Hauntologies

February 24, 2009 in Papers & Talks by Steen | 7 comments

The following is a brief presentation of the research project I’m embarking on. It falls into two halfs; the first is a theoretical overview, where I trace the origin of hauntology, its connection to other critical movements and terminologies. It focuses primarily on the spectral and is certainly only a very sketchy overview, as there are several areas that still need to be investigated closely, specifically media boundaries, the concept of presence and hauntology’s broader relationship to modernity.

Hauntology is a neologism coined by Jacques Derrida in his work Specters of Marx. In it, he invokes not just the ghost of Marx and the opening of The Communist Manifesto but also the ghost of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Two passages from Shakespeare’s play are particularly significant for Derrida: “Time is out of joint” and “To be or not to be”.

“Time is out of joint” is for Derrida the cue to point out the tenuous connection between past, present and future. The past always haunts the present, of course, but equally important so does the future. Some refer to hauntology as “nostalgia for the future” (Ballardian) in an attempt to point out that the introduction of a ghost – in this case, the ghost of Hamlet’s father – creates a tear and a fold in history.
Derrida takes this point further with the quotation “To be or not to be,” which he expresses perhaps most clearly towards the end of his book, stating that

To haunt does not mean to be present, and it is necessary to introduce haunting into the very construction of a concept. Of every concept, beginning with the concepts of being and time. That is what we would be calling here a hauntology. Ontology opposes it only in a movement of exorcism. Ontology is a conjuration. (161)

Derrida’s point is thus that the very concept of Being is always haunted – not in the sense of the past returning as a kind of return of the repressed, but rather in a more fundamental sense. The origin of anything – ontology itself – is always spectral, is always repetition’s first and last time. Being always carries the ghost within itself, in the sense of a “structural openness” as Colin Davis points out, and he continues to state that the “ghost pushes at the boundaries of language and thought.” (Davis 379)

Hauntology is thus Derrida’s differánce and trace, it is that which cannot be articulated but remains a part of everything in our culture. The presence of Derrida’s specter is a way to make “established certainties vacillate” (Davis 376) and so it is evidently a deconstructive term but it remains significant that he chooses the figure of the ghost and the term hauntology to describe this process which is particularly related to a challenge to linear history and a sense of nostalgia. As Wendy Haslem argues, “Haunting is the effect of modernity. Spectrality emerges from the reproduction and repetition of images…” (Haslem) which suggests that there is a distinctive resonance in the figure of specters, ghosts and haunts.
Indeed, several scholars have pointed out the rise of specters, ghosts, phantasms, haunts and similar forms of the ephemeral and have in different ways pointed to the significance of these figures and metaphors. One important point comes from Fred Botting when he states that “[s]pectrality instead describes ordinary operations of new technologies and their hallucinatory, virtual effects.” (Botting 200) This connects to Botting’s larger argument about the Gothic and the inherently Gothic nature of new technologies, but at the same time we surely also see a Baudrillardian specter of the simulacral effects of technology.

Surely of equal significance, is Jeffrey Sconce’s concept of “haunted media.” In his book Haunted Media, Sconce analyses what he refers to as “media metaphysics” and is particularly interested in the cultural history of electronic presence, a presence which is not an essential property, but a variable social construct which has changed across media history. (Sconce 7) For Sconce, as for Derrida, “haunt” becomes the key figure to question the stability of presence and to point out how technologies and media are caught up in the way we perceive and understand the world – in other words, how we relate to Being and Time. The ontology of media history, for Sconce, is thus clearly a hauntology of media history.

Marina Warner takes up Sconce’s argument and gives a survey of how ghosts, spirits and other ephemeral phenomena – phantasmagorias, to Warner – all crop up as metaphors when new technologies emerge. Her argument follows two concepts: Henri Focillion’s argument that aesthetic forms generate autonomous meanings in the interplay of historical, social, economic and personal circumstances, and Mallarmé’s “logic of the imaginary.” (Warner 11-12) In other words, technology and media generate new ways for the cultural imagination to refashion representations of specters, just as specters, ghosts, etc reconfigure emerging media in specific ways. Warner’s point is that we cannot ignore either side of the equation and that we need to examine the hauntings of media as closely as we examine media themselves.

Much of the same argument, but this time in relation to social life, can be found in Avery F. Gordon’s Ghostly Matters, where she argues that “Haunting is a constituent element of modern social life. It is neither pre-modern superstition nor individual psychosis; it is a generalizable social phenomenon of great import. To study social life one must confront the ghostly aspects of it.” (Gordon 7) Without specifically invoking Derrida, Gordon’s primary argument is that “that which appears absent can indeed be a seething presence” (Gordon 17) and that the ghost is the sign – the empirical evidence – that a haunting is taking place. For Gordon – and Derrida and me as a hauntologist – the ghost is not simply a dead person but a social figure; a social figure of a dense site where history and subjectivity make social life.

In other words, ghosts are significant because they produce material effects, and it is through the material effects that we may locate the presence of ghosts and analyze the effects of their hauntings. Gordon’s argument for the significance of ghosts is also tied to technology and media for as she states “in a culture seemingly ruled by technologies of hypervisibility, we are led to believe not only that everything can be seen, but also that everything is available and accessible for our consumption.” For Gordon, hypervisibility is “a kind of obscenity of accuracy that abolishes the distinctions between ‘permission and prohibition, presence and absence.’ No shadows, no ghosts.” (Gordon 16)

I shall take it to be the task of the hauntologist to locate the ghosts that lurk in our culture of hypervisibility, to not just locate their absent presence or analyze their material effects – though these are all complementary tasks – but point out how the ghost as a social figure helps us understand the convergence of cultural forms, history and social life. We will do this by opening up the cultural forms we analyze, rather than attempt to catch the ghost. Paraphrasing Gordon, I will argue that cultural texts haunt that which assembles and binds. Hauntological analysis will be a method to interrupt the “presentness of the present” (Weinstock 5) and undermine the fixedness of binary oppositions and the linearity of history.

