Living Vicariously in Uncanny Valley.

Colin Ledwith

‘It may be true that the uncanny is nothing else than a hidden, familiar thing that has undergone repression and then emerged from it.’ (1)

The ‘uncanny’, which is the English approximation of the German word unheimlich, was described by Sigmund Freud as an especial form of fear. Difficult to define, the term provokes philosophical debate, reaching far beyond everyday shorthand for the ‘eerie’ or ‘strange’ to re-examine central ideas concerning perception, identity, narrative and language. ‘Freud writes that the uncanny is associated with the bringing to light what was hidden and secret, distinguishing the uncanny from the simply fearful by defining it as ‘that class of the terrifying which leads us back to something long known to us, once very familiar.’ (2)

In his seminal essay on the subject of the uncanny, Freud uses Ernst Hoffmann’s short story Der Sandmann (1816) to illustrate the central, yet subliminal phenomenon associated with the uncanny; the unsettling sensation of the familiar discovered at the heart of the unfamiliar, or vice versa. Nathanial, the protagonist of Der Sandmann is troubled to the point of hysteria by fears developed in childhood, which he embodies in the nursery tale figure of the sandman. Nathanial’s arrested child-like terror is further augmented by his inability to separate the imagined figure from actual occurrences in his own house, thus elaborate constructed fiction and reality converge and blur as the story proceeds. (3)

In Freud’s recounting of Hoffmann’s work, other important factors in defining the uncanny are revealed. There is the sense of the bizarre, foreign and ungraspable. It is present when involuntary patterns repeat. It can arise from a sense of déjà vu, when inanimate objects appear to be conscious. It is felt in the presence of doubt, in the company of ghosts, and in the dark, alone. In contemporary life, it is perhaps present in the glitch and hum of modern technology; disembodied voices on the phone, computer generated imagery and virtual realities. The uncanny can be ugly and horrific. But it can also be disturbingly beautiful and verge on the ecstatic in complexities; the shifting and unstable gap between narrated past and narrating present, the fallible, selective and manipulative nature of memory, the subjective and relative status of the ‘reality’ of past experience in constant temporal and narrative slippage.

Film theory historically stresses temporality at the expense of spatiality, promoting complex narrative rather than compelling visual environments. Contemporary digital filmmaking overrides these conventional frameworks and assimilates the uncanny through the manipulations of environment, form and narrative. These creative possibilities have been unleashed relatively recently and reflect a shift from the computer as a tool, primarily understood in terms of information storage and numerical calculation, to the computer as one-stop medium for creative production, communication and global distribution.

The effect of computers in the motion picture industry has been profound. Until recently, external image montage, in which shots are inter-cut for emotional and associative impact (think of an impressionistic series of rapid edit shots in a movie, often used to convey a dreamlike, drunk, or drugged sensation to the viewer), were the only visual tool available to subvert narrative in film.

Now, through the work of computer generated imagery companies such as ILM and Digital Domain, we can experience the unsettling disquiet of the uncanny as montage within a single film frame. The traditional warning signals we are subconsciously trained to look for to alert us to the artificiality and construct of the manufactured image we see on the screen are now often absent; no matte lines, differences in film stock grain, or inaccurate image-scaling. Images within images are a visual language we recognise. Images seamlessly bonded to images within the same frame are not. We are no longer aware of any manipulation of the filmic image precisely because of the perfection of CGI manipulation; film becomes ‘unreal’, ‘unnatural’ or uncanny.

This paradoxical effect has a name: the ‘uncanny valley.’ A concept coined by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori, the uncanny valley argues that computer created simulacra of reality seem alive and convincing as long as they’re relatively low-resolution. Think of a comic strip for instance; with only a few lines on a page Charles Schulz created a vivid world and convincing emotions for his characters in Peanuts. When simulacra are low-res, the human brain fills in associative detail to help the image seem real. But when the CGI image approaches photo-reality, a reversal occurs. In Ryan Gander’s Is This Guilt In You Too (the study of a car in a field), we subconsciously scan the image in much greater depth and begin to focus on missed detail. The image realism suddenly plunges into a valley and becomes uncanny: unnervingly real, yet flawed and alien in an indefinable sense.

Freedom of image manipulation with film footage shot in the ‘real world’ and ‘cut and paste’ appropriation of archival footage through sophisticated computer editing is also freely accessible to anyone with time and a little money to spare. The rapid advancement of technology and recent availability of affordable-yet-powerful digital cameras, image capture equipment and editing software create complex narrative possibilities in the box-bedroom. As little as a decade ago similar possibilities would have been near impossible to achieve in a high-end post-production studio. The same technology further provides an instantaneous global distribution point for grassroots cultural production and self-publishing, as web outlets such as YouTube and flash file sharing sites proliferate.

The divide between documentary and artistry is blurred by technology, yet the credibility of a lens-based image still often relies upon the concept of ‘truth’ or reliable reportage. If a scene is constructed to appear real or spontaneous, or to provoke a specific reaction from the viewer, truth and honesty will be disputed. At the same instant, capturing a scene ‘as it is’ is impossible, as the photographer ultimately determines the look of the image, as in the Phil Collins film How to make a Refugee. When it comes to photography, agency, truth and representation are often discussed in moralistic terms, as dilemmas, and artistic freedom is not readily granted. In his last significant work Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes reflected on this symbolic meaning of the documentary photographic image, and its subjective quality, ‘that which pierces the viewer.’ Barthes explained that a photographic image is not a solid representation of ‘what is’ as ‘what was’ and therefore ‘what has ceased to be’. The photographic image does not make reality solid but serves as a reminder of the world’s inconsistent and ever-changing state. (4)

Today, this process of theoretical deconstruction has become cultural lyricism. In Subculture: The Meaning of Style, Dick Hebdidge defined punk’s ordered anarchy: ‘The punk subculture… signified chaos at every level, but this was only possible because the style itself was so thoroughly ordered.’ (5) Recently we witnessed a global saturation of the personal camera through the convergence of technology in the cell phone. Nowadays, nearly every citizen in the developing world is armed with a powerful recording device, and with the addition of a laptop, a powerful editing studio. It is this ordering or administration of newly deployed reality, signified by raw camera work and imperfect images (imperfections which confirm their status as ‘real’ images), that we witness the final codification of destruction.

