Yule Log

Speaking of TV, I've always been amazed at the transformation of the device into a fireplace each Christmas. Yet another reminder that content steadfastly refuses to remain content on a TV, as Grant points out ("The Form of Content Delivery"): here something like reference, or even indexicality, brings the device back into the realm of mere depiction, and yet also fills out the space of the gadget (in a way typical of media, yet perhaps ne'er so well expressed) to make it add to the very architecture of your apartment (the transformation remains determined by its place of origin: most New York City apartments don't have fireplaces). Through the looping in particular of the representation, the device is set back into a larger lived space to a radical degree, and one dwells beside it--indeed almost moves through the new space it has created.

Star Trek

So I finally saw the new Star Trek last night. For various reasons I just couldn't make it to the theater over the summer--though one of those reasons was that when I could, my ambivalence over the whole thing kept me from going. You see, I'm a bit of a devotee (i.e. fan!). TNG has always been my favorite series, since I prefer its more hard-sciencey sort of focus and the more thorough concentration on the issues of managing the flying space city that the Enterprise has become (a focus that we see throughout Galactica, for instance). It's space opera become a problem--I like that. Plus it makes social issues come into focus on a wider scale, and the encounter with "new life and new civilizations" much more representable (instead of just sticking in an alien here and there, as in Star Wars or, actually, in this new movie, you get a focus more on cultures, collectives). Of course, this was also possible because of the money pumped into its special effects, but the storytelling was also usually pitched at that level. Like any good science fiction program on TV, it tended to wobble away from that if a better, weirder, more thought-provoking situation came up and could be explored--in a way not unlike many of the original series episodes, which occasionally seem more like The Twilight Zone's great one-off thought-experiments. So while I liked TNG, the original series, was still great, since it had solid stories, solid characters, and was often true in spirit to the inventive, pulpy, and indeed literary mode American SF, even if it could only build its worlds on a smaller scale (the recent reissue of the original series, with its suped-up special effects [and wonderfully remastered sound] tries to undo this and wonderfully fails, though it allows us to focus away from what is most obtrusive and lends to parody--in a way that makes one realize, as we did in a negative way watching the horrible new Star Wars movies, that the stories are what produce the need for representation of this future reality).

So I had Trekkie issues. But it wasn't so much that I thought the old characters should be forbidden to be taken up again, or indeed the whole canon itself forbidden to be messed with, as much as I was worried about the remake becoming only what it indeed turned out to be: an action movie. Now, TOS was, let's be honest, not always the more cerebral political meditation that one found in TNG (best exemplified in the unbelievable episodes on torture) or Deep Space 9 (which, by the way, is underrated). And TNG (especially in the movies) certainly had its share of pure action. But maybe it'd be good to distinguish between action and adventure, and say that in the original series, regardless of all its fights, it remained closer to the latter. It never made that leap towards the pure action film without some serious loss: it never turned into, however thin the plot was, that typical action-movie form where story becomes merely an excuse tying together pure spectacle, choreography, or violence (which is why the fight scenes--the best being, of course, with the Gorn--are often laughable for their length more than their low quality).

This has huge ramifications, I think, when it comes to the representation of space itself, as we'll see in a moment, but adventure turning into action was what I feared and what the movie actually did. Maybe another turn of the screw is appropriate, though: what we found in the new movie was not action purely, but adventure, become action, now trying to become adventure again. So it's not a pure opposition, but something like the the action movie trying to regain its roots (something that happens--with typical nostalgia for WWII times--in Indiana Jones, say).

