Microscopic Pornography: Public Enemies and the Problem of Detail

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Ill-conceived reactionary nostalgia, Jean Baudrillard, microscopic pornography, Pornography, Public Enemies, Robert Frank, The Americans

Last night, I attended a screening of Public Enemies, Michael Mann’s retelling of the final months in the life of the Depression-era bank robber and working-class hero John Dillinger.  As a cultural artefact and an example of the new digital cinema, the film is a fascinating if problematic iteration of an emerging cultural tendency towards overdetermination and a pathological need to reveal the world in all its detail.  The film, as an aesthetic experience, is deeply frustrating.  The script is economical and propulsive, while at the same time it allows for enough space to effective engage with ideas of celebrity and the necessary role of violence in the maintenance of order.  Across the board, the performances Mann gets out of his actors, especially Stephen Graham as a cackling, sociopathic Baby Face Nelson, are compelling.  The period recreation is convincing and the film makes an extraordinary stab at realism by shooting in many of the locations across the American Midwest where the events recounted in the film actually took place.

The problem lies in the fact that Mann shot the film digitally, as he did with his last film, the laughably bad Miami Vice.  Had he shot Public Enemies with the same care for composition and lighting that are needed for celluloid, something Mann is in fact very, very good at (see Heat or Manhunter if you don’t believe me), this could have been a truly great film.  As it is, it just looks cheap.  Not gritty and realistic, just cheap, unfinished.  This kind of digital aesthetic can be and has been used very effectively, in films as diverse as Cloverfield and Che, but here the off-the-cuff cheapness and inconsistency of the whole affair – and a few of the scenes are stunningly beautiful – seriously undercut Mann’s attempt at historical truth and his striving for mythic resonance.  Maybe this is an indicator that filmic convention hasn’t quite caught up with the technological changes and that it will be some years before old-fashioned people like myself will be able to accept period cinema told without the warmth and depth of film.  On the other hand, maybe the film points, to a larger problem (or consideration, if we want to use neutral language) with digital media.  Ignoring entirely the question of quality – at points, the film looks like it was shot with a cell phone, and a cheap one at that – and the still-unsolved problems of digital cinema – the artefacting, the choppy movement when the lighting is less than ideal, the lack of real depth of field – the film renders the world in excessive detail.  Mann’s cameras render the world flat, uninteresting and completely exposed, stripping out the shadows, revealing the hidden and robbing the world of its mystery.

In a pleasing moment of syncronicity, upon arriving home, I ran across the following quotation from Robert Frank, the great Swiss/American photographer whose 1958 book The Americans gutted the American mythos of the 1950s, showing, over the course of only 83 images, that Americans were not contented suburbanites living the good life of the post-war boom but were something altogether darker and more interesting.  Frank, speaking about the rise of digital media, said in a recent interview:

There are too many images.  Too many cameras now.  We’re all being watched.  It gets sillier and sillier.  As if all action is meaningful.  Nothing is really all that special.  It’s just life.  If all moments are recorded, then nothing is beautiful and maybe photography isn’t an art anymore.  Maybe it never was.

The Americans: Parade — Hoboken, New Jersey (1955)

From a man who turned the everyday life of America as a corporate entity in a stunning work of art, from a man whose vision of America is as influential as that of Elliott Erwitt or Walker Evans, this is more a requiem for a lost aesthetic age than a mere criticism.

Turning our gaze outward, it is interesting to note that the late French cultural critic and philosopher Jean Baudrillard wrote a good deal about the problem of overrepresentation and overdetermination in a media-saturated world, which he captured in his enigmatic  yet highly evocative phrase ‘microscopic pornography’.  He writes, ‘This is what we have forgotten in modernity: subtraction brings force, power is born of absence.  We have not stopped accumulating, adding, raising the stakes.  And because we are no longer capable of confronting the symbolic mastery of absence, we are now plunged in the opposite illusion, the disenchanted illusion of profusion’.[1] There is an argument to be made that Public Enemies takes this disenchanted illusion and transforms it into an aesthetic strategy, perhaps a historical-film analogy to contemporary horror film’s tendency to show too much, too be too generous in its telling.

Baudrillard extends his argument about this paradoxical poverty of excess into the larger world and implicitly argues that the world as we know it is too visible, too well known for our own good: We are no longer in a system of growth, but of excrescence and saturation, which can be summed up the fact that there is too much.  There is too much everywhere, and the system cracks up from excess’.[2] Ours is, in a word, a world of hyperdensity, one in which people suffer from ‘an over-proximity of all things, a foul promiscuity of all things which beleaguer and penetrate’.[3] Baudrillard employs a number of techniques, phrases and metaphors to describe and critique this situation.  At turns, he writes of a ‘sidereal era of boredom’ and of ‘horizontal madness’,[4] looking always to something better: ‘Let us hope the random universe outside smashes this glass coffin’.[5] In The Transparency of Evil, he links the increasing banality of the world to the effects of technology: ‘We have left the hell of other people for the ecstasy of the same, the purgatory of otherness for the artificial paradises of identity.  Some might call this an even worse servitude, but Telecomputer Man, having no will of his own, knows nothing of serfdom.  Alienation of man is a thing of the past: now man is plunged into a homeostasis by machines’.[6] For Baudrillard, the rise of information technologies, at best a paradoxical form of plenty, serves as a primary illustration of this tendency.  In In The Shadow of the Silent Majorities, he writes,

We are in a universe where there is more and more information, less and less meaning … Everywhere information is reputed to produce an accelerated circulation of meaning, a plus-value of meaning homologous to the economic plus-value which results from the accelerated notion of capital.  Information is given as creative of communication, and even if the wastage is enormous a general consensus would have it that there is in the total nonetheless a surplus of meaning, which is redistributed in all the interstices of the social fabric … We are all accomplices in this myth.  It is the alpha and omega of our modernity, without which the credibility of our social organisation would collapse.  Yet the fact is that it is collapsing, and for this very reason.  Just where we think that information is producing meaning, it is doing the exact opposite.[7]

