around back then when they were really needed (*sigh*), so we have to make do with the well-intentioned, but somewhat dated, Joan Baez instead:

A Brief History of the Future

Editing work piling up again so I can only be brief today. If you haven't already, I recommend picking up a copy of Jacques Attali's A Brief History of the Future. A useful way of critically contextualising the genre of such futurist writing in general is to revisit Andrew Ross's essay in his Strange Weather. More specifically on Attali's book though, I got the impression that he pretty much ignored the cultural significance of the biological sciences, choosing instead to talk about wars over resources. And how about at least mentioning the future of space exploration and its possible benefits for our collective humanity? Check out the essays in this issue of Futures and you can catch a tantalising glimpse of what Attali ignored.

Notwithstanding these shortcomings, I think his book is worthwhile because it offers a progressive vision of the future. To be sure, homo sap is portrayed as going through some truly hellish times over the course of the next 50 years before what Attali describes as "hyperdemocracy" emerges triumphant. In this respect he breaks with the comparatively unambitious and pessimistic outlook that tries to always warn us in advance that "the road to hell is paved with good intentions" (I suspect this is the motto of those conservative futurists known as "risk managers" the world over, who are most eager to ensure their own viability). I regard Attali as closer then to Steve Fuller's maxim, "the present is the site in which the future is constructed...we get the future that matches our current judgements by carefully selecting the chain of historical precedents that lay the foundation for them".

So the next half century may well be the "age of stupid", meaning we have to survive that before we have any chance of arriving at anything like a sparkling Syd Mead type world organised along hyperdemocratic principles. I've included a clip from The Cove (exposing a killing frenzy by fishermen against dolphins in Japan) as further evidence of the ongoing battles over resources we can expect in the "age of stupid".

Precarity

Precarity - trailer
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A toolbox to investigate about the increasing precarisation of our existence

Martine Beugnet & the cinema of transgression

I was reviewing the list of influences on Coffin Joe and it got me thinking more generally about transgression and the need to complicate the gender blindness that can follow on from uncritical use of this concept. I thought one promising starting point would be to get hold of Martine Beugnet's book on the so-called "new French extremity", entitled Cinema and sensation: French film and the art of transgression. Derridata, have you encountered this book in your travels, and if so, do you feel it departs in any significant ways from Shaviro's The Cinematic Body? Methodologically, does it follow the default setting of the continental philosophy blogosphere of performing deep readings of canonical texts and applying them in an analytically suspect way to this cultural phenomenon, or does it really contextualise them social theoretically so that they are saying something about life in France at the beginning of the 21st century?

Given the biological themes of this blog, it is hard to ignore her starting point that film is a "medium of the senses". I like the description of the book though how it claims to move from the cinematic apparatus itself to broader social issues:

"Martine Beugnet focuses on the crucial and fertile overlaps that occur between experimental and mainstream cinema. Her book draws on the writings of Deleuze, Merleau-Ponty, and Bataille, among others, but first and foremost, she develops her arguments from the films themselves, from the comprehensive description of specific sequences, techniques, and motifs that allows us to engage with the works as material events and as thinking processes. In turn, she demonstrates how the films, envisaged as forms of embodied thought, offer alternative ways of approaching today’s most burning sociocultural debates—from the growing supremacy of technology, to globalization, exile, and exclusion".

I'm intrigued by the prospect of encompassing "today's most burning sociocultural debates", particularly how the foregrounding of globalization would seem to intimate the applicability of her critical approach to comparable studies of other films as epiphenomena of cultural transgression. I don't know the extent to which she undertakes a feminist analysis that is reflexive enough to epistemologically qualify Bataille's contribution in light of the formative influence of his companion Laure (as per, for example, Michel Surya's Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography).