As is evident from the above, the figure of the ghost has been influential in many different areas, all of which can be considered hauntological efforts. Furthermore, Derrida’s concept has gained critical recognition in various places; most especially in the area of music studies where blogger K-Punk is particularly prominent. For K-Punk, hauntology has been a very suitable term for a distinctive brand of electronic music which relies heavily on sampling.

Indeed, we may now find references scattered across the web to specific albums and bands as ‘hauntological’ and in this way it may be considered almost a genre of music. The term hauntology was first applied to music in 1995 by Ian Penman in an issue of The Wire. The musical genre is a version of ambient and trip-hop, where there is an emphasis on dubbing, and the genre emerged by using samples particularly from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and library music. As a consequence, the sound becomes distinctive and a further relation to haunting is the interest in how the future was imagined in the past. One example of this type of music is Burial – Ghost Hardware

K-Punk refers, in connection to blues and Robert Johnson but I believe it holds true across all media, to the “layers of fizz, crackle, hiss, white noise” which is the spectral part of Robert Johnson’s music. (‘Phonograph blues’) I argue that hauntological analysis will always focus on these layers of fizz, crackle, hiss and white noise that haunts every text – the places where hegemony attempts to assemble and join, for as K-punk goes on these “specters are textural,” we can sense them in the texture of the text. Hauntological analysis is thus sensitivity to these layers of textures.

So, this sensitivity to layers of textures can be said to be the method of hauntology as an analytical tool, which points out that we need to be sensitive to all manners of different layers, not just textual, but also medial, historical, economic and so forth. It is tied to our historical moment, which Jo Collins and John Jervis refers to as “the uncanny grounding of modern selfhood and the social.” (Collins & Jervis 4)
As Jervis points out later, “the spectral can figure a state of ontological undecidability or tension, where there is an insistence, a presence of whatever resists us, recalcitrant to our understanding.” (Jervis 10) Although Jervis talks about the uncanny, it is evident that many of his points apply to hauntology as well, such as history being a stream of disappearing traces (11), the frission of the uncanny (31), the phantasm as the uncanny double of the image (39), but most significantly is his argument that the uncanny is an “unformed feeling” suggesting that our foundation of experience is grasped and figured in aesthetic terms. (Jervis 45) This returns us to both Warner and Gordon, who argue for the vacillation between the aesthetic and the social.

Hauntology is a portmanteau concept indicating that most texts are already portmanteaus themselves, and the task of the hauntologist is to reveal the layers and open up the text for various new meanings that were not clear before. So, let us turn to a number of cases in order to see how that might work in practice. In order to do that, I will present some cases that are papers from conferences I have attended or will attend in the near future.

David Bowie, 1. Outside (Uncanny Media, Utrecht, August 2008)

Despite being one of Bowie’s least-known albums, Outside has consistently had a strong underground following due to its unusual nature: it was made as a collaboration between Bowie and Brian Eno (the first since Bowie’s Berlin-trilogy) and consists of regular rock songs, interspersed with small, spoken-word pieces where Bowie’s voice is altered through the use of plug-ins. Conceived as a trilogy, this first album starts off an unusual murder story: the young girl Baby Grace has been killed in a horrible graphic way, but also in a way which the story’s detective refers to as “art-murder.”

The investigation is what takes up most of the album’s narrative, which is presented both in the form of the songs and the segues (the brief spoken-word interludes), as well as the booklet which accompanies the CD. We meet a variety of characters which Nathan Adler, the detective, interrogates and investigates. We even hear Baby Grace speak to us, despite the fact that she has been killed. This occurs in the segue “Baby Grace: A Horrid Cassette,” indicating how already here we encounter the voice of a ghost. All these characters are portrayed by David Bowie himself, both verbally – altered by the plug-ins readily available in ProTools – and visually in the booklet, where the alteration has taken place with digital imaging techniques.

Bowie haunts the entire album in a variety of forms: what we might call uncanny doubles, since we as Bowie fans can certainly recognize both his voice and his appearance in the various characters. That is not the only Gothic figure of the album as the story itself is narrated out of linear sequence. Not only do we hear Baby Grace after she has been killed but the song “Wishful Beginnings” is the 13th track rather than the first (and the same song is the one which has been left out of the 2nd version of Outside to make room for a Pet Shop Boys remix of the song “Space Boy.”) This winding, labyrinthine narrative suggests the figure of the arabesque which was prominent in Gothic architecture, but also useful as an aesthetic figure.

We are never provided with enough information to solve the puzzle, and the identity of the killer is never revealed. Partly, this is because the trilogy was never completed, but what is more significant is that the way the album is conceived, no matter who the killer actually is it will be David Bowie in one of the performances. Indeed, Bowie is both victim, investigator and perpetrator all at the same time. This conflation of identity is hardly coincidental but rather part of the album’s uncanny nature. It is also the album’s uncanniness which suggests a hauntological analysis.

Certainly, time is out of joint on this album. Not only does it take place on around New Year’s Eve 1999, on the threshold of the year 2000, but the narrative is also out of joint in its non-linear sequence. Furthermore, the opening segue tells us that Leon cuts a zero in time, “a zero in the fabric of time itself.” The figure ‘0’ both signifies nothingness (because it is zero, naught, nil) and thus the extermination of time, but it also suggests infinity because it is an unbroken circle with no beginning or end. In this way, it becomes fitting that the murder is never solved, since this means that the narrative folds in upon itself and we as listeners are left to wander around the arabesque labyrinth that the album creates.