It's sad, though, to see that this effort has so limited the resources with which such a revival could be accomplished to the postmodern high formalism J.J. Abrams lives and breathes (there's certainly another sort of postmodern content--anxiety about recursiveness and hallucination as such, which we find in the new excellent remake of The Prisoner--a content that, to defend it, is much more rich... but this is always less appealing to Abrams, unless it is the effect of a formal problem). For it's this formalism that we find, I think, in the old characters themselves: not so much a pleasure in their new content as some sense that their slots have been filled--or the fetishization of the fact that they can be filled at all and their story can be different. I'll get to Spock in a second (perhaps the only exception to this--but even then this is only accomplished through the most bare formal pressures), but you see that indeed this logic is so impoverished it actually has to take the most expansive form of the clunky plot itself, with its time travel and alternate universe production. Never mind the fact that it tries to push the burden of its clunkiness on the ties of the series to science in the first place, in the overcomplicated explanation future Spock (Nimoy) gives to Kirk in an ice cave--which I think just amounts to an insult, playing off notions that the series, because it just was SF in general, was therefore overcomplex and intellectual (early in the movie, Kirk's use of the word "syntax" is depressingly used as a code for deep learning). Never mind that: what's disturbing is that this also makes the whole movie into an allegory for the marketing-like dilemma the re-creators faced in the first place (and which some of them obviously didn't sweat about so much that it would prevent them from shoving a Nokia phone into the beginning): can we make anything different than the original, with these poor characters and this overburdened series, when the original is actually still doing so well? The dilemma becomes one of rebranding when it's not even necessary. Now, it's not that I don't like anything different done with the characters--though that's precisely the insulting sort of false-problem the movie produces for Trekkies and which it would love them to fume over (while they document each new technical change made to their beloved universe) while it rolls in the cash (Why don't you want anything different done? You were supposed to love these characters! You just don't want them shared with anyone other than yourselves!--suchlike phrases/overtones even became a way to market the film... and I think the anger of Trekkies is usually about this having nothing to say back to this more than anything). No, that's not my problem. It's that, when this inversion is transferred to the level of the plot itself, the movie ends up evacuating itself of anything different it really could have done, difference now simply having become newness and vice versa (a problem Jameson rightly sees as central to postmodernism). This is what makes me happy they are doing another movie, where the question of difference can actually be pursued in terms of a less-formal and auto-referential plot (getting its motivation not even from the bad guy, whose superfluity is so extreme that I think he becomes relevant again, in that he gets stuck in there precisely to draw our focus away from the real center--the time-travel dilemma--and its turning in place). Though this is exactly the minimal affirmation, minimal hope, such an empty formal work desires to produce.

Form become content, then, our attention is shifted back to the cinematic medium itself--which indeed has been filled with all sorts of thickness that the plot and the characters (again excepting Spock--but actually I think he's just a form too, as we'll see at the end) are lacking. Here, indeed, is something genuinely fascinating and which strikes out in a genuinely new direction. The profusion of light in the movie, that complete inversion of noir which is so striking when it comes to the bridge of the Enterprise, when projected onto space turns it into another animal altogether. While on the Enterprise, indeed, it remains a great homage to the smallness of the original show: light comes in to delete the space of all those old props, and represent the expansiveness of the original vision which it couldn't actually pull off with its gray cardboard-like consoles and bleep-bloop blinking computer buttons (which again, I think, represents another moment where SF ties to technology get seen as over-intellectual, doomed to become obsolete [not in function but in representation, in look, not feel--but that's a difference symptomatically passed over here], and therefore able to be eliminated altogether--along with their ties to futurity itself and its even more futuristic afterlife, which, let us remember, is again what the whole "plot" is meant to accomplish!). Where there is finally some representation of this old hulking ship, the great tubes, canisters, vats code it wonderfully (and comically) as steampunk--what happens when SF meets pastness itself. This is welcome, but besides the tubes (which crisscross in a weirdly unsmooth fashion that jars a bit with the rest of the movie sleek surfaces--though because these surfaces are ultimately thick and fleshy, as I'll show in a moment) this like the light takes a form subtracted from the visual by its addition, which is that of the wonderful static, crackling sound of transportation (the single best thing in the film, I thought) and the pop of warp speed. All this produces an unbelievable non-nostalgia for 60s-ness (or even late-50s-ness): in the space of the 60s (which, reaching its climax in in Kubrick was full of light--and remember 2001 was hugely ripped off by the first Star Trek movie), it gives us some other feel (non-Kubricky), which is welcome because makes us think hard about what it could be at the same time as it allows us to understand the 60s-feel as such differently, perhaps more thoroughly. Since the association of Star Trek with this old technological code is what the film is perhaps most intent on preventing (another purely negative goal--accomplished by so much being left out and only the crudest associations with primitive elemental forces [water, metal, electricity] put back in), or because this non-nostalgia is so pervasive, the movie doesn't push far in the latter direction.