But I do know that when I start to think about this topic I admit to feeling a lot like I imagine Herbert Marcuse did in Eros & Civilization, shyly tiptoeing past the cavalcade of perversions he attempted to introduce on account of their [alleged] radical emancipatory potential. For me, reading or thinking about such possibilities demands something like Martine Beugenet's approach: I treat the reading as a material event. If I am repulsed by it I admit I will have a hard time moving forward by articulating why I feel that way, letalone changing my reaction, irrespective of whether a prima facie political reason can be advanced to try to convince me otherwise. So my test in the first instance is gauging how you respond to these kinds of positions. Be sure to drill down to the comments in that post about bell hooks before you try to reach any decisions about your receptiveness to transgression. Another affirmative perspective can be found here, along with the aforementioned Shaviro's extreme take on its biological ramifications, thanks to a reading of Michel Foucault. Transgressors would no doubt sneer at the idea of opposition (claiming it presupposes transgression), but a representative example is Ashley Tauchert's Against Transgression. Closer to my own social theoretical views are Anthony Elliott's objections to queer theory more generally (of which transgression forms a subset), which can be found in his Concepts of the Self.

But I'll finish up here by leaving it to some examples of transgressive filmmaking to serve as a litmus test. That is my only justification for posting them here. I fear they are treading some dangerous misogynistic territory, so I advise extreme caution in case anyone else chooses to watch them (especially the second half of the final clip). But the test for me is whether the advocates of transgression would be willing to redeem even these activities, letalone their filmic representation, or do they agree that limits and distinctions occasionally have to be drawn because some things are simply beyond the pale? By the same token, how much latitude must be given in light of the fact that there is a diverse range of cultural logics, or are they merely accentuated for the reasons Beugnet adduces i.e. an explosion of difference in response to globalization?

Graphic Sexual Horror is an interesting case though because it documents political censure of a bondage website by an administration under the Patriot Act that was itself willing to use torture as an interrogation technique, in addition to the greed of the website's creator (and its effect on his "models"), so I certainly don't wish to imply that the issues are always cut and dried. It would be interesting to compare the motivations of that webmaster with those of the Japanese maker of genki porn. In the latter case the documentary makes little effort to establish how representative such an extreme genre is, letalone attempt to challenge any justification behind it.

My only point then in regard to each is that Beugnet's book might help me to get a better critical perspective on what is at stake in these kinds of debates, thus also hopefully making it unnecessary to automatically appeal to Videodrome as sole evidence of a transgressive "postmodern" media culture.

Intense material hailing from the Portuguese speaking lands......

I ducked out during the day a week or two back to go the movies. I won't talk about the film I saw (truth be told, it didn't really make much of an impression on me), and this was a strange feeling because what I found far more evocative was sitting in the front row of the virtually empty cinema listening to my iPod while I waited for the show to begin. The blank screen and the quietness of my surroundings acted as a feedback loop to the dark ambient soundtrack I was listening to. I had barely recovered from the brilliance of Les Joyaux de la Princess when Thermidor's 1929 kicked in. I hereby declare Thermidor the most stunning new artist I have heard for a long time. This even extends to the album's concept art, which is very reminiscent, to me at least, of Sam Von Olffen's steampunk style, which I posted on this blog before. I'm trying to chase more information about Thermidor, but I think the artist wishes, like Les Joyaux, to preserve anonymity as much as possible. Be sure to check out Thermidor's website to get a better idea of what I'm so enthused about.

OK, I described Thermidor as offering a dark ambient soundtrack, but it's hard to see the style as complementary to that mad visionary José Mojica Marins, try as I might. Any connections are tangential, aside from their speaking the same language, suffice to say I would be curious to know how this Brazilian filmmaker has been received in Portugal. As far as explicit musical affinities go, I don't think Rob Zombie would hesitate to admit how he has been influenced by Coffin Joe. For now at least I'll have to content myself with posting Pt 1 of a fascinating documentary about a director who has been described thus:

"Marins’ furiously subversive anti-religion/anti-government interpretation of the genre took shape in the midst of a brutal dictatorship and remains wholly without parallel.

Over his nearly half-century-long career, he has created some of the most inspired, inflammatory and hallucinatory imagery in the history of fantastic cinema. His Coffin Joe character is equal parts the Marquis De Sade, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Salvador Dali and Friedrich Nietzsche, channeled through a love for confrontational horror films and the darkest of carnivalesque spook show iconography".

8th Wonderland

I've seen the trailer for Cameron's Avatar, albeit not in 3D, and my initial impression is that the film may be impressive on a conceptual level (not least for the depiction of a militarised future reminiscent of Aliens), but perhaps lacking in its execution. Therefore I concur with the many bloggers who have complained about the character design resembling the dreaded Jar Jar Binks from the Star Wars universe.