Donnie Darko and The Butterfly Effect (ICFA, Orlando, March 2009)

Time is also the central concern of my next investigation, although here we are dealing with two films – time travel films, in fact. While there are differences between these two films – Donnie Darko and The Butterfly Effect – there are several significant similarities. They both emphasize traumatic experiences as the locus of the time travel episodes. Earlier periods are re-visited and altered in order to work through the traumatic episodes. In both films, the protagonists suffer from psychological traumas, which cause their perception of and relation to reality to be different. Thus, rather than presenting time in spatial terms, as is typical of time travel narratives, these two film insist as much on a psychological view of time; a space of mentality which needs to be confronted before time can be properly re-adjusted.

In Donnie Darko, Donnie’s sleepwalking results in him surviving a jet engine crashing int his room simply because Donnie is not there. His survival causes a number of problems for the people close to him, and Donnie needs to change time in order to save those he loves. Similarly in The Butterfly Effect, Evan is traumatized as a child as are his childhood friends, and only be traveling back in time to change these traumatic experiences, can time be set right.

Both films thus articulate the paradox between free will and determinism which time travel narratives so often oscillate between. I suggest that only be reading these two films as trauma texts can we properly understand read their wounds of time out of joint. The repeated scenes of earlier events take on uncanny intensification in the way they are changed into new and better events. As both films end with the death of the time traveling protagonist (although, only in the director’s cut of The Butterfly Effect does this literally happen), we see how man can conquer time, but not in a technological sense of inventing time machines. Instead, the time traveling is traumatic and can only be stopped by the sacrifice of the time traveler. No longer is history a process of becoming, but a process of unbecoming, of ceasing to be.

So, in the way that the past haunts the present life of the protagonist, forcing the protagonist to go back in time in order to fix the mistakes evidently made, so in the same way can the protagonist be said to be a specter of history; the traumatic event should have properly killed the protagonist but failed to do so. Consequently, the protagonist lives on and time is out of joint.

These two time travel films thus explicate that while trauma is typically seen as a destructive repetition, to use Cathy Caruth’s phrase, there is also the potential for positive transformation. The device of time travel is used in these films to break free of “the formation of history as the endless repetition of previous violence.” (Caruth, 63) The repetition of previous violence can thus be broken by re-visiting the episode of original trauma, so in this way the time travel can be seen as a way of recovering from history.

The narrative sequence of the both films are thus broken down and re-arranged; history is challenged and revised in ways that are considered as healing. Symbolically, the time travel becomes a way to set things right again, to recover from the trauma that haunts not just the protagonist, but all the characters involved, even though they never realize it.

Don DeLillo, Falling Man (CEA, Pittsburgh, March 2009)

Continuing on the topic of hauntology and trauma, I turn to Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, where although war does not explicitly feature in Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, it haunts the entire narrative as the specter which sets actions in motion. 9/11 is the traumatic event which slowly falls apart as access to it becomes impossible.  The lives of the novel’s characters fall apart, and the event haunts them as they fail to to reintegrate the memory of 9/11. As Cathy Caruth argues, drawing on the works of Paul de Man, the loss of connection to traumatic experience results in a referential loss, free of the weight of reference. The figure of the falling man literally revisits them in the performance artist who falls from buildings as a ghost from the past. His literal falling is meant to be a lifting of the trauma experienced by the onlookers, a way for them to grasp their own survival, to read the wound, as it were, of the unknowability of survival.

A synthesis of trauma theory and hauntology will allow us to explain the destructive repetition of the history of violence set in motion by traumatic events. We can thus begin to explain how the traumatic event is in itself already shot through with this destructive repetition – that trauma is a haunt/ing: an origin and a recurrence. DeLillo’s novel explicates the experience of trauma in the way the fall of the towers and the people falling from them spread into the lives of the survivors and become the guiding metaphor for the way they live on. The conflict of event and memory of the event which stands central for DeLillo’s novel reveals how the metaphors of war permeate and haunt the traumatic origin, how these metaphors inevitably fail our search for an external referent to make sense of the traumatic origin. In the end, direct reference is lost but reintroduced in the figure of falling: the falling man, the falling lives of the characters and the fall of meaning into entropy, DeLillo’s guiding metaphor.

DeLillo’s entropy creeps in through the uncanny presence of Falling Man; the meaning of the event is slowly emptied as it is repeated over and over again. Yet this is also specifically the haunting which Falling Man reveals. So, the event is ripped from its “proper” context and we see how the trauma becomes constitutive of the lives of the surviving characters. Hauntology reveals this constitutive fact of the trauma and how repetition works for the characters, emptying meaning from their lives.

Tom Waits, Bone Machine (IGA, Lancaster July 2009)

Tom Waits’ album Bone Machine sounds like an apocalyptic vision, the clattering of percussion sounds like a dance of skeletons, while Waits’ gravely voice sounds like a necromancer conjuring ghosts of both past and future in a dance macabre of images that haunt America. The album is itself a bone machine, a thing stitched together with all the scars showing and so the monstrosity of Wait’s album articulates the specters that surround an imminent apocalypse. Bone Machine starts with the Earth dying, then moves across a Gothic landscape of barns, empty highways to the allure of the west coast and ends with a plea to never grow up in this terrible world.

I see this album as a hauntological and spectral album where Gothic media images are conjured up to provide a spectral America, and to show how much haunts, specters and ghosts have always been part of American national imagination, as Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock argues in the collection Spectral America. As a media monster, the album disrupts the its own present time of being (as it is being heard) with scrambling, clanking sounds that do not seem to fit, yet is part of the album’s spectral sound. As a narrative monstrosity, it shambles along an apocalyptic path tearing at the foundations of America to reveal traces that are often covered up, the parts of America so rarely mentioned but which has been part of Tom Waits’ career.