But back to space, where the payoffs, I said, were the greatest. Space in the movie becomes thick, fleshy, multilayered: the Enterprise itself must keep floating through debris, being shrouded in the light of the warp speed (like on the poster), or emerging out of the bath of Titan's atmosphere (which is dwelt upon almost too long, so that we even feel something like the touch of space, its caress, and everything becomes vaguely sexual). No longer is space a void, an emptiness, a vast beyond: rather it envelops us. We are all Star Children, but precisely because space isn't black anymore: it's yellow, green, blue, anything but that stark black or the hardly different purple--which, represented in the new film, takes on associations with bruises before it seems like any cloud of space-dust. The most striking shot of the film brings this home (you can find some of it here): the Enterprise blasting itself out of the black hole by dropping the warp core (old trick, I think used once in TNG), being chased for a moment by an expanding cell membrane made of blue light which comes to push it on and or absorb it... this shows us the camera has become a microscope and we have completely passed into the realm of biology, of Innerspace, rather than the physics space of old. Space is body in this film, embodied, and while it'd be relevant here to bring up Fredric Jameson's discussion of the body as the real horizon of postmodern thought, I'll do that more in detail at a later time. Needless to say this applies here: we wonder at our bodies in this movie and their disintegration, not at space in any classic sense, and while this might represent something of a progression, something that makes space something closer to the more pliable realm SF has always seen it as (and the physical universe in general, nature itself), because it is a device for producing that reinvestment of action with adventure (and not the other way around) it seems to me a bit regressive. I'll be more specific: physics-space causes wonder, while the biology space of this movie is still sheer spectacle, since space is evacuated of its limitlessness, or made (however wide the shot) only so big, while none of the problems of this swath of light's management (what makes it alien, hard to deal with) emerge (we find in it only sheer enjoyment, or sheer terror). Moreover, given this body, it isn't filled with anything, anything like people, ships, space stations and devices or what have you, despite the appearance of one in the beginning. This space isn't the space of technology and people, of possible civilization, but something like weak nature, which peoples you more than you people it. Again, maybe that's an advance: it's certainly an aesthetic advance, mirrored more on the most unbelievable pictures we get from the Hubble or the orbiters of Mars, and makes possible a new representation of futurity as full of wild being, as it once was called by Merleau-Ponty, full of light and warmth, half-glimpses of stars and worlds (which could be interesting if it were pushed back into technology: we would get less of an on-board experience of journeying--and we don't really get this 19th century naval experience here, which is so prevalent in TNG--and the man-made would flit by with a less visible, though light-filled, tactile pressure and pull than the current visual explosiveness, tending towards the anarchy of Transformers or the obsessively over-detailed Star Wars, that we sometimes still see here and which still relies on simple equivalence between personal perception and the third person objective camera). But, put to the ends of this movie, it all tends to merely mirror our act of gazing at our (nonalien) bodies more than it does any sort of encounter with nature itself (which is why at the end, all the rest of the universe can just be gone through in a series--star system after star system impeccably modeled and chaotic rolling by merely with the credits), and make humanity less of a blip in the cosmos as the natural inhabitant of the universe (space merely as atmosphere)--taking it over without thinking (it's interesting how quickly Starfleet itself is coded as a military organization--like the Air Force, to keep going with the space-to-atmosphere reduction--more than an interstellar forum for diplomacy with an academic institution as its training academy: and while Kirk's final exam has always been seen as a sort of daring mixed with smartness, here the movie tries to code it as the lower class breaking a big bureaucratic intellectual institution through--not even cockiness, but pure assholery [the sign that it'd rather not represent lower class intellect at all, or see it merely as the frat-boy behavior it isn't]).