Bringing this insight to bear on our ongoing discussion of the unofficial record of the modern, rationalised city, in a novel extension to his neo-Romantic urge to reenchant language, Baudrillard writes in praise of a familiar form of unofficial, symbolic language as part of his critique of the contemporary urban experience, which he sees increasingly dehumanising: ‘The urban city is also a neutralised, homogenised space, a space where indifference, the segregation of urban ghettos, and the downgrading of districts, races, and certain age groups are on the increase.  In short, it is the cut-up space of distinctive signs’.^[8] Baudrillard refers throughout his work to the practice of graffiti as a means of humanising the modern city, writing for example, ‘Graffiti covers every subway map in New York, just as the Czechs changed the names of the streets in Prague to disconcert the Russians: guerrilla action’.^[9] In his famed Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard compares graffiti in the subways to ‘Symbolic ritual of incision and marks’^[10] and makes explicit a theme in many of his works by writing, ‘Only the wounded body exists symbolically’.^[11] Here Baudrillard recalls forcefully Michel De Certeau’s enigmatic statement, ‘Haunted places are the only ones people can live in’.^[12]

In an age where technology allows us to strip more and more of the veneer off of the fundamental mysteries of the world, our films, like all of our art, would do well to remember this.

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[1] Baudrillard, The Conspiracy of Art: Manifestos, Interviews, Essays, trans. by Ames Hodges, ed. Sylvère Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 2005), 114.

[2] Jean Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact, trans. by Chris Turner (Oxford: Berg, 2005), 191.

[3] Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication, trans. by Bernard and Caroline Schutze (New York: Semiotext(e), 1987), 27.

[4] Baudrillard, Conspiracy, 109.

[5] Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End, trans. by Chris Turner (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 88.

[6] Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena, trans. by James Benedict (London: Verso, 1993), 58-59.

[7] Jean Baudrillard, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities or the End of the Social, trans. by Paul Foss, John Johnston, Paul Patton and Andrew Berardini (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007),99-100.

[8] Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, trans. by Iain Hamilton Grant (London: Sage, 1993), 76.

[9] Baudrillard, Symbolic, 81.

[10] Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. by Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1981), 112.

[11] Baudrillard, Simulacra, 114. He calls back to archaic societies with this image of the marked body: ‘The savages knew how to use the whole body … in tattooing, torture, initiation – sexuality was only one of the possible metaphors of symbolic exchange, neither the most significant, nor the most prestigious, as it has become for us in its obsessional and realistic reference, thanks to its organic and functional character’. Baudrillard, Simulacra, 115.

[12] Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, vol. 1, trans. by Steven Rendell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 108.

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Best Circumlocution for ‘Gay Sexual Love’ in a Biblical Studies Dissertation

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Gay Sexual Love, Joseph Lozovyy

I think he means ‘gay sexual love’:

“the emotional factor on the level of what one might call ‘chemistry’ in its extreme form [in the relationship between David and Jonathan]”

(Joseph Lozovyy, PhD thesis, p. 170, emphasis author’s own)

That’s quite a mouthful, Joseph!

From the cheap seats: Anglogelicalism

Kevin Ward offers some intriguing thoughts on that peculiar beast known as “evangelicalism” in the latest issue (August 09) of Stimulus. A generation or two ago Harold Lindsell, editor of Christianity Today, bemoaned the watering down of the “e-word” in The Battle for The Bible, and proposed that the righteous of the land abandon the term in favour of the “f-word” (fundamentalist.) Ward comes at it from the other direction: the “e-word” has been hopelessly contaminated by the “f” crowd. Time to concede the rout and stage a hasty strategic retreat. From henceforth the more thoughtful members of the “e” crowd might consider hoisting the letter “o” aloft. Let us be “orthodox”!

Dr Ward makes an interesting case, with a strong historical perspective on the scene in Aotearoa/NZ. Alas, those of us who are not part of the Borg Collective – made up of Anglo-Reformed Protestants and their cognate groups – may feel sidelined by the argument. Although I’m a third generation Kiwi, and it could well be that “resistance is futile,” I have too many Danish and German genetic markers to graciously cede the “e-word” to the dominant Anglo usage.

Between them Wesley and Edwards represent two faces of a new movement of revival, which has borrowed a label from the Lutheranism of the Reformation and calls itself Evangelical.

Diarmaid MacCullough

Years ago I was vacating a school-house in a small Taranaki town, ready to move to Wellington. The new tenant-teacher and his wife stopped by to check it out. She spied “The Evangelical Catechism” on the bookshelf and enthused: “Oh, I do approve!” Little did she suspect (nor was I about to tell her) that the esteemed volume was the American edition of the Evangelischer Gemeindekatechismus. Neither Billy nor Franklin would, I imagine, have recognised it as expressing their belief-system. The European usage tends to contrast evangelical (evangel/proclamation-centred) with biblicist (bible-centred) and tradition-centred. Hence Bultmann was a better evangelical by far than Lindsell.

Dr Ward makes no reference to the prior use of the “e-word” before it was applied by Wesley to a pietistic form of Christianity, and ultimately mutated across into Reformed usage. This kind of Anglo-centrism is often taken for granted.  A text on modern Christianity breezily acknowledges the way the “e-word” was used before it was mingled with Pietism and revivalism, then dismisses it as irrelevant. Really? Is this the historian’s way of crooning “lie back and think of England”?

Having said that, maybe the “e-word” is indeed a lost cause for thoughtful Christians who genuinely identify with the progressive social values that were once associated with that label in the English-speaking world. Dr Ward asks “does a rose by any other name still smell the same?” Fair question, but if you start calling rhubarbs roses, where oh where will it all end?