By figuring the American mythology as a specter, Waits reveals that “there’s a world going on – underground” (Waits, “Underground”) and Waits himself can be said to be in the position of the mediator or perhaps phrased better as the shaman – Waits’ increasing popularity is indicative of the fact that he brings certain things to light in mainstream culture. From one perspective, it is precisely the spectral nature of the “rain dogs” that wander urban streets at night, but it is also a challenge to mainstream musical production.

Waits’ love for the “fizz, crackle, hiss, white noise” of sound production is well-known and his voice bears the same texture as a well-scratched record, worn with use. These haunting sounds of the production are emphasized rather than smoothed over. The assembling and joining is thus revealed, in the same way that Waits points to the flip side of American mythology.

Conclusions

As is evident from the above, hauntology is mostly useful for texts that are reflexively aware of their own ontological instability. This is hardly surprising, seeing as how hauntological research is interested in the places where texts are assembled and joined. In other words, hauntology is best suited in the case of texts that are at least partially transgressive and subversive. We should not assume that this only applies to ideological texts, even though Derrida connects hauntology to hegemony, but instead keep in mind that it applies to all forms of transgression and subversion, including those that challenge textual and media boundaries. Hauntology allows us to open up and transform the texts in order to better understand them and our relation to them.

Also, while the texts I have chosen are recent texts, I hope that it is also evident that hauntology applies to a broad range of types of texts; it is not an approach limited to one specific cultural form but it is one which – at least as I have used it – is mostly useful for some kind of media/text analysis.

Works Cited

  • Ballardian, “‘Magisterial, Precise, Unsettling’: Simon Reynolds on the Ballard Connection”, from <http://www.ballardian.com/simon-reynolds-on-the-ballard-connection>, accessed February 16, 2009.
  • Botting, Fred,  “Gothic Culture”, The Routledge Companion to Gothic, Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy (eds.), London: Routledge, 2007.
  • Caruth, Cathy, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Baltimore & London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1996.
  • Collins, Jo & Jervis, John, Uncanny Modernity, Houndmills & New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
  • Davis, Colin, “État Presént, Hauntology, Spectres and Phantoms” in French Studies 59(3), 373-379, 2005.
  • Derrida, Jacques, Specters of Marx: The state of the debt, the work of mourning and the new international, London: Routledge, 1994.
  • Gordon, Avery F., Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, Minneapolis & London: Minnesota UP, 1997.
  • Haslem, Wendy, “Traces of Gothic Spectrality in New Media Art” in The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies 5, December 2008 <http://irishgothichorrorjournal.homestead.com/gothicspec.html>, accessed February 16, 2009.
  • Jervis, John, “Uncanny Presences” in Uncanny Modernity, Jo Collins and John Jervis (eds).
  • K-punk, “Phonograph blues”, <http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/008535.html>
  • Sconce, Jeffrey, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television, Durham & London, Duke UP, 2000.
  • Warner, Marina, Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-first Century, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006.
  • Weinstock, Andrew (ed), Spectral America: Phantoms and the National Imagination, Madison: Wisconsin UP, 2004.

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The Specter of Falling

December 5, 2008 in Books by Steen | No comments

For the CEA conference in Pittsburgh March 26-28 next year, my proposal for a paper has been accepted. The abstract is below.

Although war does not explicitly feature in Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, it haunts the entire narrative as the specter which sets actions in motion. 9/11 is the traumatic event which slowly falls apart as access to it becomes impossible. The lives of the novel’s characters fall apart, and the event haunts them as they fail to to reintegrate the memory of 9/11. As Cathy Caruth argues, drawing on the works of Paul de Man, the loss of connection to traumatic experience results in a referential loss, free of the weight of reference. The figure of the falling man literally revisits them in the performance artist who falls from buildings as a ghost from the past. His literal falling is meant to be a lifting of the trauma experienced by the onlookers, a way for them to grasp their own survival, to read the wound, as it were, of the unknowability of survival.

A synthesis of trauma theory and hauntology will allow us to explain the destructive repetition of the history of violence set in motion by traumatic events. We can thus begin to explain how the traumatic event is in itself already shot through with this destructive repetition – that trauma is a haunt/ing: an origin and a recurrence. DeLillo’s novel explicates the experience of trauma in the way the fall of the towers and the people falling from them spread into the lives of the survivors and become the guiding metaphor for the way they live on. The conflict of event and memory of the event which stands central for DeLillo’s novel reveals how the metaphors of war permeate and haunt the traumatic origin, how these metaphors inevitably fail our search for an external referent to make sense of the traumatic origin. In the end, direct reference is lost but reintroduced in the figure of falling: the falling man, the falling lives of the characters and the fall of meaning into entropy, DeLillo’s guiding metaphor.

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American Utopias

November 4, 2008 in Films by Steen | No comments

One of the ways that American independent filmmaking distinguishes itself from its Hollywood counterpart, is in its relation to American culture. While Hollywood films are often seen as partaking in the hegemonic structure of the dominant American society, independent films typically represent an alternative. This alternative is not just found in aesthetic practice and different modes of production, but also in the often critical dialog they establish with their own cultural context. One very specific place where the difference between Hollywood and independent filmmaking’s dialog with culture can be asserted quite clearly, is in the construction of utopian spaces and how these spaces are imagined as responses to contemporary culture. In this essay, I will argue that the utopian imagination is used by Hollywood to reinforce hegemonic structures, while the independent filmmaking often distances itself from the possibility of a utopian space. Hal Hartley’s The Girl from Monday (2005) will be the main film discussed here, but in order to understand what it reacts against, I will look at a number of Hollywood films that employ utopian strategies.