Ironically, the radically deconstructive narrative and aesthetic possibilities of our digital age are currently almost entirely absent from mainstream cinema. The more experimental, raw aesthetics of filmmaking emerge in some strange quarters, the most startling cinema of recent times perhaps coming from the Iraq conflict: the 2003 United Sates military film of a dishevelled, recently captured Saddam Hussein in what looked like the prologue to a snuff movie, or indeed, the grainy colour saturated footage of Hussein’s undignified execution in late 2006 recorded on a cell phone camera.

Sergeant Wesley Wooden, a combat cameraman has said that ‘Basically, what we’re trained for is that the camera is our first weapon… We’re lucky enough to carry pistols. It gives you some more protection. You can shoot and shoot at the same time.’ (6) In a surreal culture clash, the joint Combat Camera Program, part of U.S. Military Visual Information Directorate, adopts the tactics of guerrilla filmmaking, the New Wave and the shoot-and-go immediacy of post-punk film in it’s ‘Video Flyaway Kit’, described thus: ‘All items are fitted into one case which can easily be handled by one person. It provides a single videographer with the capability to acquire video imagery, edit and compress the imagery using the laptop, and transmit the video clip via INMARSAT. This is an ideal system for use by a two man documentation team.’ (7)

The military producing some of the most arresting cinema verite of our age is something Paul Virilio predicted, writing that the gestures of surveillance, speed and vision have for a long time linked cinema and the military: ‘one could go on forever listing the technological weapons, the panoply of war, the aesthetic of the electronic battlefield.’ (8) The pre-eminence of the military as a movie production company using guerrilla film-making tactics is understandable given the collision of theory and irony jamming the channels of cultural distribution during the ‘80’s and ‘90’s. The self-aware, ironic statement by Sgt. Wooden, who recognises that the languages of warfare and perception are bound together, is made possible because cultural theory has been extensively mainstreamed into popular culture over the past twenty years. Post-modern theory, which essentially worked to make visible the codes that underpin cultural production, has been replaced by a context that has assimilated and ingrained theory into cultural production. Thus divisions such as avant-garde and mainstream, theoretical and naïve, are rendered practically meaningless as filmmaking in the digital present struggles to define its fluid, hybrid multiplicities.

The assimilation of cultural theory into the material of popular culture is evident not only in production and content, but also the permanently archived format of the consumer DVD, easily available and garnering publicity in multiple virtual cultural arenas, ranging from Amazon.com to personal blogs. Films are permanently demystified, stripped of their aura with the addition of a wealth of extra material: out-takes (often produced specifically for the DVD), production notes, secondary narration, cast and crew interviews, in ways described by Walter Benjamin in his prescient 1935 essay The work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. In 2006 a short CGI movie entitled Elephants Dream was released for mainstream theatrical distribution. Made entirely with ‘open source’ (copyright free) software, it was also released on DVD under creative commons licensing. The film was groundbreaking in that all 3D models, animatics and software are included on the DVD free for any use. In a further model of cultural assimilation, the Warp record label recently released advertising promos and short experimental films in the ‘Director’s Label’ DVD series by Spike Jonze, Michael Gondry, and Chris Cunningham, illustrating the extent to which film culture has changed: both media and content melding into a powerful new cultural form that exists at the far edges of what used to be called film or video.

This assimilation of theory not only in terms of narrative content, but also in terms of self-deconstructing format such as the DVD, suggests that digital video has the potential to archive the breakdown of the real, in real time. A feature film such as 28 Days Later, is significant because the attempt to capture realistically a hypothetical future only highlights the artifice of the medium. Ironically, the realism of films like The Blair Witch Project, the output of the experimental Dogme ‘95 group, and even to an extent the Saddam Hussein footage, rests precisely on their uncanny momentary anti-realism.

Contemporary films deploy shaky, hand-held cameras and self consciously hard lighting as shorthand for realism, but this only serves to reinforce the sense of bizarre ‘otherness’, and of the camera behind the image. Keith Griffiths has said that what ‘gave cinema part of its value, a confident, assured and unchallenged recording of reality, and one that was extremely difficult to modify or manipulate; has now been changed by the new digital technology.’(9)

It would appear then, as with the human replicant in the film Bladerunner, the closer digital technology takes us to the ‘real’, the closer we must re-examine that ‘reality’ and the more seamless and uncanny constructs will become. Image and narrative can no longer be trusted.

Colin Ledwith

1. Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny (1919), ‘Sigmund Freud: Collected Papers, Vol. 4’, trans. and ed. Joan Riviere, Basic Books, 1959.

2. Mike Kelley, Playing with Dead Things: On the Uncanny (1993), ‘Foul Perfection: Essays and Criticism’, ed. John C. Welchman, MIT press, 2003.

3. Ernst Theodore Hoffmann, ‘Tales of Hoffmann’, trans. and ed. R.J. Hollingdale, Penguin Classics, 2001.

4. Roland Barthes, ‘Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography’, trans. Richard Howard, Flamingo, 1984.

5. Dick Hebdige, ‘Subculture: The Meaning of Style’, Verso, 1979.

6. Virginia Heffeman, ‘Camera Down a Hole, and the World Follows It’, New York Times, Dec.16, 2003.

7. As above.

8. Paul Virilio, ‘War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception’, trans. Patrick Camiller. Verso, 1989.

9. Keith Griffiths, ‘The Manipulated Image’, animateonline.org.

Nucular

Matthew Munday

As he walked along, the carrier bag hung heavy on his fingers. He had tried resting his hand inside his pocket with the handle twined around his wrist, but the bottom of the bag only clunked rhythmically against his knee as he moved. There seemed to be no other way but to endure one cold hand. He stopped. At the end of the road, in the distance, where the cracked tarmac dipped away, he saw a greygreen band of light on the horizon. The sun was coming up. The light which melted upwards showed a bare morning sky: no milky wisps of cloud, no winking Cinderella stars. Just an upturned bowl.

