Three Movies, Three Gods

In “The Central Sector,” Merleau-Ponty’s second chapter of The Structure of Behavior the philosopher first introduces the difference and relation of figure and ground. The passage discusses the effect of natural light on the perception of a grey ring on a yellow ground, but the fungible and yet persistent relation of figure and ground trails with and through most of his lectures and writings. What is figure and what is ground—and how they are perceived—are not isolatable, he claims, but (in words I draw from a slightly different discussion) “depend on a constellation of both proprioceptive and exterioceptive stimuli” (89). As with perception of the world, so with perception of religion, I would argue. Religion is not a thing or object but a constellation of particular (and culturally predictable) patterns of figure, ground, and contrast.

“Snowpiercer” (Joon-ho Bong, 2013) is the most obvious. This odd Korean film has attained something of cult status in the U.S., maybe because it stars “Captain America”Chris Evans as its warped messiah figure, and maybe because its parlay of environmental devastation and severe antagonism between the rich and the poor is a crass enough and linear enough ground not to be taken too seriously. The film pits a religion of survival through violent protection of the status quo against a religion of democracy through violent overthrow of privilege. Curtis (Chris Evans) is clearly positioned as the figure chosen to lead humanity to a kind of Lucan justice: The poor, the hungry, the weeping and the hated seek their heavenly reward of material abundance and social recognition. What Curtis cannot bring himself to sacrifice in part—or perhaps because Curtis cannot sacrifice parts of himself—he sacrifices in total, redeeming the loss of one mother-child couplet for another, and resetting earth’s counters to a new (and thawing) Eden, with the recognition of nature itself (the animal gaze) substituting for spiritual resurrection. The film avails itself of a crass and basic ground of Christian filmic mythology in a manner that works sufficiently to drive forward the plot, though it ends up flopping like a fish out of water around unproductive questions. “We Are the Best” (Lukas Moodysson, 2013) is a less obvious but still familiar refraction of a Christian grounding form. Two 12-year old Swedish girls grasp at the dying embers of punk rock to thread a wavering line of meaning in their worlds of primarily benign neglect. Their families and teachers are barely present, but punk externalizes the huge ‘Fuck You, World’ that they seem to carry around with them. Just as the figured friendship of Bobo (Mira Barkhammar) and Klara (Mira Grosin) reaches an intolerable pitch of annoyance, they listen to Hedvig (Liv LeMoyne) play classical guitar at a talent show and decide to recruit this friendless Christian as the sole figure who might teach them just enough musical skill to keep afloat their punk obsession. Hedvig’s mom (Ann-Sofie Rase) slips into stereotype as a doctrine-oriented dogmatist, but Hedvig herself oozes the best sort of proselytizing—that of quietly being a model of Christ, a grounding force of peace, honesty, love, dedication, commitment, and responsibility. Hedvig’s gradual, solid influence on her two friends turns the film’s title into a religious double entendre: punk may or may not be dead, but sinking into a Christian ground can indeed make them the best.

“Wild” (Jean-Marc Vallée, 2014) also relies on a familiar kind of god, but one often categorized as ‘spiritual, not religious’. Cheryl Strayed (Reese Witherspoon) departs into the wilderness to “become the woman my mother intended me to be,” or, in standard back-to-nature parlance, to “find herself.” The film loops from an opening scene of mountaintop frustration through a series of flashbacks, and when the story returns to its opening scene, Cheryl turns around and unexpectedly encounters a small red fox sitting calmly and staring at her. The fox appears only twice again, but it clearly stands for or as a spirit guide or familiar. The fox is metonymic for the wild, the fox is her god, and she is foxy: beautiful, canny, quiet, and aloof. Like an Escher picture, the figure is the ground, the ground is the contrast, and the contrast is the figure, depending on how you look at it.

**all photographs taken from the respective movie “photo” pages on http://www.imdb.com

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Merleau-Ponty and OOO (take 1)

  Reading Merleau-Ponty’s The Structure of Behavior alongside Bogost’s Alien Phenomenology can generate a kind of cognitive whiplash. MMP takes on the physicists and physiologists for adhering too tightly to causal separation in the delineation of experimental protocols and results. “Might the cleavage between the subjective and the objective have been badly made,” the philosopher wonders (10). A few pages later he provides his own answer: “the classical theory of nerve functioning is led by the force of things to burden itself with auxiliary hypotheses which are almost in contradiction with it, just as the Ptolemaic system revealed its inadequacy by the large number of ad hoc  suppositions which became necessary in order to make it accord with the facts” (16).

These scientists, MMP seems to be saying, are so strongly committed to the independence of body and world, of things stimulating and things reacting, that they form elaborate explanations for very simple events, like Ptolemy adding epicycle after epicycle to make an earth-centered cosmos be the answer to the data. The “force of things” forces the classical scientific method either into absurdity or into a world-oriented understanding of actions and reactions.  “The world,” MMP writes, “is an ensemble of objective relations borne by consciousness” (3).