When looking at American independent filmmaking, we need to keep in mind that the label ‘independent’ is a quite unstable construction, mainly pointing out that it should be seen as existing outside of the Hollywood production system, than having any particularly shared features of their own. As P. Adams Sitney points out in his Visionary Film (2002), there was a distinctive shift in the late seventies and throughout the eighties where a convergence of social and historical forces altered American film (Sitney 409), a shift where the independent film emerged. Of course, as Emanuel Levy points out in his book Cinema of Outsiders (1999), there are really two different conceptions of independent films: “those that are acceptable to Sundance and those whose contents and styles render them virtually unshowable” (Levy 5).

The Sundance Film Festival, established by Robert Redford in 1980, thus became a turning-point for non-Hollywood filmmaking and while “independent film” began as a label for films without economic attachment to the Hollywood system, this was soon to change. However, this is not the place to discuss the decline and subsuming of avant-garde film into independent film in the US, but rather to point to the convergence which happened. While most independent films may have remained soothing and reaffirming, rather than questioning and challenging (Levy 494-495), it is clear that some independent films can be considered avant-garde, and will reject narrative conventions established by mainstream Hollywood and instead enter into a “dialog of forms and voices” and regard the concept of philosophical resolution or narrative closure as an occasion for parody (Sitney 411). It is this critical and subversive streak of the independent film, that I will relate to Hollywood’s use of utopian strategies.

From the point of view of most Hollywood filmmaking, these utopian strategies are used to mirror the hegemonic structures found in society. Instead of imagining an alternate space as a resistance to dominant society, these films place USA as the utopian space. Such an argument follows what Jean Baudrillard provocatively argues in his book America: the US is utopia achieved and because of this, there are no poor people in USA. ”The have-nots will be condemned to oblivion, to abandonment, to disappearance pure and simple. […] And rightly so, since they show such bad taste as to deviate from general consensus.” (Baudrillard 111). Baudrillard’s argument must of course be understood as ironic, and as pointing to the ideological erasure of the poor, rather than a serious argument of no poverty in America.

The argument follows from his larger claim that USA has torn itself from the historical: ”at a certain point they [Americans] freed themselves from that historical centrality” (81), which points to a similar approach to the utopian space as Fredric Jameson in his book Archaeologies of the Future, where he argues that utopian texts ”struggle desperately to escape our force field and the force of gravity of our historical moment” (Jameson 71). This is the standard argument that America’s national youth has left it without proper historical grounding, resulting in nostalgia, kitsch and a loss of the real. Such a view misses the point that mos Americans are already fully aware of this, and it is only in a European perspective that his is even considered problematic, as Steven Shaviro points out (16). Equally significantly, Baudrillard’s view also reproduces a reductively hegemonic view of the American society, which Hal Hartley’s film is precisely trying to unsettle.
Baudrillard and Jameson’s arguments are also opposed: Jameson argues that the utopian impulse functions as a critical and analytic method where capitalist society is rejected and replaced with an alternative (Jameson 230), while Baudrillard points out that utopia is used to perpetuate the capitalist society (Baudrillard 77, 95).

Consider Gattaca (Andrew Niccol 1997) which portrays the struggle of Vincent who tries to become an astronaut despite being considered an in-valid, due to his faulty genes. Diagnosed with a life expectancy of no more than 30 years, Vincent goes on to prove the system wrong by living longer and becoming an astronaut in spite of the immediate rejection. However, this does not result in the film portraying the system as problematic, but simply presenting Vincent as a heroic figure. Society is not challenged, as Vincent is praised. Here, the film rejects sympathizing with the in-valids and by extension those that the in-valid symbolically represent: poor people and people of color. The film’s conclusion is the individual’s victory over the system, not the collapse or change of society. The individual succeeds in spite of the society, but this also indicates that anyone may succeed, despite the conditions they are born. Matters of race and class – folded into the image of the in-valids – are rejected as arguments for one’s situation. The geneticism Vincent faces can still be conquered, if you work hard enough: no social divide is so large that it cannot be overcome. While this may seem as a positive thing, it is also reactionary view which denies the need for change, since “the talented will overcome”.

A range of other films, such as The Island (Michael Bay 2005) and Equilibrium (Kurt Wimmer 2002) also portray this fear of the loss of individual freedom, authorities being corrupted with no respect for individual rights and a clear sense of dread that the future will bring about a commodification of the human. Whether this future is portrayed as utopia which is revealed to be false, or as a dystopia, the common denominator is the view that the future will not be better than the present we have, or the past we once had. These films thus point to the crisis which Baudrillard argues USA is undergoing; not the European crisis of historical ideals that cannot be fulfilled, but instead ”the crisis of an achieved utopia, confronted with the problem of its duration and permanence” (Baudrillard 77). It is this crisis which results in representing the future as worse than the present, and why conflicts are often resolved through nostalgic strategies. Films such as The Island and Logan’s Run (Michael Anderson 1976) reiterate the figure of Abraham Lincoln as savior.

These films thus perpetuate the view of USA as utopia achieved; this is as good as it gets, everything you could want to achieve is already true. The ideological erasure is also maintained in these films. The poor and the different – in-valids in Gattaca, the outcasts of Logan’s Run, the residents of ‘the Nethers’ in Equilibrium – are all marginalized through the films’ narrative. Although these films supposedly reject homogeneity, they do not argue for a heterogeneous society understood as a multi-cultural society. Only by striving towards a certain ideal is there a chance to break out of the conformity of the future. The tables are thus turned and a dominant device is revealed; they remain symptoms of the ideology which Hollywood generally represents: a capitalist consumer society and an acceptance of USA as utopia achieved.

Hal Hartley’s The Girl From Monday uses the utopian impulse to confront USA with its own hegemony, its construction of itself as utopia achieved. Hartley’s film poses a series of critical questions in the way it represents its future: its future balances between the dystopic and the contemporary, for it lacks many of the devices typically used to show that a film takes place in the future: there is no technological break from our present or even a specific date to go by, most of the film might as well take place in our time.

