The future on film: Blade Runner and Children of Men

I find it extremely odd that Alfonso Cuarón would say that he wanted Children of Men to be, in the style of the future world that it depicted, the "anti-Blade Runner," and that he had to keep rejecting his art-department's drawings because they looked too "futuristic." This goes along with the revulsion against a fetishization of the fantastic and the futuristic that we find in Cuarón's films (even in his Harry Potter, where it is extremely refreshing), but I don't think that the opposite of this, in the world of sci-fi, would be Blade Runner.

While Blade Runner did go to Syd Mead and got extremely stylish and "fururistic" designs back, Ridley Scott's integration of the designs into the movie is arguably almost a thorough as Cuarón's. I think Cuarón would explain his approach as purely against the Blade Runner aesthetic or style primarily because he wants to have his films be more immediately relevant and political. But what this overlooks is that Blade Runner was and is still felt as extremely immediate and relevant, and even in some of the issues that Children of Men perhaps thinks that it is broaching. Overpopulation, immigration, environmental degradation and biotechnology (in the forms of grafting, cybernetics of course, organ farming, and even reproduction) all are crucial to the film, and get placed into its world almost as thoroughly.

Of course, there aren't any neon umbrellas in Children of Men. But to think that the aesthetic of the two worlds are contrary is a mistake, and perpetuates a sort of willing ignorance and indifference to the history of films that depict the future and participate in that genre we call science fiction--as if a sci-fi film can only be immediately relevant if it opposes its own depiction of the futuristic. This seem to fetishize the effort of Cuarón more than any of his attempts to resist this with his alleged verité: one can think that one is entering a newer depiction of the future than any other if one watches it with his comment in mind. Thankfully, one doesn't have to: and this is what makes Children of Men a triumph. What the film loses in its alleged immediate impact on issues that are "relevant" (terrorism, overpopulation, etc. etc.), it gains in contributing to the genre. This isn't the case in every film of course or even perhaps in most, but it is here.

Why? Because, as Blade Runner shows, a sci-fi film like this will be relevant anyway. This is because the genre has a closer relation to time and historicity than perhaps any other: even if a sci-fi film is placed in the past, because it contains a marked and explicit alterity with respect to our world (I say "marked and explicit" because of course any film's world has some otherness by virtue of its constructedness), the constitution of its environment will pose the question "what if our history were different so as to be like it?" This goes also for anything supposedly occurring in the present day.

By virtue of the mistaken assumption (taking Cuarón at his word) that it was going to resist the genre, Children of Men exemplifies with stunning brilliance the effect of one of the genre's innermost principles. This is because the toning down of the "futuristic," while perhaps producing greater contemporary relevance, the side-effect is produced of prompting a greater integratedness of the film in the world that it is depicting and exemplifying its historicity more. In other words, the verité, toned-down nature of the depiction does not necessarily produce relevance, but most definitely produces a sort of fullness of depiction of the everydayness of its world. This brings out that alterity more with respect to time, because the time in the film itself, its own history, is constituted with a greater density. Thus the modest quality of the futuristic details (the graffiti, the style of advertisements about getting fertility tested--which is similar to some you see now--the degradation of the trees by acid rain, etc.), and the high degree of the preservation of current technologies in the film (the London buses have the current interiors, and London itself is largely unchanged in architecture, etc.), have the wonderful effect of being able to do a lot of the traditionally sci-fi work in the movie: again, like Blade Runner, not because they help the movie become more immediate or closer to our present, but because they make it interact with our present with that historicality that is most characteristic of the depiction of alternate worlds in science fiction.

Time and Derrida

Here are two points to grasp about time as Derrida sees it. Perhaps the best way to think of them is phenomenologically, despite the impossibility of this thought from this (or any) perspective. What would the phenomenon of temporality and temporalizing be if we understood time this way? How does one have an intention (let alone a self) in such a time? Or, perhaps taking an less phenomenological approach, we can ask whether there can be any coherence of representations or signifiers (in terms of the self, can there be a self as the faking of an interiority, as mere exteriority, as performance understood without citation, as enacting a self that is simultaneously coherent and stable as an identity over time)? It is obvious that the answer is, for Derrida, no. But let's get to the two incredible, impossible points:

1) Time can "flow" backwards as well as forwards: time for Derrida ceases to be unidirectional. This already is an unbelievably profound, absolutely impossible thought. For it does not mean that time can be "rewound" or that we can re-enact the past. We see the immense differences with Lacan asserting themselves already. For Derrida, time isn't haunted by trauma in a typically Freudian sense. If we are not in the present, it is not because we are repeating some past unexperienced/traumatic moment (or lack thereof--i.e. repeating a lack or what is not there) or that (to put it another way, and, again, quite crudely) that moment has come to usurp our experience of the present, making it (again) a non-present or something. The Lacanian move backward in time here still presupposes the unidirectionality or forward-flowing of time. Or a unidirectionality in general. For Derrida, we don't jump into the past (or have the past return); time flows backwards. The "stream" is simply reversed. Or rather, it is reversed while still moving forward--and of course this makes it less simple. Time flows forwards just as much as backwards, and never "returns" upon itself in the sense that it rewinds and undoes itself, going back to the moment that is not yet. The return indeed is completely different, if you conceive it this way: one has to rethink what "repetition" means (essentially, it cannot be "caused" even by a non-cause, the Real, as Lacan holds: cf. "Tuche and Automaton" in Four Fundamental Concepts). And with respect to Heidegger, this means that time does not temporalize out of the future, or does not do so any more than it according to Hegel temporalizes out of the past (cf. Phenomenology of Spirit, §801-2: "In the Notion that knows itself as Notion, the moments … appear earlier than the filled [or fulfilled] whole whose coming-to-be is the movement of those moments..." etc. etc.). If this is grasped, the second point will need less comprehension:

2) There is no "proper" (eigentlich, "authentic") or primordial (ursprunglich) temporality, or rather this primordial temporality of which Heidegger speaks in Being and Time is precisely only also the everyday calculable time or clock-time that Heidegger says this primordial time alone makes possible. Being and Time, then, is shocked by this fundamental upheaval of one of its most basic theses (William Blattner has much to say about this thesis): in short, authentic time would be, according to Derrida, calculable. This also means, however, that calculable, everyday time is authentic, and not derivatively or in a "falling" (verfallen) way. In other words, the time of mere representation (or the signifier), of mere counting-off of instants (one second, two, three), of a whole life composed perhaps of mere passing the time, of bare life or mere sur-vival, is authentic or proper, is Dasein's ownmost. Indeed, in the later writings of Heidegger, the temporalizing gets thought on the level of the history of being out of the opening up of the different ecstases to begin with (and this thought is indeed right there in Being and Time, just less explicitly thought in this particular way), which is closer to Derrida because (even though priority is still given to it) the future itself is less important as such (cf. On Time and Being)

The body of Jean-Luc Nancy performs

Nancy's magnificent essay "Corpus," in The Birth To Presence, would do much for anyone trying to link a more phenomenological tradition of thought about the body and embodiment, culminating in the reflections of Merleau-Ponty that seem today to be gaining in popularity (and will be gaining even more, with the upcoming publication of Sean Kelly's new translation of The Phenomenology of Perception), to those reflections on embodiment that have perhaps more recently arisen (though, through Foucault, one could say that their origins are the same) in work on performativity. Nancy essentially could be said to--like Derrida--take the theses of the latter tradition and elaborate them in the language of the former--though perhaps with more intent than Derrida to elaborate, rather than focus on the resistances or misreadings this elaboration would also constitute. In short, Nancy makes the performative body thinkable in terms not of performativity but of the body "itself:" that task which Judith Butler attempts so nobly and rigorously within terms of performativity (and power) in Bodies that Matter.

Merleau-Ponty held that the body was a basic disposition or structure of intentionality constituting a particular point of view. This has the effect of reversing the oldest conception of the body in the way Nancy describes:

...one had to dispense with the body, with the very idea of the body. The body was born in Plato's cave, or rather it was conceived and shaped in the form of the cave: as a prison or tomb of the soul, and the body first was thought from the inside, as buried darkness into which light only penetrates in the form of reflections, and reality only in the form of shadows. This body is seen from the inside, as in the common but anguishing fantasy of seeing the mother's body from the inside, as in the fantasy of inhabiting one's own belly, without father or mother, before any father and bother, before all sex and all reproduction, and of getting hold of oneself there, as a nocturnal eye open to a world of chains and simulacra. This body is first and interiority dedicated to images, and to the knowledge of images; it is the "inside" of representation, and at the same time the representation of that "inside."

-"Corpus," The Birth to Presence, 191-2

Merleau-Ponty shows that the body itself must, prior to being this inside, create this insideness. In other words, it must be outside its inside, ek-statically, as an interface with the world that juts out into it. The body is outside, for Merleau-Ponty (for some merits of this view and the amazingness of Merleau-Ponty more generally, see one of my earlier posts on him).