I don't have much else to go on at this stage, and I'm also not particularly interested in following the Fanboy type arguments too far, so I've directed my attention elsewhere. I've come across 8th Wonderland, which is already starting to generate some positive advance notices (visit the accompanying "virtual" nation here). I regard the film as effecting a thematic displacement of the Darwinian model of evolution embodying adaptive fitness towards a greater emphasis instead on creativity, as per the vitalism of Henri Bergson and, perhaps more importantly, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's conception of the "noosphere".

Hence I foresee critical discussion devolving on the issue of whether the emergent noosphere depicted in the film is representative of a new "post national" stage of human evolution. One should remember in this context that nationalism is a discourse intended to heal the contingency associated with modernity (which is why it has been described by Benedict Anderson as equating to an "imagined community"). It is analogous to Walter Benjamin's urban archetypes, such as the detective, who attest to the power of consciousness to retain its synthesizing powers. In comparison this makes the hacker a dangerously ambiguous figure: on the one hand very creative and autonomous, in the manner of the detective who also steps back from the circumstances at hand through a sheer force of will and intellect. Of course the difference is that the hacker is ultimately less interested in rationality as a restorative agent for law and order, leading us to understand that anarchist movements always remain a possibility because self-organizing networks are an inherent feature of complex systems, including social systems.

Because I have yet to see the film, I can't judge the extent to which it acknowledges this fact as either a good or a bad thing. The former could exist anywhere on a continuum spanning from Rheingold's electronic homesteaders to Negri and Hardt's emergent "multitude", whilst the latter would dovetail with Jean Baudrillard. Judging by the capsule review I've pasted below and the representation of violence in the trailer, it is probably closer to a Baudrillardian dystopia insofar as it is [seemingly] not amenable to rational planning and democratic control by human beings. I haven't read Julian May's Galactic Mileu series so I can't cite it as a sci fi precedent for the themes of this movie. In any case, here are some details about 8th Wonderland:

They are of all nationalities, all professions and creeds. They’ve never met face to face but they share a common secret. Together they form a clandestine community based in 8th Wonderland, the planet’s first virtual country. Motivated by the same goal, they communicate daily to concoct strategies for counteracting the Machiavellian plans of the world’s capitalist societies and create a land on Earth where, at last, peace reigns. After disabling a project that might have started a war, 8th Wonderland finally attracts the attention of the global media and with it, that of anti-terrorist organizations. Risking the worst, the inhabitants of the synthetic nation elect to move ahead with plans to impose their laws on all the world’s leaders. A new era is beginning to emerge, even if it’s threatened buy the sudden intrusion of someone claiming to be the creator of 8th Wonderland.

Easily one of the most fascinating genre films of the last half-decade, 8TH WONDERLAND, by newcomers Nicolas Alberny and Jean Mach, is a triumph on every level. By imagining an alternate world that would no doubt have intrigued Jean Baudrillard, the French filmmakers offer a smart consideration of the place of new media in contemporary society. The undeniable political power of Web communities has never been so effectively presented in cinema. Though editorial commentary is the leitmotiv, Alberny and Mach dodge intellectual heavy-handedness by incorporating it into a gripping story of suspense, a conspiracy tale loaded with humour, tension and surprising twists and turns. This captivating trip across the Web culminates in a climax that matches that of Park Chan-wook’s OLDBOY in its impact. With a multitude of mini-stories woven into a massive narrative and a precise and original use of the split screen (the scenes occurring inside the 8th Wonderland site are a feast for the eyes), Alberny and Mach succeed where Zack Snyder failed in his transposition of the spirit of Alan Moore’s comics to the big screen. 8TH WONDERLAND may well be the film of its generation, for whom Facebook and Twitter are part of a daily existence split between the real and the virtual, one that demands justice and equality for those denied them, one that wants to see its utopian dreams at last realized.

—Simon Laperrière (translated by Rupert Bottenberg)

The Feminization of Poverty within a corrupt Narco-State: Rethink Afghanistan

Rethink Afghanistan