He shifted the bag from his right hand to his left, looking at the stripes of bloodless skin it had left across his fingers. As he blew into his fist, the tins he’d bought clinked against his thigh. A car sped past. Treating his right hand to a spell inside its pocket, he wiped his wet nose on his other sleeve and carried on, hunching his shoulders against the cold, and whistling vapour into the freezing air.

As he strode along, he looked down at his feet, picking his way through the oily puddles in his path. Presently he looked up and, with something of the squint, peered forward to see where, far up ahead, a figure moved jerkily towards him. No harm in being careful, he thought, and crossed the road. A streetlamp, bent at the base by some collision, arched awkwardly over the road and flickered silently to itself. He stopped again to change hands.

He could now see the figure was pushing something in front of it – something like a pram or a small trolley – and that it was the erratic jumping of the wheels on the potholed ground which caused the person to move so strangely. The figure itself looked short and robust, and was zipped up from knees to head in a thick jacket. He stood and watched as it drew closer on the other side of the road. Over its head was a large fur-lined hood, leaving only a small porthole. The figure kept this hole constantly focused on the ground in front, making sure to pre-empt the more violent bumps of the pram with see-sawing arm motions. At the crossroads ahead it stopped and stared fixedly downwards, its hands never leaving the pram’s handle-bars. All lights showed green in all directions. The figure hesitated a moment, listening he supposed, and then abruptly began again, pushing out with confidence into the empty road. As the pram trundled crazily past he saw its contents – a huge plastic bottle of water, the kind which he’d once seen bubble and gurgle in the corner of an office. Around twenty litres, he guessed.

As he approached the crossroads on the other side, with the pram now moving off some way behind him, he glanced both left and right. Nothing coming. He took a light step down the kerb and spun around, letting the bag’s weight and momentum take it in a wide circle around him. With his arm extended fully, the bag swung in a circle wide enough to encompass both lanes of the road, its loose plastic fanning and rippling in the wind. He slowed down, stopped, and then stood for a moment, looking south down the huge hill towards the motionless rubble of the city. A pigeon flapped lazily along. It was getting light. Setting the bag down at his feet, he wrapped one fist over the other and blew warm air into both of them. It made a broken duck-call noise. He did it again.

He picked up the bag and skipped up the far kerb towards home, staggering happily from one side of the pavement to the other like a drunk. Far behind him the streetlamp stopped flickering.

At the corner of his road a bus lay on its side. None of its windows had survived, and scattered around were a few remaining cubes of glass. He kicked lazily at one of the wheels, trying to make it spin. It didn’t move - it never did. Clambering onto the side of bus, he sat down and fished about in the bag, eventually pulling out a tin of tuna. This he opened slowly, pulling the ring-pull back, enjoying the feeling and sound of metal scraping on metal. He dug two fingers into the oily contents and brought them quickly up to his mouth. He did it again, licking his lips. After scraping out the remnants and sucking his fingers clean, he threw the tin off to the side and jumped down from the bus, landing with a glassy crunch. Yawning and scraping his boots against the tarmac, he set off towards home.

In his front garden a path led from the gate to the front door through a large patch of bare earth. The gate had long ago disappeared, as had its hinges, leaving four rusty holes in the stone pillar which had once held it up. He looked up at the first floor windows. They were tinted brown at the edges. Through a small gap in the curtains he could see the piles of newspapers that they kept up there. These were vast, like haystacks – bundle upon bundle of grey paper right up to the ceiling.

He made his way along the path, inspecting the contents of the bag as he went. Everything seemed to be there. Tinned this and that, wads of cloth, sterilising powder. When he reached the door he shifted the bag to his left hand and with his right pumped the door handle three times, up and down. After a ten second pause he did it again. Through the frosted glass he saw her moving towards him down the hall, laying her hand on things to steady herself as she went. And after a moment he listened contentedly to the rattle and clicks of their seven locks being carefully undone.

Cries and Whimpers: Hollywood’s Apocalyptic Ending vs Being-towards-Death in Haneke

Boris Knezevic

‘Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.'

-Nietzsche, The Gay Science

‘…he was overwhelmed by the belated suspicion that it is life, more than death, that has no limits.’

-Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

Apocalypse as Shock Therapy

The basic thesis of Naomi Klein’s book on ‘disaster capitalism’, The Shock Doctrine, can be paraphrased thus: the real disasters of our age are not the wars, natural disasters and economic crises that occupy the daily news, but the more lasting tectonic shifts that pass unnoticed beneath these phenomena; the surreptitious elimination of the public and the democratic, the brutal remaking of the world in the neoliberal capitalist image. The cataclysmic shock of the surface phenomena functions to distract and pre-emptively extinguish dissent and opposition. Collectively immersed in the act of mere survival, in world events, mesmerized by the forces of nature or of evil and tranquilized by our powerlessness as individuals, by our fear of being taken over by aliens, murdered by nuclear-armed terrorist thugs, swamped by floods, etc – we fail to see the gradual and hostile takeover carried out under our noses by the very people whose job is to protect us.

It is through this politicised version of Heideggerian Dasein that we may read the proliferation of apocalyptic themes in cinema in the past two decades: contrary to the conventional wisdom that apocalyptic cinema is an expression of ‘millenial fears’ and anxieties about the future, the fear of apocalypse is a psychological tranquilizer that shields us from a revelatory Angst in the present. As the ultimate objectification of biological death in the far-off spectre of some final fantastic showdown between humanity and its other – aliens, nature, God, etc - it blinds us to the true nature of Dasein, our being-towards-Death. By obscuring the way that death intervenes in life at every point, it hides the true cost of our obedience to power, and exaggerates the cost of resistance.

In the films of Michael Haneke, by contrast, the external spectacle and the subterranean Angst have reversed roles: existential dread derives from the pervasive sensation that the cataclysmic event, which has always-already occurred, intrudes unnoticed into ordinary everyday reality, while the latter takes centre stage. Death is no longer the objectified finality external to life; it is a reality embodied in the present. In Hidden, the life of an ordinary French middle class family is disrupted when they receive anonymous tapes and children’s drawings that evoke the personal repercussions of a massacre of Algerian immigrants in Paris 30 years before. We never find out who sent the mysterious tapes and child’s drawings, let alone who made them. The guilt cannot be explicated or objectified; the ethical position is deliberately left ambiguous, and we are permitted no distance.