It's interesting on this point that the movie is so casual with things like planets and civilizations themselves, despite the use of Saturn: no fundamental break is seen between humanity on Earth and humanity in space, between the stars. And this brings me, finally, to Spock and black holes themselves--the real enemy of the movie. These puncture space and take away representation (though they also weirdly--because the plot needs to begin--seem to allow passage from the alternate Trek universe... such clunkily inconsistent physics doesn't even pose a problem for the movie but seems all the more to tie things together without really doing so--the typical formal postmodernist move), and they only work if space has become so very thick and bodily such that we can see this as threatening, sad, or profound. So back on the level of content (that is, form), within the plot, this is precisely what gives Spock himself something new, something only somewhat interesting: trauma. While this makes Spock into a different character altogether, this seems to me to be the most hackneyed way of doing so, since the non-representation of the death of of six billion people and their entire civilization in all its rich complexity seems more a formal requirement of the film--given its pure aim to be different--than anything really thought-provoking for either the character or us. Or maybe it provokes some thought, but this thought is about representation itself rather than any of the more substantial things (legacy, memory, social structure, the alien--remember, Vulcan was the first alien contact humans had, according to the canon) that might appear in further movies (and again, this minimal affirmation is all that the movie is after here). Here, they seek to give new meaning to the old Vulcan dilemma itself, as if it weren't rich enough (with all its racial overtones) beforehand, and this makes such a complex exploration of what this all means take the mere form of yet another prelude to action (big statues, once signifying something, are more interesting because they come crashing down on a poor figure as Spock rescues the Vulcan High Council).

In the end, if you think that this overcomplication does indeed invest the movie with some less formal content, you might be right. It certainly ends up, through all these maneuvers used to extricate itself without extricating itself from the canon and series, as perhaps a more complex meditation on revisiting older aspects of franchises than some of the more recent comic book restart movie-epics. But then again, it also doesn't, in some sense, since this is again all tied up much too neatly: one has to ask whether one wants this affirmation to be so minimally and formally represented--and there only by absence--rather than played out in a richer plot integrating the achievements at the level of the medium itself. And this not in a future film, but in the future of this present one.

A note on Orientalism

So, I divorced literary theory from critical theory a bit last time. But I did so not to knock at the latter so much as show how literary theory is really doing something else, something less critical in the sense that people have been lately been referring to this--that is, negatively, and with its Kantian overtone. This isn't to say that ideology critique isn't also what we do in literary studies sometimes or even often. It's just that this necessarily takes the form of an extended meditation and analysis (or reading), that, because it has to pass through its object and really explicate it, can really only be something like dismissing conditions of possibility if it's done superficially. And, yes, there's probably a lot of superficial stuff. But there is that in all sorts of disciplines, and you can't dismiss critique by equating its most superficial performance with its most accomplished work, unless through that very Kantian maneuver. Regardless, the relationship of literary criticism to critique in general is not a simple one (critique has so many valences, and even if you mean it in the "proper" sense--and which applies, in the Latourian area from which this talk comes, primarily to critical sociology--the import of what you're saying starts to apply to the other significations), and the similarity of the words shouldn't make us think so.

It gets a little more complicated with the rise of critical theory and postmodernism, which sought to really play on this similarity of words and tie literary analysis with critique (and even reading itself into something like critique): it's a way to make criticism in any form (qua close attention to something) seem relevant, after all. However, we shouldn't forget the reasons in America that this desire for relevance was sought. It wasn't just opportunism. Certainly the way it proceeded was a bit suspect, since it also attempted to beat American philosophy (for one) to death. But this was already a dead horse, in many ways, and philosophy's renewed relevance in America might be attributed, in some way, to the slight pressure of this postmodern challenge, which, along with new (and perhaps much more heavy) pressure from the sciences, allowed it to develop its Continental aspects--though of course it did this mostly through internal changes, with much infighting, negotiation, and thinking and reading (the sort of unbelievable fixed positions of someone like a Dreyfus or a Schacht or Searle seem symptomatic of the sort of struggles they went through).

But this is why I once said critical theory is primarily the politicization of other disciplines. Here I just wanted to show that it also politicizes literary studies--and sort of undo the general sense that this critical theorizing started and ended here, or didn't become something with its own agenda. The particular way this politicization occurs--and I should be clear that when I say this I mean that literary studies isn't apolitical, just that it might have other possibilities for politics than the critical one--has generally put people like me in an awkward position, and my interest in literary theory is first and foremost one of trying to figure out how we can negotiate the legacy of literary theory in its relationship with this critical tendency, such that it doesn't all end with the situation we're currently in. This is a situation where last generation of readers has put the next generation in an untenable position, having pissed off everyone through its too-radical-but-strangely-not-radical-enough attempts to change the system by making this theory map directly onto with a critical-political project much larger than any particular field (which end up mainly just collapsing into a weak and less political attempt to deal with increasing "professionalization" or the compartmentalizing of literary studies--see John Guillory's good Bourdieuvian account of this).

