Dancing Through Kensington, Composing, 06/12/2014

One of the essays in Cary Wolfe’s What Is Posthumanism collection that I loved, for both philosophical and personal reasons, was his analysis of Dancer in the Dark, the Lars von Trier film from 2000. Wolfe examined the film in the context of the tradition in Western philosophy that makes a problem of our sensory and perceptual relationship with the world.

There are two pretty remarkable ideas I had when I was reading this essay. One regarded Wolfe’s intriguing reading of the philosophical implications of the film. He uses it as a springboard to examine a key epistemic problem of modernism, and how his own perspective (a post-humanist and post-modern perspective influenced by systems theory and Jacques Derrida’s philosophical encounters with the impossibility of any certainty that doesn’t subvert itself at some level) engages with modernist models of knowledge.

The terrifying ecstasy of a Björk whose world falls apart.

The central analogy through which we typically understand knowledge today is the imagery of vision. This in itself isn’t controversial, and Descartes is the usual reference point here, with his continual talk of the importance that knowledge be clear and distinct, at least in most people’s introductions to philosophy in university classrooms. But the general modernist account of knowledge also depends on knowledge’s inaccessibility. This is where Kant’s idea appears, that the world we experience are the appearances of a thing-in-itself as our encounters are conditioned by the apparatuses through which we experience the world. 

Further explanation of this model comes with Wolfe’s account of Derrida’s distinction* of voice and noise. For us to gain knowledge from sound, we make sense of it, sensible noise being regarded as voice. But sound without this conditioning of our interpretation is just noise. We wouldn’t even be capable of understanding any sound as pure noise, because the mere act of going to work on sound to make it somehow comprehensible is making some manner of voice from noise. And since we don’t experience noise without interpretation, the sense of hearing better explains this notion of the thing-in-itself. 

* You like my recursivity here?

Another aspect of Dancer in the Dark that this essay helped me see regards my own artistic work, which is why I gave this post my Composing label, even though most of its content is better suited to research time. Wolfe is also doing some genre analysis in this essay, to make sense of what weird kind of narrative and film Dancer in the Dark actually is. 

To do that, he discusses the nature of opera, particularly the aria, and compares it to the Hollywood musical. Musicals are an important element of Dancer in the Dark’s story: Björk’s character Selma’s favourite type of film is the musical, and Wolfe’s essay walks you through a conception of the Hollywood musical sequence as an attempt to impose an ethical sensibility on a world that is otherwise chaotic, terrifying, and hostile. Her musical sequences see her subjectivity itself taking control of the film: the disparate noise of realistic cinema becomes the sensible clarity of choreographed music and dance.

The shaky handheld camera of the film’s realistic sequences contrasts with the steadily shot, immaculately composed and coordinated musical sequences when Selma begins to sing. As her situation grows increasingly desperate, her musical interruptions of the realism likewise grow more difficult to succeed, as when she desperately searches for some sound to morph into music in the oppressive silence of her death row jail cell and when her last attempt to sing is cut off by the fall of her neck into a hangman’s noose.

Sam Nemeth played an excellent
Vicki, but I didn't notice until after
our first production wrapped that I
made a Lars von Trier lamb out of her.

The musical sequences function as arias: operatic attempts to impose a moral order that prevents disaster on a world that resists conformity to best action. It’s a perfect element around which to focus a Lars von Trier movie, as his narrative often revolve around taking a female protagonist to the absolute breaking point in her suffering and actually breaking her. 

This is why I sat in shock for a long time after I saw Dancer in the Dark for the first time (and in the sensory immersion of a cinema too, not the relative distance of a television or a computer screen); watching this story of Selma being tortured and essentially flayed alive until she was dead, even though she always tried to do the right thing, was paralytically horrifying to me.