Similarly, in The Seventh Continent, based on a true story, a family inexplicably destroy all their possessions and commit suicide. One can easily imagine a Hollywood version of this film: some pathological explanation would inevitably be provided – the family were in financial trouble, or the father was an abusive monster, or one of them had a fatal and incurable illness, etc. Yet it would be a mistake to treat Haneke’s subversive gesture as one of mystification. It is precisely the opposite – it is a revelatory step which sweeps away the cultural debris and clutter of cliché, pathology and explication to reveal behind our immersion in the world, our ‘fallenness’, the true state of Dasein. Haneke’s aim is to permit no distance; one cannot leave the cinema comforted by the knowledge that ‘that’ happens to other people, who fit a certain pathological profile. It is pathology and explication that obfuscate the true picture, the slow trickle of Being towards Death.

It is the latter notion that Haneke conveys even more explicitly in the final scene of 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance, as we watch for an entire minute or so the slow oozing of blood from the body of one of the victims in the bank; a body which is not dead, but dying. It is not simply TV that objectifies historical events, we collectively objectify them, and have done so long before TV existed; even the notion of ‘war’, as illustrated in 71 Fragments with the news footage of global conflicts (Bosnia, Somalia) interspersed throughout, is ultimately a quasi-apocalyptic objectification suggesting the simple dichotomy war/peace, which shields us from an acute awareness of the ever-present threat of violence in our midst. As the heroine in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis declares, “I had been through a revolution and a war, half my family were either dead or in prison, yet this trivial love affair nearly finished me off…” This is not a simple contrast, and there is no real irony here: it is not that in spite of having experienced the terror of revolutionary Iran she cannot handle a ‘trivial love affair.’; rather, the emotional trauma has deprived her of the ability to cope rationally with a betrayal, leading her to homelessness, starvation, and near-death from bronchitis. The war is not only over there – it extends into the apparent tranquillity of refugee life. Complementary to this insight is the inverse or vice versa operation in 71 Fragments, where among the footage from wartime Sarajevo we see a boy and girl decorating a Christmas tree at home during a relative ceasefire.

It is thus by pervasively undermining all forms of objectification that Haneke provides the most effective critique of ideology. In mainstream cinema, cataclysmic historical events, especially when they involve human guilt, are portrayed from a safe distance. Films such as Schindler’s List and Amistad leave us content in the knowledge that the tragedy at hand – the Holocaust, slavery, etc – has been properly dealt with, safely buried in the past, never to repeat. This is complementary to the apocalyptic film, which objectifies the threat of the future. In Haneke’s work, on the other hand, the past and future are always-already here; the historical burden must be continually reassessed. (A Haneke film dealing with slavery, one suspects, would not take place in 19^th century New York but in the present-day ghettos of Philadelphia or L.A., for instance.)

This is the point about what Arendt calls the ‘banality of evil’ - it is neither the blind systemic or objective violence of a bureaucratic machinery nor simply the subjective violence of guilty individuals; any such concretization of evil is ultimately an objectification that safely distances it. It is Eichmann’s “normality” that was “much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together”; this was a “new type of criminal, who is in actual fact hostis generis humani…”¹ There is no clear pathological reason why the student in 71 Fragments decides to go on a killing spree, or why the family in The Seventh Continent decide to commit suicide, or why Georges in Hidden lies about his adopted half-brother. ‘Evil’ is always partly hidden from view, the key struggle against it is always internal - the very gesture of totally isolating it in an object is what ensures its re-emergence. When Bill Clinton declared ‘never again’ at the opening of the Holocaust museum in New York in 1992, a genocide was taking place at that very moment in Bosnia – with concentration camps, mass rapes, and the like – and was quietly ignored for several years.

It is Haneke’s embrace of Heideggerian temporality that is most subversive: what gives his work such terrifying immediacy is the fact that everything takes place in a pure present, the terrifyingly ‘normal’, eternal now. Irredeemably trapped in the moment, his characters are on one side haunted by a tragedy that has always already-occurred, on the other overshadowed by a repressed anxiety about what will happen next. Yet this true picture is to the characters themselves obscured – for the most part and most of the time - by their ‘fallenness’, their tranquilized immersion in the world mediated by the notion of apocalyptic death. In one scene in 71 Fragments the bank security guard secludes himself in the bathroom before bedtime to say a prayer; after asking God for the usual – good health for himself and family, etc – he pleads “please do not let a nuclear catastrophe or a third world war happen….” While praying to avert the apocalypse-to-come, we avoid confronting the actual tragedy, the evil already in our midst.

The Banality of Death: Now Ain’t the Time for Your Tears

This always-already aura of apocalyptic time is tacitly or even unwittingly (subconsciously) deployed in mainstream cinema. As Mike Davis points out, Hollywood’s “pop apocalypses and pulp science fiction” with their carceral inner cities, high-tech police death squads, sentient buildings, urban Bantustans and the like, only “extrapolate from existing trends” in urban development in “post-liberal Los Angeles.”² These post-apocalyptic dystopias do not reflect anxieties about the future, but about the present as a future that has already taken place. It is in this sense that we can reformulate (or twist) Primo Levi’s claim that Kafka’s The Trial, written in 1925, foreshadows the Holocaust. The Holocaust appears in Kafka in the same way in which apocalyptic death appears in Haneke – not a foreshadowed death-to-come, but Death that is always-already here. The horror of Kafka’s world is not merely the horror of modern totalitarian bureaucracy – it is the horror of a world in which the Holocaust has already taken place.