For the OOO guys, however, the world does not exist and things need to be much more separate from humans.

  The idea of the world exists for Bogost as much as a jalapeño pepper, islands of plastic trash in the ocean, or a distant galaxy, but to assert the existence of the world concedes too much to anthropocentrism and intersubjectivity. (Why a galaxy can exist but not the world seems a pedantic insistence on the totalizing semantics of “world,” but there you have it.) Humans need a flat or tiny ontology, Bogost claims; an ontology that positions us as one thing among others, does not approach or study things as always in relation to us, and that respects the internal “withdrawing” of things away from us and our needs. We need an ontology, he says, that refuses the imbricating and perspectival correlationism of the 20th century.

In light of dire environmental crisis, the need to think in systems larger than humans is urgent. But I disagree that science examines earth and space only for human profit. I am confused how metaphorism is not a kind of correlationism. And I am still waiting for a clearer explanation of how things can be utterly radically separate and yet always in networks or messes or imbroglios of relation.

Scientific research is often only the truly curious engagement with the otherness of things there is (scientists at CERN do not accelerate particles for human benefit; NASA does not send space probes out to the edges of our galaxy for human benefit). Language itself is correlationist and metaphorical, as Bogost’s own delightful prose indicates. And, ultimately, ethically, our approach to things must engage humanity because humanity is the hyperobject screwing up this planet.

“It is a constellation, an order, a whole, which gives its momentary meaning to each of the local excitations,” MMP writes in a completely different context. But in the whiplash from juxtaposition, the philosopher seems to be chiding this new generation of ontologists. The trajectory from posthuman is not the afterhuman (no matter how much wonder is involved) but the human-with. We need an ethics and engagement of stewardship, even if it is stewardship of a damaged and deteriorating world.

Ferguson: Race and ‘affective spectacle’

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affect theory, animation, Ferguson, Sianne Ngai

 In her book Ugly Feelings Sianne Ngai turns her fine analytical skills to what she calls the “affective spectacle” (125) of animatedness. She writes, “The affective ideologeme of animatedness foregrounds the degree to which emotional qualities seem especially prone to sliding into corporeal qualities where the African-American subject is concerned, reinforcing the notion of race as a truth located, quite naturally, in the always obvious, highly visible body” (95). This affective and visible slippage tilts in one direction toward political agitation (the link between agitation and animation, p. 96), and in the other direction toward the automation and subjection of puppetry and ventriloquism (so that a raced body becomes “an instrument, porous and pliable, for the vocalization of others,” p. 97).

In other words, the affective and visible slippage of animatedness conjoins the corporeal qualities of spontaneity and routinization, of free will and of the marionette.

  Drawing on Eisenstein’s discussion of the “plasmaticness” of Disney cell animation and Chow’s analysis of the “simultaneous visualization and technologization” of modern bodies (99-100), Ngai deftly connects our fascination with the automatic motion of inanimate objects to the equally human fascination with the putatively ‘grotesque’, hyper-motion (excessive animation) of raced bodies. She clarifies how the attribution of ‘liveliness’ complexly entwines racially non-hegemonic bodies that, on the one hand, cannot escape abject power dynamics that circumscribe (routinize) the public display of racial difference and, on the other hand, overflow (spontaneously) bodily difference in willed–and expected–displays of ‘entertainment.’  Ngai’s point is to claim a space for non-stereotypical representations of race: “There can be ways of inhabiting a social role that actually distort its boundaries,” she writes of the African American characters on The PJs, a Fox Television animated comedy that ran from 1998-2000.

This point is called into question by the murder of Michael Brown, and more recently of Tamir Rice; by the subsequent public explosions of rage, grief, impotent frustration, and bitterness; and by the  widespread and growing disbelief that the structures of society can at all protect or serve non-white bodies. Though her optimism might be hard to swallow right now, Ngai’s analysis remains spot-on. The fatally damning (and damningly fatal) rhythms of racism lie in the specular and spectacular dynamics that force non-white bodies to inhabit a doubly “fascinating” corporeality, a bodily presence that is both like the mechanical routinization of a marionette or factory production line and like the spontaneous freedom of an overflowing and agitated will. Such a body is seen to be both thing and terror. Such a body is seen to be an object in motion, and a moving will that overflows its boundaries.

To change this rhythm of racism requires changing the dynamics of what is seen, and to change ‘what is seen’ requires labor on our affective ideologemes. Ngai borrows this phrase from Barbara Johnson, for whom it signals “semic complex[es] which can project [themselves] in the form of a ‘value system'” (7). But the concept is better situated as the very structure of feeling, and, agonizingly, also the very feeling of social structure, of the base-line ‘seeing’ of the distinction between a person and a thing.

Photo#1: http://www.thenation.com/blog/180964/whats-exceptional-about-ferguson-missouri

Photo #2: http://communitytable.com/327329/iraphael/powerful-photos-from-protests-in-ferguson-missouri/#gallery_327329-3. Photo number 17.