Atheism in Christianity Reissued

For those interested in doing theology without rules, I discovered that the hard-to-find classic from Ernst Bloch, Atheism in Christianity was reissued by Verso a month back, in June 2009. Again, the tension between transcendent and immanent theologies is at issue.

“At the Bible’s heart he finds a heretical core and claims, paradoxically, that a good Christian must necessarily be an atheist.”

From Caprica & Coupland to Žižek on Immortality

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Andrei Tarkovsky, Battlestar Galactica, Caprica, death, Douglas Coupland, immortality, Monstrosity of Christ, Slavoj Žižek

Eric recently commented on the way the forthcoming Battlestar Galactica prequel, Caprica, reflects the 20th Century Western shift from otherworldly to this-wordly spirituality:

“… The relentless drive for ‘self-improvement’ or ‘self-realisation’ that is part and parcel of so much of contemporary religious thought and practice, is necessarily a this-worldly matter…”
(Dr Eric Repphun)

In response, I wondered if the transhumanists might be the ones today who have reincorporated the infinite into this dominant strand of this-worldly spirituality. For, in the transhumanist body, both the finite-material and the infinite defeat of death are combined. Much like the Christ.

And as a spooky synchronicity (religiously speaking), Slavoj Žižek recently gave a lecture (with the same title as the book he co-wrote with John Millbank, The Monstrosity of Christ, 2009), in which he says this:

“Did you notice how, in contrast to previous centuries, especially the Nineteenth Century – when the topic of finitude was, as it were, reserved for materialism, and spiritualists, idealists were talking about (and I simplify very much, but nonetheless) the infinite, the spiritual dimension is our contact with the infinite, and so on – all of a sudden (it started with Heidegger, taken over by others) in the Twentieth Century, it’s the very finitude which becomes the ultimate support of spiritualization. The idea is that – precisely insofar as we are finite beings, that is to say, irreducibly thrown into a world that we cannot ever dominate, rooted in this world, unable to withdraw from our concrete place in historical reality to gain a kind of a neutral position, above the run of, outside the run of things – precisely because of this, we cannot ever think of dominating technologically, or in any other way, reality. So we have to remain open for an unfathomable transcendent otherness.

So again, no wonder that even with cinema-makers, I noticed – like, who is the most materialist cinema-maker, arguably, probably, over the Twentieth Century? My choice would have been Andrei Tarkovsky – the Russian guy. But he is also the most spiritualist. You see this idea that, precisely because of this idea that we are stuck into our bodies, our place, this gives to our existence an unfathomable abyss that sustains it, which is the proper place of spirituality.

And on the other hand, the only ones who are ready to take over – in a way that I don’t accept, but nonetheless – the old topics of immortality, infinity, in the sense of getting out of one’s body, are some (usually, even the more vulgar ones) Darwinists, brain scientists or cognitive scientists who claim, you know this idea that that the ultimate, especially in the so-called tech-gnosis movement, where the idea is that the ultimate goal of recent digital, bio-genetic development is to transform our very personal identity into – to cut a long story short – into software; into a virtual program which can then be downloaded from one to another hardware, so that we can indefinitely reproduce ourselves. So that’s an interesting reversal.

Where I am, along with Alan Badiou, is on the side of infinity here – not this vulgar materialist infinity, but nonetheless an infinity, if nothing else the Freudian infinity, even immortality.”

Caprica, Douglas Coupland, and the Problem of Immortality

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Battlestar Galactica, Caprica, death, Douglas Coupland, immortality, Peter Berger

The rebooted television series Battlestar Galactica (2003-2009) was, in this reporter’s opinion, one of the finest serial narratives in the history of the medium (though the Baltimore-set crime drama The Wire, which ran at pretty much the same time, is arguably just as good). It is science fiction, certainly, but as an allegory, the whole series can be read as a long, eliptical meditation about religion and its role in contemporary society.  Battlestar told the story of the conflict between a far-flung human civilisation called the Twelve Colonies of Kobol and a race of genocidal, fundamentalist robots known as ‘Cylons’.  The Cylons, originally created by Colonial scientists to serve as slave labour in the Colonies, eventually launch a devastating war of rebellion and revenge on the Colonies.  The series follows a handful of human survivors as they flee across the galaxy, pursued by the beings that their parents had created.  Though Battlestar ended its run early this year, a new series, Caprica (the name of one of a Colonial homeworld), which will begin its run in 2010, explores the human world of the Colonies at the time of the creation of the original Cylons.  While it toys with familiar science-fiction and horror themes about the creation of life and the terrible responsibility that this act brings with it, there is something that is even more intriguing about the excellent feature-length pilot episode that was released recently on DVD.  While Battlestar Galactica had a good deal to say about religion, and particularly about the ways in which we in the West view Islam, Caprica adds an interesting dimension to the series’ commentary on religion.

Caprica: Alessandra Torresani as Zoe

In the Caprica pilot, we learn that the fundamental motivation for the development of the original Cylons was a fear of death and the refusal to accept the death of a loved one.  Daniel Graystone, the man most responsible for the creation of the Cylon technology, is driven by a disquieting mixture of greed, ambition, and grief.  Graystone is, in grand Battlestar tradition, is a deeply flawed and compellingly human character.  There is an interesting and troubling parallel between the way Graystone approaches his research and the way that he treats his human daughter that speaks volumes about the ambivalent place that science occupies in the universe of Battlestar and Caprica.  Early in the pilot, Graystone’s precocious teenage daughter Zoe is killed in a human bombing executed by a member of an underground monotheistic sect (the Colonists are polytheists).  Zoe, a secret member of the same sect, has created an effective and sentient virtual copy of herself that Graystone discovers only after her death.  He forcefully appropriates the virtual Zoe and uses her as the basis for the first working Cylon model.  The pilot ends with a truly chilling image of a hulking metal Cylon Centurion, developed for military use, pleading for help in a halting, adolescent girl’s voice.  Though there are real questions as to Graystone’s ultimate motives, it is obvious that he is deeply affected by Zoe’s death and his initial trials with the virtual Zoe and the Cylon bodies are motivated by a desire to undo her death, to deny the basic fact of mortality.  Graystone is suspect in that he is overly ambitious and unscrupulous, but also because he is a deeply rational man unable to face this one troubling aspect of reality.  His attempts to counter death with technology will end, we know before he begins, is the Cylon-led genocide that almost wipes out the human race only a few decades later.