I realized, on reading Wolfe’s account of the aria, that I did this in You Were My Friend, despite my own general discomfort with von Trier’s styles of narrative. Vicki and Madison’s solo scenes, whether monologues or realistic explosions, are their arias, their expressions of yearning for a world where their compromises and terrible circumstances can be avoided. But whether it’s in their own natures or the natures of their world, they can’t avoid their worsening situations. Without even knowing I was doing it, I gave them a von Trier plot, even though I hate those plots when I see them.

The Deceptive Ease of Looking Back, Research Time, 03/12/2014

We don’t really know anything about the past, even the recent past. We think that we do, but that isn’t really the case. It isn’t that we delude ourselves that we perfectly understand the past and where we come from. I’m not going Freud-style with my thinking here. I’m just riffing about a particular idea that Cary Wolfe skirts in his What Is Posthumanism collection about the nature of history.

It’s an an essay called “Animal Studies,” where he examines some of the university system’s professional tendencies that have led to the proliferation of “X studies” disciplines. These remarks are almost marginal, occurring in some closing sections of his overall argument, casually tossed into a discussion to explain a Derridean idea that our sense of our own narrative is foreign to itself. But since he’s such a fan of Derrida, I’m sure he’ll have no problem with my getting some mileage out of an idea he discusses on the margins. 

When I read War and Peace, I was impressed by
Tolstoy's ability to combine the personal scale of
a single noble family with the grand historical
political movement of Napoleon's wars of
European conquest, the man Hegel called "the
World-Spirit on horseback." But Tolstoy still cut
away from the detailed stories of the people
beyond the noble class in those wars. Ostensibly
comprehensive history revealed to be selective.

Where we come from as a culture is often very clear to us. We learn all the basic beats of our countries’ social and political histories in the earliest years of our education. The foundation of our state, major waves of immigration and settlement, the chronologies of the major wars, as well as national and international political events. All this heritage is clear. 

But there’s a lot of our history that doesn’t make it into the history books or the canon of what’s self-consciously culturally remembered. I don’t mean history in that self-conscious sense here, how a culture in the present understands and knows its own past. 

I mean the actual physical causes that interact in the process of roiling time. Almost all of those causes were events that occurred to ordinary people, or that ordinary people created. Wolfe makes a peculiar point. Say 200 books from the Victorian era end up being remembered culturally in some, at least minor form. That’s barely half a percent of all the books that were published in that time. 

Here's another example. I was thinking to myself yesterday that I wanted to find some heavy rock music from the 1960s. I heard a 60s-sounding guitar in a store the other day, but it was heavier than most of the music I knew from the period. So I found this list online that someone who knows WAY MORE about music from this era than I do compiled of 158 heavy rock bands from the late 1960s. I had heard of hardly any. Now, I want to track them down. These were people who formed bands, made some kickass music, and disappeared from our knowledge of history. Yet their actions still contributed to the constitution of our causal history.

And now I really want to get into Atomic Rooster.

Wolfe’s point is that how we understand our own cultural narrative is actually incredibly selective, and has cut a lot away from consideration. We only remember in our history books a few centrally important narratives and chains of events; so much else has been forgotten about and disappeared without a trace in the present anymore, except for proliferating physical effects that effect indirectly and systematically a variety of events today, which will probably later be similarly forgotten.

This fact causes a lot of problems for many influential conceptions of history, particularly any philosophy of history that sees human historical existence as an ultimately unified process. Or at least as a process with a particular end point in mind. Let’s make the scope even more broad: any understanding of history as having any sort of simple organizing concept. 

So I’d actually like to hear from some of my Hegelian friends about this idea. Because when I first started this blog in July 2013, I was reading Georg Hegel’s Philosophy of History, had some good discussions on the subject with B, and some irritatingly dogmatic discussions on the subject with P. Ever since I first started reading Hegel in detail, in a graduate course I took during my Master’s studies going through The Phenomenology of Spirit, I found the goal of this central book in Hegel’s thought is laying out a conception of history that has a clear, unifiable meaning.