The courtroom thus yields the perfect metaphor. Even more than Hollywood films, the language of the law is the objectifying mirror that limits any possibility of an authentic ethics: “Despite the necessity of the trials…they helped spread the idea that the problem of Auschwitz had been overcome.”³ This is the gist of Bob Dylan’s ballad ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carrol’; after repeating “now ain’t the time for your tears” with each verse, it is only when he delivers the court’s decision that Dylan cynically urges, “bury the rag deep in your face, for now’s the time for your tears.” When the crime is objectified in legal judgment (and precedent), the tragedy is no longer only that of ‘Hattie Carroll’; it is the tragedy of a society in which a certain kind of (class) crime is partly pardoned in advance. (always-already) It is only with this collective, unchallenged submission to power that Hattie Carroll truly dies.

In the Diamond Sutra, the Buddha urges his followers to ‘practice charity without abiding in the notion of practising charity.’ By the same token, Slavoj Žižek holds that “the moment democracy is no longer 'to come' but pretends to be actual - fully actualized - we enter totalitarianism.”⁴ This is just the kind of insight Haneke is after: by abiding in the notion of apocalyptic death-to-come, or inversely that our being is synonymous with biological existence, we obscure the way in which death conditions our entire being, regardless of external threats. When we avoid death at all costs, we risk a death-in-life, whole or partial; we risk submission to power. To rephrase the standard existentialist wisdom in the Buddha’s terms, in order to be truly alive, one must live without abiding in the notion that one is fully alive; one must take risks when necessary, and live each day as if it were the last. The moment we pretend that life is fully actualized in biological existence, we enter death.

The muselmann, the ‘living dead’ of Auschwitz, is the epitome of a life fully surrendered to death, shocked into submission (‘abiding in the notion’ of living) by the cataclysmic spectacle. In Auschwitz - “the gray zone in which victims become executioners and executioners become victims”⁵ - the Muselmann “makes it forever impossible to distinguish between man and non-man.”⁶ It is the point where the division between subject and object (man and non-man/victim and executioner) dissolves in a perverse culmination of the liberal notion of equality before the law - the Hegelian ‘end of history’. The apocalypse has already occurred, is occurring – the ‘end of history’ is always-already here, not a utopian end-to-come, but a catastrophic failure of humanity that one must struggle against in every moment of the present. The terrifying voice that haunts much of Haneke’s work, that emerges in the background of all those pregnant dinner table silences, passionless routines, and clicking movements of machinery like a slow, bewitching incantation, sounds very much like that final stanza of T.S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men:

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.

A whimper – a sentence. (“now’s the time for your tears...”) The entire poem, written in the aftermath of WWI, can be read as a tribute to Haneke’s themes…”Paralysed force, gesture without motion…Lips that would kiss/Form prayers to broken stone…In this last of meeting places/We grope together/And avoid speech…” We are all post-apocalyptic ‘hollow men’. Our fear – fear of death – is what prevents us from truly living.

Yet this conclusion is not quite as dismal as may at first appear. For if we accept the possibility of a death-in-life – its most concrete form being the musselmanner of Auschwitz, whose plight for Agamben documents “the total triumph of power over the human being”⁷, we simultaneously invoke the inverse possibility, of life-in-death – the revolutionary possibility that death is not purely and simply the end; that through love one may continue being, not in some religious ‘afterlife’, but in this world, beyond the limits of biological existence – Love, the total triumph of the human being over power, over mere death.

1 Arendt, Hannah, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), 253.

2 Davis, Mike, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (2006), 223.

3 Agamben, Giorgio, Remnants of Auschwitz : the witness and the archive (1999), 18-19.

4 Žižek, Slavoj, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis)Use of a Notion (2002), 155.

5 Agamben, 17.

6 Agamben, 47.

7 Agamben, 48.

Mediated Apocalypses

Owen Hatherley


it's after the End of the World – don't you know that yet?'

Sun Ra

In the 20^th century, the apocalypse happened more than once. In a perceptive 1978 essay on Surrealism, Angela Carter wrote: 'the 1914-18 war was, in many respects, for France and Germany, the end of the world. However, the Russian Revolution of 1917 suggested the end of one world might mark the commencement of another world, one in which human beings might themselves take possession not only of their own lives, but also of their own means of expressing the reality of that life, i.e. art. It is possible for the true optimist to view the end of the world with sang-froid. What is so great about all this crap? Might there be something better?'

Carter recognised that the apocalyptic impulse, at its inception, is an optimistic one – in fact, a revolutionary one. Norman Cohn's The Pursuit of the Millennium makes quite clear that eschatology emerges from the religion of the poor, in the context of oppression and betrayal. From the book of Daniel onwards, the apocalyptic mode is based on denunciations of Rome or Babylon, of Priests and false prophets, and lurid descriptions of the various misfortunes that will befall the evil, and the pleasures that await the righteous ones. So why is it, that in the 20^th century, the apocalyptic imaginary has largely been a series of horrific images, of horrendous catastrophes from which no-one can be safe?

The short answer is that, after 1918, a vision of apocalypse took form in the imagination that was very closely based in reality. In 1914-8, millions directly experienced a blasted landscape in which it was impossible to discern the corpses, with all life obliterated by the most advanced technology. One of the earliest cinematic apocalypses takes immediate inspiration from this. William Cameron Menzies, Alexander Korda and H.G Wells' Things to Come (1936) stages a series of Hegelian catastrophes, in which first, 'Everytown' is obliterated in a (still horrifying) blitzkrieg, then we have a decades-long war in which aerial bombing manages to destroy all of the world's cities. By 1970, the remnants of Enlightenment civilisation are just about legible as the backdrop to an atavistic, tribal world of local chieftains, disease and obscurantism. What follows this, in a manner familiar from the similar apocalypses and rebirths in Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men, is a rationalist Bauhaus world beneath the surface of the earth, in which finally nature has been mastered and war eliminated. The film ends with the prospect of that world too being destroyed by its restive inhabitants, demanding that technological development be ceased.

Things to Come establishes many of the conventions of apocalypse cinema – the blasted post-apocalyptic landscape, the terrifying depiction of instrumentalised slaughter – but what is missing in its successors is the utopian element, the promise that technology could, in the right hands, promise a paradise as much as a hell. After Hiroshima, the apocalyptic imagination was provided with the genuine scientific and geopolitical possibility of destroying civilisation, and after 30 years of the arms race, all life on earth. This prospect is luridly visible in hundreds of 1950s Cold War schlock films, in which usually some sort of atomic contamination has literally created a monster, from Godzilla to the giant ants of Them! One of the most interesting of these films is Roger Corman's self-explanatory 1958 shocker The Day the World Ended. This film is heralded by the magnificent introduction 'what you are about to see may never happen...but to this anxious age in which we live, it presents a fearsome warning...Our film begins with...THE END!'