But can this body itself be viewed by itself? It is here that the question of performativity would come up: one would be viewing one's own body from the outside. The difficulty of this for Merleau-Ponty is that viewing as such requires that the body precisely be unable to view itself. It turns back on itself, but can never quite slip out of its own grip on itself to fully, coherently, see itself. This would require it remove itself from its bodily, embodied perspective (to the third-person perspective that he says science studies), which Merleau-Ponty holds to be impossible. And it would have to do this precisely without overshooting itself or viewing itself past or beyond or outside itself. This is really the crux of the problem, and why the impossibility is there in the first place. Merleau-Ponty thinks intentionality can only be unidirectional, fundamentally, because (this is ultimately a Heideggerian claim which Merleau-Ponty does not make well in The Phenomenology of Perception; precisely because he is not trying to run into the problems Heidegger encountered in expanding and refuting Husserl's "Internal Time-Consciousness" essay; in other words, he sticks close to Husserl against Heidegger to be more Heideggerian than Heidegger) the body is temporal and finite. It temporalizes itself, or bursts forward towards the world temporally from... the inside. Or rather, an outside that can only gain coherence by equally being the most inside of insides. By being outside, by structuring the Platonic inside, Merleau-Ponty is really positing just an inside that is prior to the inside. At least in The Phenomenology of Perception. He moves beyond this in his later work, most notably The Visible and the Invisible. Of course this view might be the only one that makes sense to some people, most notably those just discovering Merleau-Ponty and using him to counter representationalist theories of perception and action either phenomenologically or in computational models (cf. Dreyfus, Taylor, Kelly, even Davidson etc.).

But it cannot account for performativity. This is probably why, despite the affinity that one might think resides between Butler and Merleau-Ponty in their concern for the bodily (and that some unthinking critics looking for new theoretical combinations have mistakenly asserted exists in their statements about the body), Butler does not engage him.

Merleau-Ponty holds an interesting and somewhat controversial (though, upon some reflection, completely intuitive) view regarding the objects that our body intends towards: they can be viewed (or, in general, related or intended to) from all angles. This means that when I am outside and my body sees a house across the street, I am seeing the back of the house as well as the side "facing" me. Why? Because my intention must already be relating beyond what is represented to the general presence of the house which my body recognizes. The house is part of a field of action or intention that could include me going behind the house: thus my body (perhaps more dimly) can be said to perceive the "back" of the house when I perceive its "front."

The question Nancy is asking, then, would be about how the body itself could be viewed like this. And viewed like this while also remaining that body that is viewing. In other words, how can the body view (we are using vision, because it is the easiest example) itself? This is the question of performance: the body must somehow remain itself at the same time as it performs or makes viewable (to this very body and to others--and we should note that we are only loosely using "viewable" here as a synonym for performance: we mean viewable only in the sense that the body is "viewing" or "seeing," not that performance has to do with mere exhibition as such) this self. To use a different sense: it would be like trying to hear oneself speak in the first and third person at the same time about oneself. And another (and this is a famous example): it would be like trying to touch oneself touching (take one arm and with a finger touch the other, trying to be touched in the second arm and feel the touching in the finger of the first arm at the same time).

Nancy claims throughout "Corpus" that this is precisely what the body does--and, we must add, thoroughly fails to do. At the point at which the body would see itself (and see all of itself, every angle of itself, like the house), it would precisely be failing to see itself: not because it is really still "inside" itself in being beyond itself and thus misses itself, but exactly for the reason that it does not miss itself and sees itself. It actually does hear itself speak in the first and third person, and this is why it becomes, as it were, deaf to itself. Or, with the example of touch, it touches itself touching and yet touches as itself: it touches itself and is touched by itself. Because this means it is no longer an "itself:" the body is external to itself, then, but not because it is beyond itself by virtue of some intention. It is because this "itself" is ("itself") an externality. In other words, it is "shared out of itself," partes extra partes:

...here, at the body, there is the sense of touch, the touch of the thing, which touches "itself" without an "itself" where it can get at itself, and which is touched and moved in this unbound sense of touch, and so separated from itself, shared out of itself.

-"Corpus," 203

The body would have to be some residue of both itself moving outward from inside (towards what the inner considered outer, that is, the outside that is related to in terms of the inside, thus when what is taken to exist or matter is only "insides") and coming back inside from the outside (towards what the outer considered inner, that is, the inside when what is taken to exist or have sense is only "outsides") at the same time. It would not be a membrane or an interface, however, that had consistency as a point by itself. Rather, it would be the trace of both inside and outside, first and third person, as they made their respective movements (holding that only insides and outsides, respectively, had sense) into their opposites. It would not exist at that point at which it would perform itself: this would have only the consistency of a performance. Thinking this point is the hardest because it lacks any density whatsoever, but, as I said, Nancy will help both those who think of performance to think phenomenologically and those who think of phenomenology performatively.