But I also wanted to do this all in order to show that critical theory isn't something to be avoided. It just has its particular purpose, which I'd like to make clear is distinct from the purpose of literary criticism. This doesn't mean either that critical theory means "forgetting literature," as some people (Jonathan Culler, though reluctantly) have put it--cultural studies (which we can say is something like a side-by-side critical adventure which we can't quite reduce to the theorization, along with AfAm, Feminist, PoCo, more explicitly Marxist studies, and Queer Studies) certainly doesn't do this, though it sees literature primarily as taking place beside other media, and I see no reason to say critical theory does this either.

So--the general field of things sufficiently stratified or differentiated (and I'd rather insist on this stratification than in the way it's now all organized)--I'd like to suggest that one can jump into critical theory when necessary or even when not (though I'd personally show more hesitance to do so than in former times and not ask whether there were other ways to articulate what I'd say). One can even do so as a literary theorist (or, for that matter, as a literary historian). And I'd like to show the relevance of that particular jump (which can again be made by architecture students, philosophers, etc. etc.) by just presenting again a little contribution to the little spat around an essay by Harman, which I dealt with perhaps a little too roundly a while ago (though not, I think, as roundly as others). It comes up again as a sort of afterthought in Paul Ennis' next-to-last post explicating the essay in question. The posts are excellent by the way (here they are: 1, 2, 3, 4, and again 5), mostly because they show what I thought was obvious but I guess needs more stress (in a way that makes me for the first time doubt the supposed ubiquity of phenomenology as the main background against which most Continental philosophy works), which is that there's a lot of phenomenological ways into the issues discussed and that Harman is in a way making a contribution to them as well: as Paul says early in the first post, "in order to understand Harman's metaphysics one also needs to understand his motivations and these are tied to an overcoming of the overcoming-of-metaphysics in Heidegger." Anyway, as I suggested last time I spoke of this, going through all this as Paul did was one of the most helpful ways to address the larger concerns that dealt with the internal aspects of Harman's project.

But then there was that issue of Orientalism. Paul addresses it, as he nears the end of Harman's essay:

Harman makes an important claim next: “We must ignore the usual connotations of sensuality and fix our gaze on a more primitive layer of the cosmos” (Collapse II, 206). Here I think we can go some way to dispelling the idea that Harman is projecting sensuous qualities upon exotic objects – at least from the strictly philosophical mode. The question of the aesthetic employment of exotic metaphors is a different issue to be addressed later in the round-up. Within the orientalist lens one might also question the notion of a “primitive layer” but this too is a major theme of Western philosophical thinking from Schelling to Heidegger (and already problematic for Jacobi in his depiction of German idealism as a step toward emptiness/nothingness).

It's the last point that was the issue, as I gathered, but in a way had to also deal with that "aesthetic employment of exotic metaphors," though only vaguely. To recapitulate, Harman was accused of Orientalism, or Orientalistic thinking--and that you can't really be "accused" of this will be my point below--for asking us to fix our gaze in the way he does in Paul's quote: on "a more primitive layer."

Now, its the last sentence of Paul's here that will probably give us only cold comfort, since it doesn't really oppose the charge of Orientalism as--to whoever is interested in such charges--show it is more diffuse than ever! In short, making the primitive in this sense into a theme which is traditional doesn't really combat the charge and sounds like an argument from authority (which doesn't have much clout, however sensible it may indeed be).

What does oppose this charge is, however, the critical theory of Orientalism itself as formulated by Edward Said! In other words, it is the charge of Orientalism or Orientalisticity or Orentialisticalismicality which is precisely not proceeding along the lines which Said (alongside his literary theory and literary criticism) developed--as the parties involved to their credit said was the case. And so far from attributing the attack to an interested critical theorist, a critic critiquing, say, we should really understand how critical theory actually, in this case, comes to help philosophy figure out what's going on and, indeed, defend itself.