Cue a succession of nuclear explosions, and images of depopulated, devastated cities (no doubt taken from stock footage of Coventry, Dresden, or Tokyo), and then we come to the survivors. Our leading protagonist has built a (rather Eames-like) house in the only geological area in the USA which can withstand an all-out nuclear war. He has been planning this for a decade, making sure that he and two others have exactly enough food to last through the fallout. The radio doesn't pick up any signals, from New York, San Francisco, Paris, or Moscow. Yet as the house begins to fill up, this post-apocalyptic serenity is broken. In a Cadillac, not far from the house, are a young couple, a gangster, and his girl, a burlesque dancer. Nearby, a drifter with accompanying donkey. Initially, none of them seem able to imagine the catastrophe that has occurred. Corman makes grim comedy out of this inability. 'When are we going to be able to get to San Francisco?' asks the hood. 'There is no San Francisco any more.' 'No Frisco!? I don't believe it'. The survivors quickly fall into atavism, with fights, sexual rivalry, battles for supremacy and the house's gun. The only moment when the horror of what lies outside really occurs to the characters is when the dancer gives them a run through of her act ('here's where I would start to peel') and collapses into tears. Meanwhile, the survivalist tries to interest his daughter in one of the men, telling her she must bear children for the future. 'There is no future', she replies.

Corman's film doesn't manage to sustain this relentlessly claustrophobic atmosphere, resorting soon to the requisite (and here, fairly silly) radioactively modified humanoid monsters - but the first half of the film prefigures what are the undisputed masterpieces of apocalyptic cinema, George Romero's trilogy Night of the Living Dead (1968), Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Day of the Dead (1985). The house bunkered in against apocalypse is here, as is the speculation that radiation has caused some strange and horrifying change in the human race, into a bestial creature of reflexes – but most of all, the films attack any notion that the best side of humanity will surmount and fight out the apocalypse. The trilogy shows society completely collapsing, with any notions of solidarity falling apart in a wave of violence and martial barbarity. This isn't mere Lord of the Flies pessimism about 'human nature', some abstract notion of inherent atavism – rather, what we see in these films is this society collapsing, one in which solidarity is already scarce. Near the end of Night of the Living Dead, we see vigilantes and national guardsmen combing the countryside for zombies, shooting them all on sight with glee – as one of the horrified protagonists of Dawn of the Dead points out, there are some who are actually enjoying this.

Romero's films are also extremely adroit in outlining the likely role of communications media in the apocalypse. The radio and TV in Night offer regular updates on the catastrophe, films-within-films that are compelling and convincing in their dread and matter-of-fact awfulness – the unsteadiness of the camera as government spokesmen are interviewed, the uncertainty of the newsreaders. By Dawn this has become even more horribly compelling, perhaps to reflect the attendant brutalisation of television in the intervening decade. One of the film's most memorable images is the talk show discussion of the massacres, where a presenter with an eyepatch repeats, as if to himself 'we have to remain rational. We have to remain rational'. Later on, even this signal has disappeared. By the third film, there is no radio, no television, no communication at all with the outside world – the implication being that the final breakdown of society can be ascertained from the non-existence of the media.

From its first scene - a couple in a car on a hill, in a clinch to 'Johnny B Goode' - Threads is wholly conscious of its status as scientific, geopolitical horror film. 'The early post-blast scenes - with survivors huddling into barricaded-in basements, fearful of and hostile to outsiders - were reminiscent of nothing so much as Romero's Night of the Living Dead. Near-total anomie, society stripped back to its Hobbesian bare minimum', wrote Mark Fisher on Threads' unbearable, truly nightmarish vision (backed up here by with a veritable list of scientific advisers in the credits, rather than zombie folk tales). In Mike Jackson and Barry Hines' TV film, we see a humanity which, like shell-shocked protagonists of Night, can't truly believe what's happened to it – what is most terrifying is that the world doesn't end in a flash, via Dr Strangelove's Doomsday machine, but somehow endures, in a grotesque, devastated form. The comparison made between Romero's trilogy and Threads seems especially appropriate in its portrayal of a mediated apocalypse. The ambient televisual noise in the film provides an ever-more terrifying countdown to Armageddon as a counterpoint to the quotidian worries of the characters themselves, who are largely either unaware or incapable of reacting to the approaching horror. Both films share a documentary realism that seems particularly apt for the depicting the unimaginable.

The apocalypse is particularly mediated today, in the queasy expectation of something appalling (nuclear, climatic, economic?) being announced every time the 'BREAKING NEWS' strip appears on News 24. In essence, the tropes of apocalyptic cinema are borrowed by every news bulletin. Yet one of the most convincing apocalyptic films of the last 15 years doesn't feature so much as a radio. In Mike Leigh's atypically brilliant, relentless Naked (1993), where the setting is merely an unflinching but televisually realistic depiction of London, we return to the source of the apocalyptic imaginary - the force and fervour of the prophetic voice. Only here, there's no sense that the apocalypse will lead to the smiting of the evil and the ascension of the righteous. Here, we openly hear discussion of what even Threads can't countenance – the total elimination of the human race itself. 'By the very definition of apocalypse, man will cease to exist!' Johnny yells at a hapless security guard. The sermon ends with two images – God ('who is') as a malevolent, amoral force, initiating the apocalypse for his own amusement; and the possibility of transcendence, of an evolution out of humanity into something else, 'a species of pure thought, are you with me?' This is what the optimistic apocalyptics are reduced to, in a world where it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. 'There is hope, but not for us'.

Functional Apocalypses

Benjamin Noys (2008)

Harry Cleaver’s 1987 article “Uses of an Earthquake” presents what we could call the optimistic Marxist view of crisis:

Crises are not to be feared or “solved”; they should rather be embraced and their opportunities explored. We should always be ready to take advantage of any crack or rupture in the structures of power which confine us. Only those who benefit from these structures should fear such cracks. For the rest of us, they are openings through which we may gain access to more freedom.