But if our understanding of our culture’s own history is so selective in its composition that almost all immanent social phenomena are cut away when we tell the story of a given era or historical path, then even a figure like Hegel who (along with his many, many, many followers and reactors) pitches his own historicism as a universal structure of humanity’s very temporality, then all these pretensions to the universal are a lie.

There is no one story to history of any kind. There is always more to be discovered beyond the neat conclusions of a historicism determined by a single set of concepts. We forget more than we have ever known. We never learn all there is to know. No matter how dead and dull we might think the past may be, there are always more stories to discover if you look.

Angry PostHumanism III: “How Dare I Eat Meat?! I Almost Cried,” Research Time, 01/12/2014

Those of you who remember Scrubs will know that the
person usually in charge of bioethical decisions in
practice rarely prioritizes purely moral motives.

Continued from previous . . . The longest essay in Cary Wolfe’s What Is Posthumanism? collection is a complicated critique of bioethics philosophy. I’ve heard plenty of critiques of bioethics, both as philosophy and as practice. 

The practice criticism is fairly simple: a hospital bioethicist has been trained in a philosophical context of dense arguments and to act as an emotional caregiver to families and friends of patients going through intense life or death issues, but the biggest pressure on their jobs is often handling situations such that the hospital avoids liability.

Wolfe’s essay on the subject, “Flesh and Finitude,” concentrates on the philosophical critique, being a philosopher. It’s a sprawl of an essay, and I think it suffers from that sprawl, setting up a problem in one context but never really returning to it by the end of its conceptual journey. It begins with the subject of bioethics and drifting away to consider how more fundamental aspects of human subjectivity impact how we think of our rights. 

It can be difficult to critique the language of rights, practically speaking, because almost all civil, criminal, and international law is conceived in terms of rights. The entire institution of tort law, for example, depends on a person’s claim to standing against another to make an accusation for redress. So much of our moral thinking is about the nature and reach of our rights to make claims against each other. 

Animals are often cut out of this, intuitively speaking, because they physiologically can’t speak to make claims upon their rights. Even Bruno Latour, a thinker who’s often considered a radical post-humanist and whose writings on science are nefarious in some circles for destabilizing public faith in the infallibility of scientific knowledge,* has written that there can only be a just relationship of humans and non-humans when scientific instruments have enabled non-humans to express their interests linguistically. This is the key idea behind his parliament of all species in The Politics of Nature.

* Latour himself now belongs in that camp. Over the last ten years, as he has engaged with the politics of climate change deniers, he has openly expressed regret that he carried out any of the anthropological studies of scientists and scientific institutions that defined his early career. Even though his research showed the humanity of science as an institution, he now wishes that he could convince people that scientists were infallible possessors of pure and perfect truths about the world again, because it would cut off the viral skepticism that drives the popular denial of climate change.

The language of rights in our culture has a powerful gravity. Even writers who have tried to theorize ways to conceive of animal ethics beyond the old-fashioned scope of civil rights and standing end up just creating more lists of demands and claims that basically are rights, but under a different name. One of Wolfe’s central examples of this is Martha Nussbaum’s list of animal capabilities: she pitches it as having moved beyond the rights-based approach of cataloguing standings and demands, but it practically amounts to a list of standings and demands that a wider range of organisms can claim.

The approach of creating lists of claims based on some clear criteria (rights, capabilities, or some other) is an approach to philosophy that sees its goal as crafting specific problems to deal with well-defined issues by producing definitive answers that ends the inquiry. I’ve never liked this approach to philosophy precisely because it tries to settle problems that motivate countless writers across the world and across centuries in neat little packages. It treats difficult questions as if they had easy answers. 

Wolfe considers literature better suited to engaging with the core issues of what our attitudes should be to the animals on which we depend to live. Literature depicts difficult situations, undecidable moments, suspension in an existentially powerful tension. He refers to J. M. Coetzee, who has written about the existential terror of realizing that we must consume creatures with which we’re evolutionarily continuous. 