For, as my quote from Paul was meant to show, it doesn't always have the resources with which to account for things. That's no essential fault--as over-interested people might have said in the past--but just the sign of a place where it can turn to others, and others can be ready to help out.

So in a comment on Paul's blog, I made my contribution, and I'll make it again in more detail here: I said that Orientalism, for Said (one can find this in the first pages of his book), is more of a locus for the operation of power, not a one way dynamic with good and bad sides. So this is why you can't accuse someone of Orientalism. Orientalism is not something like a property of a thought or a taint upon it. Rather, Orientalism is a thoroughfare. Or, more vividly put, Orientalism is like a panopticon. And Said does this because he thinks that seeing orientalism as some taint of exoticization which needs to be expunged from whatever someone says--according to the weak and reactionary protocols of political correctness--are missing what is really at issue. One can always link exoticization with anything. The issue is larger, more collective or more widespread than that, but also has less to do with the character of the ideas themselves as the linkages to the relations between East and West that are the most hard to pin down. And so the concepts, as such, are not good or bad, either because they are old concepts that have come from something like a tradition of oppressing the Near or Far East, or because they carry their exotic flavor. This is because because the association of exoticization with the Orient, and the use of concepts in such a tradition, is the symptom of a more complex dynamic actually playing out between East and West--one that doesn't simply produce the oppression of the former or work in one way, and which never really stops if the concepts in which we see it most manifested disappear.

You see how this relies on Foucault's employment of that nice structuralist notion of discourse (Said himself says this). Now, you can disagree with this, with Foucault's ontology or whatever you want to call it, all you want. You can say it's too based on language (and I'd agree with you), but that's not enough. It's not enough here, because the theory allows us to begin to understand what is going on. Just because we knock away at that the notion of discourse (or language) doesn't mean we can't see how it helps us here, because at least negatively it shows us there can't be anything like a one-to-one correlation of concepts with political or social ramifications. Philosophy has a hard time arguing when this fact comes to the fore, because it means it has to creep past the interior of the concepts, just beyond their edges, and show their formative requirments--in short their historical character. Harman has actually been pretty good about trying to historicize his own concepts, at least on the personal level (I've never heard a person so frankly admit exactly when they really figured out Husserl before, as he does in Prince of Networks)--and philosophy, as history of philosophy as an area of study grows, is no doubt getting better in general in this area. But here we have a critical theory that works pretty well, and so why not use it? It doesn't always have to entail some agreement at bottom with the whole "system," and the efficacy of the notion doesn't always fall away with an attack at its foundations--simply because it might not so philosophically be "based" on such foundations.

It's also a theory that is trying, primarily, to get beyond the alleged crudeness of the Marxist way of going about this, which is through ideology. I think, though, we might see the Foucauldian notion of discourse against this Marxist background, almost as a modification of it rather than anything radically different than it--along with Derrida's much maligned talk about Western metaphysics. What's going on there is some attempt to not just dismiss philosophical concepts as tie them to the tendencies that shape them, their typical directions. If this then has ramifications on the interior, as it were (I'm using a poor conceptual scheme here, as if concepts were black boxes, but whatever--that's Latour's contribution). I think fundamentally, too, it is in this Postcolonial context (as it is called) that the arguments are the best: that is, I find Derrida's talk about Western metaphysics most convincing when it comes out of his attempt to deal with the historical ramifications of France's relation to Algeria--as I think it often does (and not just because he was Algerian). I think of what Foucault does as addressing a similar--though perhaps less starkly drawn--set of relations. Orientalism works too by trying to map the dynamics--not just in philosophy--that obtain at this crossroads. It might not be the best way to go about this, but in this case I think it works, in the sense that the theory makes us grasp how quickly we are moving from something like the content of the philosophy to statements about its general contours, by way of invoking the Orient itself (these large concepts often do too much work, as some people, in other situations, point out well). This is what Said was trying to account for with Orientalism--which is not one such big concept so much as the name for a dynamic which we can trace.