What “use” can be made of nuclear war, or any other global end of humanity scenario (at least for us “humans”)? Very few could probably share the confidence of heretical Trotskyite Juan Posadas that “Humanity will pass quickly through a nuclear war into a new human society – Socialism.” Posadas provides a truly Marxist eschatology, in which the revelation or unveiling of truth (the meaning of the word “apocalypse”) is socialism itself. In its own way equally weird is the bracing class-struggle scepticism of George Caffentzis, for whom “everybody dies and even if everybody dies at the same time (I mean everybody) what’s the problem? The earth becomes a cleared tape and why should the angels grieve?” (“Work/Energy” 1)

Putting that scenario aside with admirable sang-froid, Caffentzis regards apocalypse as the indicator of the crisis of capital’s regime of accumulation: “whenever the ongoing model of exploitation becomes untenable, capital has intimations of mortality qua the world’s end.” (“Work/Energy” 1) These “functional apocalypses” are the revelatory signs of the rupturing effects of class-struggle, the unveiling of the old mole. From this perspective there is little time to be wasted on outbursts of nuclear paranoia or anxiety, instead we have “the simple indifference to the whole world-historical drama of Nuclear Apocalypse experienced by many because the rent’s going up, the job is ending, the children are hungry and the electricity is about to be turned off.” (“Power and Terror” 308)

Certainly this position allows Caffentzis to have some fun at the expense of the death-obsessed philosophies of nuclear terror, and what he regards as their common roots in the Heideggerean philosophy of technology. No Heidegger debate for him:

Defeat can lead to despair, but must it come to this grovelling before the Nazi philosopher? Many a NY leftish intellectual who would be horrified to touch a PLO leaflet quotes this philosopher of the death camps with slavish delight. History is a nightmare, but must its jokes be forever so cruel? (“Power and Terror” 314)

Even better is his and Silvia Frederici’s parody of the discussion between Lotringer and Virilio concerning the publication of Pure War, in which Virilio’s musings on the revelation of the essence of nuclear technology is presented as a thinly-disguised lust for the final day of judgement:

True, A BILLION CASUALTIES ON THE FACE OF THE EARTH WOULD NOT BE NEGLIGIBLE. BUT WHAT MATTERS IS THAT THEY WON'T HAVE DIED IN VAIN, as we will have learnt to CONTROL what we PRODUCE.

S: No, you cannot say this in the book...
(99; the capitalised section is a quotation from Pure War)

Of course the irony is that the distance between this kind of Marxist reading and Heidegger is not perhaps as great as Caffentzis would like to imagine. What is shared in common is a certain structural eschatology of unveiling, of the transformation of crisis into opportunity – although of course very different in each case. The revelation of the essence of Gestell in atomic power is configured by Hölderlin’s line “But where danger is, grows / The saving power also”. (“The Question Concerning Technology” 28) As Heidegger’s 1966 Der Spiegel interview suggested this could take a more “directly” religious turn as “only a God can save us”. Caffentzis, unlike Posadas and Heidegger, abandons any direct revelation through nuclear war, but he still reads the “danger” as “saving”. In his case the “Bomb Apocalyptics” of the early 1960s was ended by the refusal of the movements of the time to be intimidated by these threats: “[t]he grip of terror could not constrict the new class movements, their desires and disgusts.” (“Work/Energy” 28)

What we might call the political ambiguity of works like The War Game (1965) and Threads (1984) is their quasi-refusal of this structure of revelation. This lack of consolation refuses any element of hope, and while obviously both films function as powerful (if not overpowering) critiques, and embody a left position, this “blankness” makes them all the more disturbing. The threat here is of what Derrida called “remainderless destruction” (30). In both cases, of course, the remainder is there; they concern the aftermath of nuclear war. Yet, this is an obvious ruse as the implication of both films is that of non-survivability – they have recourse to necessary, as Derrida points out, fables or fictions (“I have recalled that a nuclear war is for the time being a fable, that is, something one can only talk about.” (23))

Unveiling still functions, but the “truth” revealed is the end of humanity should a total nuclear war take place. There is no opening here to “more freedom”, and unlike many other post-apocalyptic films they lack the “utopian” element – the imagination of some functional future society “arising from the ruins”. It is this trace of remainderless destruction that makes these films so disturbing, and which complicates and runs against possible “ideology-critique” readings: The War Game as critique of ruling-class complacency and the security measures by which it believes it will survive any crisis; Threads as the fantasmatic representation of social collapse and the possible non-reproducibility of capitalism. While these films by now may function as objects of a perverse nostalgia, they carry in them this inassimilable moment that threatens any functionalisation of the apocalypse.

References
Caffentzis, George, “The Work/Energy Crisis and the Apocalypse.” Midnight Notes 2.1 (1980).
http://www.midnightnotes.org/pdfapoc16.pdf
___, “Power and Terror in Bomb Philosophy: A review of Joel Kovel’s Against the State of Nuclear Terror.” Social Text 19/20 (Autumn 1988): 305-314.

Cleaver, Harry, “Uses of an Earthquake.” (1987) Libcom.org, 2005. http://libcom.org/library/uses-of-earthquake-cleaver.

Derrida, Jacques, “No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives).” Trans. Catherine Porter and Philip Lewis. Diacritics 14.2 Nuclear Criticism (Summer 1984): 20-31.

Frederici, Silvia and George Caffentzis, “A Review Play on Paul Virilio/Sylvere Lotringer, Pure War.” Social Text 17 (Autumn 1987): 97-105.

Heidegger, Martin, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Trans. and intro. William Lovitt. New York: Harper, 1977.
___ ‘“Only a God Can Save Us”: Der Spiegel’s Interview with Martin Heidegger.’ In The Heidegger Controversy. Ed. Richard Wolin. Cambridge, Mass. and London: The MIT Press, 1993. 91-116.

Apocalypse Where Or When? An Alchemical Reading.