By showing how the problems of rights and standing to make claims against those who harm them can apply to the situations of animals, Wolfe tries to problematize the bioethics of hospital practice. When not only humans, but many kinds of life, can provoke the ethical unsettling of an existentially problematic encounter, a lot of the core presumptions that ground our everyday moral practice are shaken along with ourselves. 

Angry PostHumanism II: The Continuity of All Life, No Matter How Different, Research Time, 28/11/2014

Continued from last post . . . Cary Wolfe’s “Event-Machine” essay is published again in his What Is Posthumanism? collection, in a slightly expanded form from the version I first read in Emergence and Embodiment, which came out the year before. It’s my favourite kind of expansion, which changes the title a little (to “Meaning and Event”), and adds some paragraphs and deletes others at different points throughout. So you don’t just get the original essay with an extra section, but the more detailed work of reconsidering some aspects of the argument and updating it. 

Part of what he’s updating it with, aside from some improvements to the expression and the order of some of the arguments, is attempting to link the essays together. Very few collections of previously published essays do that, and as a result, they’re often quite repetitive, as essays originally published in different journals years apart will be smashed in a book within a few pages of each other. And reading through marginally different iterations of the same introductory conceptual material can get damn annoying sometimes. 

Although Wolfe sometimes refers to the same texts in different articles, and even sometimes the same quotes from the same texts (I’m thinking about a particular line from Jacques Derrida’s essay “Eating Well”), the context of each occurrence is different enough to make it land on a reader differently each time. 

Really, just coming to grips with the fact of our ecological
evolution must adjust you to your continuity with animals.
Any process as slow as humanity's evolution, while involving
thresholds, can only be continuous.

Derrida’s “Eating Well” is his engagement with the ethics and morals of animal rights and vegetarianism, and his conclusion amounts practically to the same brand of not-quite-quietism that most of his ethical engagements end in (unendability, that is). There are several essays in this book about the question of human continuity with non-human animals, an issue that conventional transhumanism usually ignores in its gleaming visions of a humanity that is ultimately stripped of all that could be called organic. It makes for a wonderfully multifaceted critique of all conceptions of humanity that radically separate us from all other forms of life and ecologies.

This makes Wolfe’s essays on the human conception of ourselves regarding animals a welcome addition to the Ecophilosophy manuscript. Because he frames their inclusion in the book using a conception of post-humanism, the new introduction to the manuscript would explicitly link the ecological and geo-historical continuity of humanity to all other life on Earth now and throughout the distant past to the planet’s beginning. 

Wolfe is also very good at calling up the ethical squishiness of our mainstream conceptions of the animal in the context of his own inquiry. I could tell that an essay called “Language, Representation, and Species” originally appeared as a direct attack on Daniel Dennett’s conception of mind, and used the actual mental complexity of animals to expose that Dennett’s concept of mind just begged the question of what exactly mind is. 

Basically, Dennett’s argument that the human mind is special because its self-consciousness (that only we can think reflexively, experiencing our own experience) is unique depends on having postulated at the beginning that non-human animals can’t think reflexively. He doesn’t prove that non-human animals are deficient in this way. He just presumes it, and argues for it in a way that makes it feel like a conclusion, when it’s been a premise all along. So I’d like to thank Cary Wolfe for finally putting a finger on why I’ve felt so iffy about Dennett’s ideas ever since I first encountered them late in my undergrad.

So there is no categorical separation between humanity and the rest of the organic world.* Once we’ve established this continuity, we end up in a very difficult spot. A lot of the moral distinctions that allow us to treat animals so poorly (medical and scientific testing, factory farming and industrial slaughterhouse practices) depend on the premise that they can only think in a fundamentally inferior way.

* Thinking in terms of this radical duality also commits the blindness of collapsing all the differences among non-human species of organism into a single category and treating them as if they were all a single type of thing, organisms-that-are-not-human. 