Though this requires a good deal more study before it is anything more than simple conjecture, it seems that the fear of immortality is an increasingly common theme in contemporary genre fiction.  To cite a not insignificant example, in the Harry Potter books, the main villain, Lord Voldemort, is driven largely by a quest for immortality, or by a fear of death.  Likewise, in the lamentable Star Wars prequels, we learn that the motivation driving Anakin Skywalker, who eventually is transformed into über-villain Darth Vader, is again both the fear of death and the refusal to accept that everything must die.  There is something interesting here for the study of religion in that there are deep connections between ideas of mortality and life after death and the Judeo-Christian religious milieu that these texts have grown out of.  If we are to believe Peter Berger’s classic 1969 study, The Sacred Canopy, religion, at least as he conceived it from a largely Eurocentric and Christian-centred perspective, is tied fundamentally to the spectre of death.  Berger writes of the importance of death in religion, which he sees as a social phenomenon which creates a sort of ‘canopy’ of explanations and motivations that helps people make sense of their world:

Its legitimating power, however, has another important dimension – the integration into a comprehensive nomos of precisely those marginal situations in which the reality of everyday life is put in question …The confrontation with death (be it actually witnessing the death of other or anticipating one’s own death in the imagination) constitutes what is probably the most important marginal situation.  Death radically challenges all socially objectivated definitions of reality – of the world, of others, and of self.  Death radically puts into question the taken-for-granted, ‘business as usual’ attitude in which one exists in everyday life … Insofar as the knowledge of death cannot be avoided in any society, legitimations of the reality of the social world in the face of death are decisive requirements in any society.  The importance of religion in such legitimations is obvious.  Religion, then, maintains the socially defined reality by legitimating marginal situations in terms of an all-encompassing sacred reality.[1]

He concludes, a few pages later:

The world of sacred order, by virtue of being an ongoing human production, is ongoingly confronted with the disordering forces of human existence in time.  The precariousness of every such world is revealed each time men forget or doubt the reality-denying dreams of ‘madness’, and most importantly, each time they consciously encounter death.  Every human society is, in the last resort, man banded together in the face of death.  The power of religion depends, in the last resort, upon the credibility of the banners it puts in the hands of men as they stand before death, or more accurately, as they walk, inevitably, toward it.[2]

Though many scholars have challenged Berger’s ideas (including Berger himself, who came in later decades to disagree with many of his own conclusions), The Sacred Canopy is deservedly a classic in the field.  We have reasons to take him and these ideas seriously.  Though we may be suspect of how reductive his thesis is, there can be little denying that religion and death are in many ways intertwined, especially in the Abrahamic monotheisms.

What does this emerging fear not of mortality but of immortality tell us about the state of religion in the Western world?  It seems odd in an environment that is undergoing something of a religious revival (to use a horribly loose and loaded phrase) that the drive for immortality plays such a destructive role in a number of prominent texts.  If there is indeed a growing suspicion with those who strive for immortality, would this mean that there is also a growing suspicion of a certain kind of religious thought and practice – perhaps reflecting the fact that the writings of some militants from various traditions have given immortality (and its dozens of willing virgin girls or its empty planets to inhabit with one’s innumerable wives) have given the afterlife a bad name?  Or would this mean that contemporary religion is becoming more and more oriented towards this world rather than any other.  Though both of these possibilities likely get to the truth of the matter in different ways, it is the latter suggestion that seems to be more compelling, because there is something profoundly this-worldly about much of modern Western religious practice and its sacralisation (perhaps even divinisation) of the self.  The relentless drive for ‘self-improvement’ or ‘self-realisation’ that is part and parcel of so much of contemporary religious thought and practice, is necessarily a this-worldly matter.  This is an interesting development in that it represents something of a return to the prehistoric religious world that early sociologists like Emile Durkheim and Max Weber described (or, depending on how sympathetic we are to their work, created), which was largely focused on mundane, this-worldly concerns.

This also raises a further question: if this is truly is what is happening out there in world beyond the ivory tower where we in the Dunedin School find ourselves working (though it is in reality not a tower of any sort but a clapped-out two-story house built in the 1920s and later converted into offices with little care or subtlety), what might be driving this change?  Turning again to fictional narrative to approach this question, the Canadian writer Douglas Coupland, in his brilliant 1993 novel, Life After God, speculates on the reasons that his characters are unable or unwilling to think about another world:

Ours was a life lived in paradise and thus it rendered any discussion of transcendental ideas pointless.  Politics, we supposed, existed elsewhere in a televised non-paradise; death was something similar to recycling.  Life was charmed but without politics or religion.  It was the life of the children of the children of pioneers – life after God – a life of earthy salvation on the edge of heaven.  Perhaps this is the finest thing to which we may aspire, the life of peace, the blurring between dream life and real life – and yet I find myself speaking these words with a sense of doubt.  I think there was a trade-off somewhere along the line.  I think the price we paid for our golden life was an inability to fully believe in love; instead we gained an irony that scorched everything it touched.  And I wonder if this irony is the price we paid for the loss of God.  But then I remind myself we are living creatures – we have religious impulses – we must – and yet into what cracks do these impulses flow in a world without religion?  It is something I think about every day.  Sometimes I think it is the only thing worth thinking about.^[3]