Fredric Jameson sees such a closeness to our own time as a problem which will in the end dissolve the possibility of the utopian impulse “which has forfeited its claim to any radical transformation of the system itself” (Jameson 168). I do not agree with Jameson in this assessment, as I believe it to be significant to see what the utopian text is trying to disrupt and react against. If we view Hollywood as part of maintaining the view of USA as utopia achieved, it is obvious to me that Hartley’s film is as much a reaction against Hollywood’s (representational) system, as against the American system.

The Girl From Monday takes place in a world where everything has been commodified and even the human has become a commodity: every citizen’s value can be found on the stock exchange and a person’s value derives from how much that person consumes. Since research has shown (in the film’s universe) that sexually active people who are not in a relationship are the most active consumers, a person’s value is closely related to sexual activity. Every time you have sex without commitments, your value increases. If you have sex because of love or even lust, it is considered perverted. This total coupling of sex and value becomes a symbol of complete commodification, where the only urge left is the urge to consume.

Opposed to this, we find a rebellious underground. Officially, this only consists of aliens – referred to as immigrants in the film – but as they look identical to human beings, they are difficult to locate. The interesting thing about these aliens is their radical difference from humans. They have no individual identity but are part of a greater whole, and even do not have physical bodies. They only assume a body when they arrive on Earth. The aliens originate from Star 147X in the constellation Monday, from which the film derives its title. The main character Jack Bell meets a woman from Monday, and initiates a relationship with her. The opposition between on the one hand the human as body, identity and consumption and the alien as inseparable, undivided and non-consuming is great, but the most important thing is how you can only define the aliens in the negative by how they differ from society. They are radically different, which is perceived as deviance by the official society.

Although Jack is the leader of the underground, the film’s ending suggests that this rebellion is impossible because even revolution, sabotage and terrorism are good for business as it further develops consumer society. This unbreakable circle is left as Girl From Monday returns to her (its) planet, while Jack – who has meanwhile discovered that he is also an alien – cannot leave because he has become too addicted to his own body.

The film’s disruption comes in through its cinematic form; made on digital video the whole spectrum of this medium is deployed: slow-motion, abrupt scene cuts, motion blurring and many other devices which clearly reject the narrative transparency which Hollywood is so well-known for and that Scott Robert Olson describes in Hollywood Planet (1999).

The narrative, such as it is, as well as the setting, is clearly dominated by a wry sense of irony, and we can easily see the film as distancing itself from the culture of desire, a culture of extreme commodification. But when Jack said that nothing much had changed, he is correct in another sense of the fictional world resembling our own. While there are discontinuities from our present world, technologically we only see school children using virtual reality goggles and gloves. Otherwise, clothes, cars, streets and so forth resemble present-day New York.

The film, however, has a peculiar narrative form resembling a Möbius strip, where not just the narrative twists back on itself, but where people are also trapped without potential for escape. Narratively, the film turns in upon itself here, not just because of the parallel between its opening shot and closing shot, but also because Jack and the girl were a couple, so there is also a repetition of his wife drowning; do we simply return to the beginning again? Throughout the film we have seen the same scene of Jack buying a gun and going down to the sea to kill himself; we are unsure of the placement of this scene in the narrative. The narrative space thus presents the same trap for the spectator as the consumer society creates for the characters.

The Girl From Monday does not present a solution, then, but clearly distances itself from the totally commodified consumer society. The aliens, even as they are represented with sympathy, do not represent a positive alternative; they cannot remain on Earth for long without becoming what humans already are. There is a very apocalyptic mood to the film which suspends the utopian impulse. The characteristic feature of the film is its critical approach to the present, and as opposed to the films earlier outlined The Girl From Monday rejects the vision of the American society as utopia achieved.

When Baudrillard argues that ”the disenfranchised, who have no voice and are condemned to oblivion, thrown out to go off and die their second-class deaths” it is precisely the way The Girl From Monday depicts the American society – the alien/immigrants and the rebels have no hope and no place in this society. Consumerism has taken over society and there is no room for those who resist this commodification. USA is presented as not a utopia, but a consumerist utopia, where everything is handled on consumer terms: there is no alternate space, no way of being on the outside – to be outside is to be as the aliens from Monday; either you are swallowed by the sea or you are turned into a consumer.

In this way, we can argue that The Girl From Monday is an anti-utopian work, defined by Jameson as works that are ”informed by a central passion to denounce and warn against Utopian programs in the political realm” (Jameson 199). This is exactly how The Girl From Monday functions; it denies and rejects the American society as a utopian society, but at the same time, no alternative utopian space is developed. The home planet of the aliens never becomes an idealize space; we never see it. Yet, they remain as vulnerable to commodification as we humans are. There is no utopian program to the film, instead the spectator is folded into the world being created; only through the cinematic devices which estrange the spectator, can a possible way out be located. This remains an ideological device, of course, but not a utopian one.

We find here a division in how the utopian space is employed in American film culture, and how the utopian discourse is used. Within the dominant culture which Hollywood clearly belongs to, the American society is viewed and represented as utopia achieved. The future appears uncertain and hostile, even in the cases where a positive development seem to have taken place. With Hartley’s film a critique is developed which is made possible through an alternative cinematic form of expression. This aesthetic alternative also represent an alternative view of American culture as a false utopia. The film is best understood as a parody of Hollywood’s typical utopian spaces; the future is dystopic but revealed to be similar to our present. USA as utopia achieved and the simulation of this perfect society is revealed to be one-dimensional.