Recognizing the continuity now introduces the ethical issue that moral dialogue with non-humans is possible where all participants are moral agents. Standing on a moral platform, if not in strict moral equivalence or sameness because of our important physical and epistemic differences in kind, means that we have to take our cruelty to animals in a profoundly serious sense. It’s more than just immoral because humans are bad when they’re cruel. A non-human’s cries, when we think authentically in terms of our natural continuity, should touch our soul. To be continued . . .

So About This PostHumanism Thing Again, Research Time, 27/11/2014

When I first got word that my Ecophilosophy manuscript would be considered for a slot in a book series broadly about posthumanism, I started looking into works that explicitly engaged with the concept. This is where my series of posts about Rosi Braidotti’s work this April and May came from. 

When I first discovered The Venture Bros.,
I thought it was a sign that we as a culture
had finally gotten over our techno-futurist
dreams. I guess not.

As I said a couple of days ago, my thoughts about transhumanism are noteworthy mostly because I so rarely think about transhumanism. I always found the philosophy played better as science-fiction concepts, and most of the straight philosophy of transhumanism ends up stuck in techno-futurist dreams that I thought we had gotten over. The techno-futurist dreams of the 19th and 20th centuries all blew up in our faces when the totalitarian regimes of Europe and Asia nearly destroyed humanity’s moral sense, and this was followed by the global ecological crisis hitting us with pollution phenomena so enormous and strange that you have to be crazy just to understand them. 

The Pacific Trash Vortex is a thing that is real, and we made it. That’s just my personal favourite example of this terrifyingly surreal ecological crazy of our civilization. So the idea at the heart of transhumanism that a whole-hearted embrace of technology will save us from ourselves is kind of laughable to me.

Posthumanism is an amorphous collection of philosophical perspectives that basically acts as a variety of rejoinders to this freakish optimism of the transhumanist vision. And at the moment, I’m looking into an essay collection by Cary Wolfe called What Is Posthumanism?, a title and a jacket description that made me think it would be quite useful for the new introduction to the Ecophilosophy project that sets it in the posthumanist context.

Wolfe’s book doesn’t quite do that; I think Braidotti’s work is best suited to forming a ground to a new introduction. Wolfe is a little too much of a Derrida fan for that. I first came across his work in the initial research when I was composing the manuscript in 2011, in my doctoral program at McMaster. He wrote a very illuminating essay, called “Meaning as Event-Machine” that closed the multi-author collection Emergence and Embodiment, which was about philosophical explications and implications of systems theory.

Wolfe’s “Event-Machine” essay helped me see the core problem with mainstream systems theory, that it isolates perceiving bodies from each other and the world semantically, even while they do perceive the world’s affects. If meaning is idiosyncratic to the perceiver, then communication is impossible. So the fact of communication is either an illusion or a paradox, which Wolfe illuminates with a parallel to Jacques Derrida’s ideas.*

* Yes, you can illuminate an idea with a reference to Derrida. Now put away your snark and be nice or go back to work for philosophical Buzzfeed.

Basically, we affect each other, but all we manage to do is hopefully harmonize our mutual irritations. It really helped me understand perception and language as a field of affects. Yes, we basically just create fields that disrupt each other, but those fields can interact harmoniously, and the patterns in those affects actually constitute meaning, like the patterns of fluctuations in radio waves making the content of our transmissions. Semantics emerges from syntax. It’s only a mysterious paradox if you don’t think that’s possible. To you people I say, go learn how radio works.

But I’m not really a fan of Derrida precisely because he sticks with the pessimistic view. Because all we do is affect and irritate each other, he mourns the loss of the more profound communion that we all thought communication really was. So I was a bit disappointed to see what a devotee Wolfe is of Derrida’s fundamental frameworks. 

Even so, he does much more interesting things with Derrida than I expected to see. To be continued . . .