In line with the tendency observable in Caprica, Coupland tells us elsewhere that embracing mortality is one of the crucial steps in developing a deeper understanding of the world.  In his Polaroids from the Dead, a collection of essays and journalistic writings, Coupland tells a parabolic story about an ‘enchanted city,’ a city charmed but without rain, and a visit paid to it by a skeleton.  The story is a scathing condemnation of contemporary culture, and particularly its ignorance of the possibility of an afterlife and a purpose to the enigmatic figure of death.  Here Coupland compares the enchanted city, which is in reality a highly disenchanted place, with the genuine enchantment that the interloping skeleton, as both a metaphor for the hidden and as the literal presence of the dead, brings with him.  The skeleton tells the city’s people, who plead for help in making it rain:

‘It is simple … While you live in mortal splendour – with glass elevators and grapes in December – the price you pay for your comfort is a collapsed vision of heaven – the loss of the ability to see pictures in your heads of an afterlife.  You pray for rain, but you also are praying for pictures in your heads that will renew your faith in an afterlife … I am the skeleton that lies deep within each and every one of you.  I am the skeleton just underneath your lips, your eyeballs, your flesh – the skeleton that silently carries both your heart and your mind’.^[4]

Quite contrary to Berger’s concept of the ‘sacred canopy’, in which religion plays a role in protecting people from death, Caprica, along with the work of Coupland (and doubtless many others),  suggests that embracing mortality and the spectre of death may in fact be a characteristic religious gesture of our times.

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[1] Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (New York: Anchor Press,1969): 42-44.

[2] Berger, Canopy, 51.

[3] Douglas Coupland, Life After God (New York: Pocket Books, 1994): 273-274.

[4] Douglas Coupland, Polaroids from the Dead (Toronto: HarperCollins, 1996): 59-60.  It is worth noting that the vision of the dancing skeleton reappears in somewhat modified from in Coupland’s 2004 novel, Eleanor Rigby (London: Fourth Estate) in the form of a visionary story about a forsaken community of farmers on a vast prairie who face conflicting information from above. Images of bones and intimations of mortality play an important part in the slowly unfolding story of the farmers. See Coupland, Eleanor, 91-92, 98-99, 102, 159-166, and 248.

Higher Criticism as Higher Faith

That mighty oak of Eighteenth Century biblical criticism, Johann Gottfried Eichhorn, had to put up with a lot of polemic from the conservative reactionists of his day. Eichhorn knew that he was probably going to get unfairly snorted at by the great unwashed masses:

“… party spirit will perhaps for a couple of decades snort at the Higher Criticism, instead of rewarding it with the thanks which are really due to it…”

Oh, the callous ingratitude! And if there was snorting, you can bet your bottom dollar there would’ve been a fair bit of unkindly gaffawing as well. But what I find interesting, all snorting and gaffawing aside, is that Eichhorn’s “Higher Criticism” is itself strongly religious in motivation. This wasn’t a case of some battle between Wissenschaft and faith. The division was more subtle than that. Rather than being motivated by opposition to faith, Eichhorn imagined his method was buttressing it. In fact, he proudly emphasises that his Higher Criticism has uncovered the religiosity of the biblical compilers in a deeper and more profound way:

“…For first, the credibility of the book [i.e. the Bible] obviously gains by it. Did ever a historical inquirer go more religiously to work with his sources than the arranger of these? He is so certain of the genuineness and truth of his documents that he gives them as they are…”

And so the Higher Criticism not only reveals the deep religiosity of the texts like no previous reading had allowed, but demonstrates their historical veracity like no earlier methodology had ever shown before. As a result of historical-criticism’s multiple divisions of the scriptures into so many sources, the student of Israelite history could now corroborate the truth of the Bible with newly discovered independent witnesses (i.e. other parts of the Bible):

“…The gain which history, interpretation, and criticism derive from this discovery is exceptionally great. The historian is no longer obliged to rely on one reporter in the history of the most distant past; and in the duplicated narratives of the same event he is not obliged to force into harmony the unessential dfferences in accessory circumstances by artificial devices. He sees in such divergences the marks of independent origin, and finds in their agreement in the main important mutual confirmation.”
(Johann Gottfried Eichhorn, Introduction to the Old Testament (1780), II.295 §424)

From the start, or at least for Eichhorn, the historical-critical method was in no way opposed to belief. Instead, the Higher Criticism was seen as providing a new basis on which to believe the Bible after the grounds for belief had shifted to the empirical and rational. He had found a light shining through the fog.

The Unofficial Record/The Haunted City (Western Europe)

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Europe, Hauntings, Unofficial Record

Furthering our discussion of the unofficial record of the modern cityscape, we move out past the borders of our own fair Dunedin and out into the wider world.  For your viewing pleasure, a few photographs of the unofficial city in the European context.

Brussels, Belgium. Original 35mm photograph ©2002 by Eric Repphun.

This is a personal favourite.  Though this may betray my neo-Romantic tendencies, there is something immensely comforting to see these two shadow people take time for something as unnecessary as a kiss amidst the rubbish of contemporary living.

Lugano, Switzerland. Original 35mm photograph ©2002 by Eric Repphun.

Granada, Spain. Original 35mm photograph ©2002 by Eric Repphun.

London, UK. Original 35mm photograph ©2002 by Eric Repphun.

The fact that this last one was taken in sight of the National Gallery makes it all the more applicable, and all the more chilling.

Kurt Noll on Religious Studies versus Theology

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Biblical Studies, Chronicle Review, Kurt Noll, religious studies, Theology

Kurt Noll’s op-ed in The Chronicle Review, ‘The Ethics of Being a Theologian’ (27 July 2009) has generated a fair bit of discussion. As always, he’s controversial and stimulating. At best he makes succinct points that cut through the BS which is the unfortunate yet not always inappropriate acronym of Biblical Studies. At worst, his near positivism could do with some nuancing.