Andy Sharp

The phrase “immanentize the eschaton” made popular by Robert Anton Wilson, in his The Illuminatus! Trilogy is thought to be derived from Gnostic ontology. The Gnostics espoused immanence in opposition to the fear ridden literalism of Christianity’s imminence. Following through this logic, the end of the world is accessible at any single point in time, in other words it is a psycho-spatial realm not a temporal event.

If we accept this hypothesis, then we are able to trace some interesting correlates in transpersonal and archetypal psychology, psychiatry, alchemy and the careers of eschatologically driven visionary artists.

This short essay is an attempt to read the motif of immanence into the alchemist Fulcanelli’s exegesis of the Cyclic Cross at Hendaye.

The final infamous “inserted” chapter in Fulcanelli’s “Le Mystere Des Cathedrales” is a spectacularly hypertrophied discussion of a seemingly humble stone cross in Hendaye, a small frontier town in the Pyrenees. Fulcanelli makes the astounding assertion that the “Hendaye cross shows by the decoration of its pedestal that it is the strangest monument of primitive millenarism, the rarest symbolical translation of chiliasm”. Chiliasm, the doctrine of belief in the millennium was part of the esoteric tradition of the ancient hermetic philosophy. Fulcanelli then goes onto cunningly deconstruct a phrase on the transverse arm of the cross. The phrase is spread over two parallels of raised letters in the following sequence:

OCRUXAVES

PESUNICA

The common interpretation of O CRUX AVE SPE UNICA (O Cross they only hope),

Fulcanelli proposes, is by intention of the stone mason actually a cipher (using a cryptic form of cabalism and word play – ‘the language of the birds’) for the phrase

Il est écrit que la vie se réfugie en un seul espace (It is written that life takes refuge in a single space), and that,

“As for the geographical location of this Promised Land, from which the élite will take part in the return of the golden age, it is up to us to find it.”

From an hermetic perspective, the “point” represents, the golden age, the point is where there is no time. The marriage of opposites raises its mischievous alchemical head as Fulcanelli states it is our mission to find the point. Of course, such a place cannot be found by a linear hunt because it exists outside time, it can only be accessed in a single moment. The hermeticist sets himself this impossible task. Fulcanelli’s prophecy of the coming of the nuclear age and that alchemy had been aware of the dangers of atomic theory for centuries is clearly evident in his concern that man would literally attempt to search for this ‘golden age’, by splitting the atom. The alchemists already had the knowledge of accessing no-time, of the consequences of creating the chain-reaction, manifesting the apocalypse, but chose to “KEEP SILENT”.

This becomes more explicit in Fulcanelli’s rendering of the acronym INRI, carved on another arm of the cross,

“the inscription INRI, exoterically translated as Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudeorum (Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews), but which gives to the cross its secret meaning: Igne Natura Renovatur Integra (By fire nature is renewed whole). For it is by fire and in fire that our hemisphere will soon be tried. And just as, by means of fire, gold is separated from impure metals, so, Scripture says, the good will be separated from the wicked on the great Day of Judgment.”

Here we see direct a correlation between the alchemical process and the apocalypse. It is by the literalisation of the hermetic tradition, in the material world that “our hemisphere will soon be tried” by fire. So the conundrum arises. Is Fulcanelli really a literal believer in the imminence of the apocalypse, with his use of the word “soon”? But that is to forget that the Fulcanelli’s work is not “about” alchemy it is alchemy. His punning, volatile cabala, explosions of meaning, ideational (as ‘fire’) chain- reactions from nonsense and absurdity is the alchemy of chiliasm: at once an instruction guide for circulation “between” the four ages and a warning of the perils of literalising and abusing this esoteric doctrine.

The would-be fear mongers with the current KaliYuga of the ‘Credit Crunch’ (The Age of Iron – in alchemical parlance, and related to the Hindu age of misery, misfortune and decrepitude by Fulcanelli), are also aware of exploiting this formula as a means of social control: that the apocalypse does exist as a real time event.

Fulcanelli shows how the Bible is infused with what are essentially pages from an alchemical lab book. In Ezekiel’s apocalyptic vision for example,

“And I looked, and behold… a great cloud, and a fire infolding itself and brightness was about it, and out of the midst thereof as the colour of amber, out of the midst of the fire. Also out of the midst thereof came the likeness of four living creatures…. As for the likeness of their faces, they four had the face of a man, and the face of a lion on the right side; and they four had the face of an ox on the left side; they four also had the face of an eagle.’”

In final summary, he quotes St. Matthew’s gospel and shows by his poetic cabala that Matthew is ‘the doctrine of science’.

The age of iron has no other seal than that of Death. Its heiroglyph is the skeleton, bearing: the attributes of Saturn: the empty hour-glass, symbol of time run out, and the scythe, reproduced in the figure seven, which is the number of transformation, or destruction, of annihilation.

So, we see that with the empty hour-glass, there is no time, in the Age of Iron. If we are not in time, then we are in a place curiously similar the notion of dreams as revealed by James Hillman in Dreams and the Underworld. We enter the apocalypse as we enter a dream, through sleep, as immanent as Hypnos whose brother was Thanatos. But, the Age of Iron is also a rich alembic of images revealing truth and essences without codification and dogma, standing outside time. In other words it is but a dream of death.

kino fist: apocalypse

After a 'summer' break, Kino Fist returns in a different place. In the wake of financial disaster, constant rumblings about nuclear perils and the many discussions about how the Large Hadron Collider might polish us off for good we will be showing films about the apocalypse as part of this event:

'La Soufrière' (Werner Herzog, 1976) (something about it here)
'Threads' (written by Barry Hines/directed by Mick Jackson, 1984) (see here for more details) [Warning: 'Threads' is very likely to be the single most depressing film you'll ever see. Please don't come if you're feeling a bit down or weird - seriously, I'd feel awful about it]

We will be here:

The Wenlock Building
50-60 Wharf Road, N1 7RN

We will screen:
October 5th
roughly 2-5pm

As always, there will be a magazine. Please send texts (200-2000 words), illustrations, images to infinitethought[at]hotmail.co.uk
by September 24th (that gives you ten days!).