What becomes very clear is how American film, either in its dominant or subversive form, has a clear connection to American culture’s self-perception. Whether it is a reproduction of dominant culture, as in the case of Hollywood, or as a disruption of hegemonic structures, as in Hartley’s case, films, both in content and form, articulate concerns considered significant for cultural discourse. In what I have laid out, the utopian discourse has shown itself to be not necessarily revolutionary, but also carrying a potential for being reactionary. The utopian impulse can be both radical or nostalgic and the utopian must be considered as an aesthetic device always closely connected to ideology.
For independent films, we can also see another more significant fact; that a culturally disruptive impulse will often require a disruptive aesthetic as well.

As I have argued, the cinematic disruptions Hartley uses in his film are necessary in order to articulate the cultural disruption. Without stepping outside of Hollywood’s cinematic transparency, it would impossible to escape a reproduction culturally dominant structures. To expand the point, just as Hollywood’s strategies have become globalized in the form of a distinctive commercial cinema, so can we point to a certain degree of convergence on the part of avant-garde and independent filmmaking, in the way that these cinematic forms always need to find alternative representational strategies, in order to resist the conformity of the Hollywood system. Instead of unifying by homogenizing their cinematic expressions, there is a move for a heterogeneity of strategies, even as they are all informed by a disruptive impulse, in order to articulate a different perspective on dominant culture and dominant cinema.

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Byrne and Eno together again

October 14, 2008 in Music by Steen | No comments

You can’t really go wrong, can you?

Ideological Fission: Cloverfield and Terrorism

September 29, 2008 in Films by Steen | No comments

After the very successful conference Monsters and the Monstrous, I’m posting my paper here.

One of the first things which is immediately noticeable about Matt Reeves’ Cloverfield is the way it serves as a form of the return of the repressed of 9/11. Most critics who saw it, could not help but remark upon the similarity between the images we saw on September 11 and the ones that are presented in Cloverfield. People running away from crumbling buildings with dust swirling, panicked screams and most of all, the uncertainty of the situation certainly recalls the feeling most people had. Far from arguing against this point, I want to take the argument even further, and say that what we are actually dealing with, is more than simply the return of the repressed. It is a willed attempt at articulating cultural anxieties and frustrations. and in this process the film inevitably ends up in an ideological position, which I want to investigate in the following.

I do not wish to argue that the film is a simplistic reflection of the cultural environment in USA today, nor do I even want to say that the film represents how the majority feels or reacts. Instead, I claim that this is simply one response among many to the events that unfolded on 9/11 and in the years since then. If anything, these events have clearly revealed that the US cannot be said to be a homogeneous cultural entity, but rather a heterogeneous multitude of responses. Cloverfield itself is representative of this split, for in its attempt to articulate a sense of the evil of terrorism, the film ends up at an ideological dead-end, unable to properly reflect and engage with the events it re-frames.

My paper will first detail the encounter with the monster and how it is represented as a metaphor of evil and terrorism – the two are equated by the film. Having done this, I will turn to the fact that although the film would like to portray the monster as abject and monstrous, it also draws upon a discourse that we know very well – monster films and their cultural history – which in turn results in us not feeling as estranged and frightened by the monster as the film would like. The monster is more a part of ourselves than the film would care to admit. It is this final point that will round off my paper, analyzing how the ideological system which the film proposes is interpellated by its use of a too-familiar metaphor, thus resulting in what I refer to as an ideological fission.

I want to proceed from the banal yet insightful point set forth by Judith Halberstam in Skin Shows. As she states: “monsters are meaning machines” (Halberstam, 21), pointing out that monsters are not so much discovered as they are made. We make monsters – in our fictions, but also in our daily lives – in order to express and articulate certain concerns, where monsters play specific roles. In much horror fiction, boundaries are challenged and brought into play – sometimes violated and sometimes reinforced. As David Russell points out:

[...] horror films can function to reenact and reaffirm social repression and contain disorder and violence by eliminating the monster, which symbolically stands in for social disorder and rampant desire (as exemplified in so-called reactionary horror films). Yet Otherness itself expressed through the horror film and its monsters may also serve to point to the breakdown and failure of repression as symptomatically expressed through a realization of unconscious desire for which the monster acts as medium.” (Russell, 237)

It is from these two observations that Cloverfield can be seen as a problematic and interesting cultural text. Despite its clear intention to present a monocular vision of evil, its position within the history of monster films opens up the film’s meaning to different spectator positions, which may in the end deconstruct the film’s ideological message.

The Monster as Terrorist

I have already mentioned the extent to which much of the visual language of Cloverfield has been drawn almost directly from the television images shown on September 11. It seems to be no coincidence that all of Cloverfield is shot as if by a hand-held camera, placed within the diegesis. Although narratively motivated to be present in the film – it is being used to document the surprise party held for Rob – it also reproduces the fact that many of the newsreels from 9/11 were actually amateur photography. Cloverfield attempts to create a sense of immediacy and urgency by placing the camera squarely within the frame of action, indicating a cinema verité-effect that is hauntingly familiar.

The film begins with a couple going on a romantic date to Coney Island. These images are fragments, left over from that day. Right now, in the present time of narration, the film is meant to be a documentation of the surprise party for Rob, who is going to Japan. Already here, the alien and other is introduced as a problem, for it is the very fact that Rob is going to Japan that has caused his girlfriend to leave him, despite the two potentially still being in love. Had he remained in America, this problem would never have occurred, thus priming us for a skeptical view of things outside the US.

When the monster strikes, it comes as a shock for the party-goers and to some extent for the spectators as well. We have not been introduced slowly to the fact that the monster is descending upon New York City, but of course know this going into the cinema. The point is, however, that any knowledge of the monster has been suppressed. At first, no one even knows that it is a monster; they simply suspect (coincidentally?) that it may be a plane which has crashed. The first thing to be visibly destroyed is the Statue of Liberty; a symbolic target more than one that causes any spectacular explosions, but is fully congruent with the film’s ideological slant – this is an attack upon American values as much as on American soil.