Noll makes great statements like this, which might resonate with many people involved in religious or biblical studies:

“Most people do not understand what religious study really is. Professors of religion are often confused with, or assumed to be allies of, professors of theology. The reason for the confusion is no secret. All too often, even at public universities, the religion department is peopled by theologians…”

And then there is Noll’s contrast between religious/biblical studies and theology:

“Religious study attempts to advance knowledge by advancing our understanding about why and how humans are religious, what religion actually does, and how religion has evolved historically… Theology also views itself as an academic discipline, but it does not attempt to advance knowledge. Rather, theologians practice and defend religion.”

There is something quite true in this contrast, in that some methodologies are inherently better than others at finding new aspects of what is true and real. Astronomy wins hands down over Astrology, for example. But when Noll talks about non-theological methodologies which are “unencumbered by overtly ideological agendas”, everything turns on Noll’s use of the word “overtly”. Theology is overtly a means to use data to defend existing presuppositions. By contrast, in biblical and religious studies, at best, our ideologies are less overt. They’re still there, of course, as “the trendy postmodern” thinkers highlighted. Yet a fundamental difference exists in that so many more of the presuppositions of religious and biblical studies are themselves open to challenge and reformulation. It’s not enough to just point the finger and say, “You’ve got presuppositions too!” Well, d’uh. Of course we do. Instead, the salient question is this: “What kind and how many presuppositions aren’t you willing to challenge?” Sure, in practice, our willingness to change our presuppositions and paradigms might be slow. But only in theology are too many such changes prevented on a priori grounds, and only in theology is this defence of so much of what is already believed held up as a virtue.

The difference between serving your ideology and being open to data is always one of degree. But it is this very relative difference which makes the distinction between theology and academic studies so fundamental.

The Very Best of Haunted Dunedin

Tags

Alice in Wonderland, Photography, smile you fuckers

For your viewing pleasure, a photo of one of the finest examples of Dunedin’s unofficial record, of the indelible stamp of human haunting, taken by the author on the corner of Princes and Dowling Streets some time in 2004.

Dunedin graffiti from an unknown artist. Original 35mm photograph by Eric Repphun © 2004.

Cinema as Exorcism (two): District 9 as Postcolonial Science Fiction

Tags

allegory, apartheid, Battlestar Galactica, District 9, science fiction, South Africa

Lest we allow this to become totally dominated by Deane’s prolific nature, now for something completely different …

Continuing on with the occasional ‘Cinema as Exorcism’ series, we will be delving into the murky waters of the postcolonial world with a trip to District 9, the very fine debut film from South African director Neill Blomkamp, produced by local boy made good Peter Jackson.  The film is an allegorical exploration of the ongoing costs of European colonialism for Africa and its peoples.  Though in a very different sense, this is the film as exorcism, a visceral grappling with the ghosts of the past, particularly that of South African apartheid, though some of the film’s message is more universal.

District 9 is set on an alternative timeline in the city of Johannesburg.  In a twist on the classic science fiction story of alien invasion – the sight of the giant saucer hanging over the city evokes texts as diverse as the film Independence Day and the old television series V – the alien visitors arrive on Earth not as conquerors but as starving, demoralised and leaderless refugees.  Their massive spacecraft, which has a far more functional look than those we are used to seeing, is a derelict wreck, stopped over the city not for strategic reasons, but because that’s where it happened to break down.  The South African government, at first pleased that the aliens had chosen their country, soon finds itself with more than a million alien visitors, who they herd into the titular District 9.  The narrative of the film opens as the private company in charge of alien affairs – the sinister and all too believable Multinational United (MNU) – sets out to evict all of the aliens and move them to District 10, a tent city hundreds of kilometres outside Johannesburg that is, even in MNU’s estimates, nothing less than a concentration camp.  Though on the surface, the film is thrilling and intriguing enough to be getting on with, it would be a great disservice to read it literally.  On one level, it certainly is a story about aliens living in South Africa, but on another level, it is about something altogether more serious and something far more unsettling.

From Neill Blomkamp's District 9

The analogy between the aliens and the South African segregationist policy of apartheid, which officially was ended only in 1994, is highly specific: District 9 is a teeming, improvised ghetto that bears a distinct resemblance to South African townships; the aliens speak in a language that includes clicking noises that recall many native South African languages; the aliens are given ‘slave names’ by the government; the official policy is of segregation and containment, all perpetuated under the guise of maintaining order and working for the greater good.  The film focuses on one Wikis Van De Merwe, the MNU office drone who is given the unenviable task of handing out millions of eviction notices to prepare for the forced exodus to District 10.  Wikus (an astonishingly accomplished performance by Sharlto Copley in his first acting role), sporting an Afrikaans accent and a bureaucratic moustache, heads blindly into District 9 armed with a clipboard, a small army of MNU mercenaries, and his own blithe confidence that the aliens are inferior creatures that must be treated with a firm hand.  As the most important human character, Wikus is our guide to a truly alien world, and is it through his experiences that the narrative mirrors not only apartheid but also the open-ended process of reconciliation.  When Wikus turns on his employer and begins to fight alongside the one alien – given the name Christopher Johnson – that attempts to engineer an escape, he does so initially more out of self-interest than in the interests of social justice, asking implicit questions about the driving force behind the end of legal segregation in real-world South Africa.

One of the things that make Wikus both compelling and chilling is that his casual racism towards the aliens is convincing, an uncomfortable mirror of apartheid specifically but one that reflects racism more generally.  Wikus, like many of the people in his world, call the aliens ‘prawns’ for the simple reason that they do resemble actually resemble bipedal shellfish.  This is not merely a descriptive but is also a distancing, dehumanising (using that term very broadly) technique that speaks volumes of the ways in which the aliens are treated by the government, by MNU, and by South Africans of all colours.  The film is clearly intended as a critique of apartheid and it gives us ample reason to pity the aliens and to deplore the way they are treated.  Things are more complicated than this, however, and it needs a good deal more analysis that I can offer here (On a more personal note, throughout the film, I found myself wondering just how much of the film’s allegorical subtlety I was missing, having experienced apartheid South Africa from afar while growing up in the United States).  The film also toys with contemporary racial stereotypes, particularly in its depiction of the only humans who have significant contact with the aliens; a gang of Nigerian criminals who reap the profits of selling the aliens raw meat or trading their advanced weapons for cat food, a favourite alien delicacy.  The Nigerians are portrayed as savage and coldblooded as well as superstitious, almost begging the question as to why the film chooses these as its most significant black characters.

The film’s critique of the treatment of the aliens, impoverished and trapped in a country where they are both feared and hated, extends allegory to its real-world context, where memories of the townships are still very fresh.  The film is about apartheid, but it is also, again allegorically, about what has happened afterwards.  In one of the film’s most striking images, in a long shot, we see Wikus arriving home after a gruelling day of serving eviction notices, the alien mothership hanging over his comfortable middle class home with a massive unacknowledged, almost unconscious weight.  There are, the film suggests, truly horrifying things hanging over the world of men like Wikus, who perform(ed) utterly irrational acts of prejudice and injustice in the name of safety and rationality, even after apartheid as an official policy has ended.

One name for another, a part for the whole: the historic violence of Apartheid can always be treated as  a metonymy.  In its past as well as in its present.  By diverse paths (condensation, displacement, expression, or representation), one can always decipher through its singularity so many other kinds of violence going on in the world.  At once part, casue, effect, example, what is happening here translates what takes place here, always here, wherever one is and whererever one looks, closest to home.  Infinite responsibility, therefore, no rest allowed for any form of good conscience.

Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx (1994): xv.

This is the first major African-made (though Blomkamp spent much of his life in Canada) science fiction film and it to the makers’ credit that this is a story that could be told only in Africa.  It is also a story that could only be told as science fiction.  In its almost unrelentingly dark vision of humanity, District 9 is a deeply subversive film.  The distancing effect of the fantastic elements of science fiction – faster than light travel, interstellar civilisations, etc. – allows science fiction to tell such difficult stories and ask difficult questions in ways that more classically realist genres of storytelling cannot.  Science fiction is, as Peter Nicholls notes, both ‘the great modern literature of metaphor’ and ‘pre-eminently the modern literature not of physics, but of metaphysics’.[1] To expand on this topic a bit further, we need only to look at the stunning ‘re-boot’ of the television series Battlestar Galactica (2003-2009), another contemporary science fiction text that uses a carefully created allegory to deconstruct the postcolonial situation and to ask unsettling questions about the colonial powers, in the case the United States.  Given this, as Brian Ott notes, it is ‘a profound mistake’ to interpret the genre ‘literally’.  Writing of Battlestar Galactica’s robotic antagonists, the Cylons, he argues, ‘The issue is not what Cylons are, but what they represent’.[2] The same is true of the aliens in District 9, which, like Battlestar Galactica, is told in a visual language that mixes the fantastic with a gritty, handheld, quasi-documentary realism.  As we have seen, what the aliens in District 9 represent remains an open question, but the first step to answering this question is to recognize the allegorical nature of the narrative itself.

Though we always be careful to attribute too much to authorial intention, it is worth noting that the new Battlestar Galactica is self-consciously allegorical, as executive producer David Eick told the Calgary Herald:

To me, the old sci-fi novels – the [Robert] Heinleins, the [Isaac] Asimovs, the [Ray] Bradburys, the [Philip K.] Dicks and so forth – were all about allegorical sociopolitical commentary.  So it really wasn’t so much about coming up with a new idea.  It was going back to an old one, which is, ‘Let’s use science fiction as the prism or as the smokescreen – as it was sort of invented to be – to discuss and investigate the issues of the day’.[3]

This is true on a more general level as well, as the great American Marxist literary critic Frederic Jameson notes of serious science fiction (no space opera allowed):

I would [base] the necessity of ideological analysis on the very nature of SF itself: for me it is only incidentally about science or technology, and even more incidentally about unusual psychic states.  It seems to me that SF is in its very nature a symbolic meditation on history itself, comparable in its emergence as a new genre to the birth of the historical novel around the time of the French Revolution … If this is the case, then, surely we have as readers not been equal to the capacity of the form itself until we have resituated SF into that vision of the relationship of man to social and political and economic forces which is its historical element.[4]

Barry M. Malzberg argues that there is something deeply challenging about the tendency towards allegory in science fiction, which, he argues, explains why it has never been a particularly popular or critically respected genre (though this has arguably changed since he wrote in the 1980s):

It is my assumption that it never will be [popular].  Science fiction is too threatening.  At the center, science fiction is a dangerous literature.  It represents the beast born in the era of enlightenment to snarl at the heart of all intellectual and technological advance … We know not what we do; the engines can eat us up – this is what science fiction has been saying (among many other things) for a long time now.[5]

District 9, like Battlestar Galactica, is just such a dangerous, symbolic meditation on history and both are in many ways exemplary science fiction.  In a formal sense, they correspond to Darko Suvin’s classic definition of science fiction as ‘literature of cognitive estrangement’.[6] Science fiction thus hinges on the collision between what is known and what is unknown, what is and what might be.  Battlestar Galactica’s ‘naturalistic science fiction’ – the phrase showrunner Ronald D. Moore coined to describe the show’s style – and District 9’s mix of documentary technique and the fantastic are a perfect visual complement to Suvin’s meditations on literature.  It is interesting to note also that both of these texts give credence to Suvin’s argument that science-fiction is a literature for times of uncertainty: ‘SF, which focuses on the variable and future-bearing elements from the empirical environment, is found predominantly in the great whirlpool periods of history’[7] and to John Rieder’s claim, in Colonialism and the Rise of Science Fiction, that science fiction emerges particularly in once-powerful societies that have begun to feel threatened, though this is more the case with Battlestar Galactica than with Blomkamp’s film.

There is perhaps a further argument to be made, at least tentatively: science fiction is genre most suited for telling postcolonial stories.  Though on first glance it might seem that this is true only of telling stories about the victors in the colonial struggle, given that it is the victors who have the greatest access to the technological apparatus so crucial to science fiction; however, Blomkamp, and to a lesser extent Moore and Eick, are showing that there are ways to give voice to those silenced in colonial contexts by using the same genre conventions.  This is, it must be noted, not an entirely original conceit.  Rieder, in fact, argues, ‘The thesis that colonialism is a significant historical context for early science fiction is not an extravagant one’.[8] Expanding on this, he writes:

science fiction exposes something that colonialism imposes.  However … colonialism is not simply the reality that science fiction mystifies.  I am not trying to argue that colonialism is science fiction’s hidden truth.  I want to show that it is part of the genre’s texture, a persistent, important component of its displaced references to history, its engagement in ideological production, and its construction of the possible and the imaginable.[9]

Thus science fiction is in some senses dependent upon European colonialism for its meaning and for its very existence.  There can be little doubt that science fiction as we know it emerged – and I will go out on a limb here and argue that Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein is the first work of proper science fiction – during a period of rapid European expansion.  In an important sense, it also emerged as a reaction to, and at times a reaction against the same technological innovations that made colonial expansion and administration possible in the first place.  Magali Rennes writes of Battlestar Galactica from a postcolonial perspective, and much of what she argues here could also be said about District 9 and its deliberately ambiguous and deeply complex meditation on the legacy of colonialism:

Battlestar Galactica invites us, as viewers, to examine how we occupy ambivalent positions within the legacy of our own colonial family romance.  The series gives us all petty satisfaction to call Cylons ‘toasters’.  And yet it compels us to look in our mental kitchens to see whose face peers out of our toaster’s mirrored side.  It titillates us with the sexual tension between one of us and one of ‘them’ – the exoticized Cylon.  And yet it asks us to prick our own skin and see how our blood is difference from any other human being’s.  It thrills us with the chase of the enemy Cylons.  And yet it begs us to consider what fundamental lack lies within us to continue racist traditions towards our own social ‘enemies.  Will we pass on the legacy of the colonial family romance to our children or will we, as children, disown our European heritage for new parents … and shape the things to come?  In this ‘one nation’, ‘indivisible’, who is the ‘we’ in ‘so say we all?’[10]

Both Battlestar Galactica and District 9 are indeed dangerous fictions, and as we struggle to exorcise the horrors of the long, destructive, and ultimately failed project of European colonialism, we are the better for having them.

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[1] Peter Nicholls, ‘The Monsters and the Critics’, in P. Nicholls (ed.), Explorations of the Marvelous (London: Fontana, 1978: pp. 170-196): 180, 183.

[2] Brian L. Ott, ‘(Re)Framing Fear: Equipment for Living in a Post-9/11 World’, in T. Potter and C. W. Marshall (eds.) Cylons in America: Critical Studies in Battlestar Galactica (London: Continuum, 2008: 13-26): 19.

[3] ‘Battlestar Expands Horizons: Sci-fi references to Middle East impress critics’, Calgary Herald, 7 October 2006: D4.

[4] Jameson, F. (with M. Reynolds and F. Rottensteiner), ‘Change, SF, and Marxism: Open or Closed Universes?’, Science Fiction Studies 1, 4 (1974): 275-276.

[5] Barry N. Malzberg, ‘The Number of the Beast’, in J. Gunn and M. Candelaria (eds.) Speculations on Speculation: Theories of Science Fiction (Toronto: The Scarecrow Press, 2005: 37-57): 40.

[6] Darko Suvin, ‘Estrangement and Cognition’, in J. Gunn and M. Candelaria (eds.) Speculations on Speculation: Theories of Science Fiction (Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, INC, 2005: 23-36): 25.

[7] Suvin, ‘Estrangement’, 26.

[8] John Rieder, Colonialism and the Rise of Science Fiction (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2008): 2.

[9] Rieder, Colonialism, 15.

[10] Magali Rennes, ‘Kiss Me, Now Die!’, in J. Steiff and T. D. Tamplin (eds.) Battlestar Galactica and Philosophy: Mission Accomplished or Mission Frakked Up? (Chicago: Open Court, 2008: 63-76): 75-76.

Mishnah Allows Brokeback Mountain Same-Sex Relationships

Tags

Brokeback Mountain, brokebacking, Mishnah, R. Judah, Rabbis, Same-sex relationships, sheep

Brokeback Mountain - Rabbis are cool with that

The 2005 film Brokeback Mountain features two manly sheepherders, Ennis and Jack, who sleep out in the wild on a remote mountain range, in a single tent – at first under separate blankets. But in a moment of passion, the two discover the social construction of the norms for male sexuality in an very immediate way – although Ennis spends the rest of the film struggling between his desire and societal expectations.

However, those canny sages of old, the tannaitic Rabbis, already knew about such things. Although it isn’t uneqivocal, the Mishnah declares its approval for  ‘brokebacking‘.

“Rabbi Judah says: an unmarried man may not herd cattle, nor may two unmarried men sleep under the same cloak. But the Sages permit it.”
(Mishnah, Kiddushin 4:14)

Well, that’s a very practical approach to legislating same-sex relationships, isn’t it? After all, the Rabbis probably realised that if they were to clamp down on such things altogether, how many manly sheepherders would be still putting up their hands to herd sheep in remote mountain ranges?

See:
Moss JA and Ulmer RB, “Two men under one cloak” – the Sages permit it: homosexual marriage in Judaism.” Journal of Homosexuality 55.1 (2008): 71-105

A Bible Commentary on The Book of Job

Tags

Evil, Job, theodicy

This video fairly much nails the key elements of the Book of Job, a text which both informs and confounds every attempt to consider ‘the problem of evil’.

“[Job’s friends] debated back and forth until God himself, literally, couldn’t take any more of their shit.”