This is the first clue to reading the monster as terrorist – it attacks the symbolic landscape of USA, and it does so from a position of secrecy. As we are slowly introduced to the monster, it remains constantly at the edge of our vision, always disappearing just as we think we can see it. It attacks without apparent rhyme or reason, and moves more or less randomly about New York City. The few images that we do see of the monster, reveals that it is both one and many – it is a huge, lumbering beast, but smaller, vicious raptors are discharged from it, spreading across the city. If one is injured by the monster or the smaller raptors, one becomes infected and must be quarantined and shot. In other words, anything that comes into contact the monster or its brood, must be put contained since they have become part of it as well. The virus breeding within the borders of normality is seemingly as dangerous – if less spectacular – as the monster itself.

Violent, contagious and senselessly, the monster rages through the streets, as it is attacked by US soldiers without any apparent effect. We see images of soldiers shooting at a target they do not understand, do not try to understand and cannot defeat. The only solution the army can respond with, is the so-called “hammer down” tactic of carpet-bombing all of New York City. What is so particular about the film, is that it never questions this situation or these responses. It remains fully on the side of the incomprehensible nature of the monster, and the necessity of responding forcefully. When Rob foolhardily ventures out to save the girl he loves, it is characterized as bravery rather than folly. This is a film which celebrates the courage to take action against the horrible events that unfold.

At the same time, the monster is irrational, without meaning, murderous and incomprehensible. It is the perfect personification of how we in Western culture regard the terrorist – it is a myth of evil, which is absolute, which neither can nor should be understood. The monster of Cloverfield stands as the figure of evil as popular imagination sees it; it is a materialization of an ideological fission which attempts to excise certain ideological constructions, yet paradoxically casting them in a form that is recognizable and familiar. It is this paradox which I will turn to now.

The Monster as Monster

Here, I do not intend to discuss in detail the generic traits or belongings of Cloverfield to the horror genre, but simply wish to proceed from the banal fact that Cloverfield clearly draws on the tradition of monster films, such as Godzilla, The Blob, The Thing and many more. At least part of our response to Cloverfield comes from our familiarity with and enjoyment of these earlier monster films. The narrative structure of Cloverfield is relatively identical to these earlier films, and the frightened struggle against the monster is also similar. The monstrosity of the Cloverfield monster is turned into evil because of its lack of morality and respect for “fighting fair” – it attacks civilians as much as soldiers. In this case, the film casts the monster as the dangerous and threatening cultural outsider which must be isolated.

Cloverfield’s monstrosity is thus quite conventionally coded – the dangerous and threatning is cast in what Nöel Carroll refers to as a horrific metonomy (Carroll, 52). The impurity of the monster comes not just from its murderous inclination, but also from the fact that it is not one but many. The brood of the monster is as significant and dangerous as the monster itself. The monster itself thus conforms to Carroll’s category of fission as the structure of its horrific metonomy – it is spatially divided into these different beings. It is hardly, therefore, a coincidence that the monster’s brood are contagious – this is a deadly virus that will spread, of not kept in check.

In this way, the monster fulfills all the requirements of being a monster; it is, in fact, a very proper monster, conforming to the conventions of the genre. What is different, however, is the monster’s motivation. It is unlike the Godzilla films of Japan, or even Roland Emmerich’s travesty. In these earlier films, the monster was not decidedly evil but rather misunderstood – a victim of circumstances, if you will. Gojira always simply tried to live a life in peace, but was disturbed by foolish humans. Not so with the Cloverfield monster; it itself instigates the conflict, it strikes first and we get a sense of it willfully destroying New York City, even if we never get any hint of its motivation. Here, the citizens of New York are the hapless victims of a force they do not and cannot understand. There is no sense of them transgressing any values, they are completely innocent when confronted with a source of indecipherable evil.

If we accept David Russell’s argument that “[Horror] mediates between culture and ideology through an indirect mode of representation” (Russell, 237), we can argue that the monster is meant to indicate the Other of American culture – in this case, the very specific Other of the terrorist. However, precisely because of the film’s structural dependence on the history of monster films, what is supposedly unfamiliar and Other instead becomes hauntingly familiar. We are familiar with these cinematic monsters, even if we are not fully comfortable with them. I will argue that more than reminding us of transgressive and dangerous Otherness, these movie monsters have disseminated into our culture as particularly and distinctively American responses to social fears. We recognize these monsters, but not as Other to US culture but rather as an integral part of it. These monsters work more as the return of the repressed of the culture’s own internal fears.

It is for this very reason, that I argue that we cannot regard the monster as abject – this is to miss the point. The monster is of course abject, as all monsters are. It certainly conforms to Julia Kristeva’s point that the abject disturbs order and does not respect borders (Kristeva, 4). However, the monster is made up, as I have already pointed out as a very conventional spectacle of evil – one that we are so familiar with that it cannot be said to be truly Other or even abject. What the film proposes, is that the monster represents the culturally abject of the terrorist attack, and in that sense the film functions as a form of “working through” of the trauma experienced in 9/11. However, I argue that this is problematic, in the way that the monster is more familiar than other. It is this that I refer to as ideological fission and is what I will round my paper off with.

Ideological Fission

My basic point here is that traces of earlier films clings to Cloverfield. There is a metaphoric dependency which makes the film’s ideological message split in two, so to speak. It is evident that the Cloverfield monster is a paradoxical construction which attempts to articulate fear and loathing about terrorism, but ends up trapped in an ideological dead-end maze, unable to do anything other than magnifying popular fears into a familiar spectacle. While the film attempts to create a monster which violates a proposed distinction between human and terrorist, this never succeeds because the film never seriously engages with the monstrous vision of evil it shows us. Precisely because this vision of evil is so limited, it prevents us as spectators to truly engage with it, as a moral construction.

The fact that the monster is so recognizable, means that we do not see the monster as other, but instead as same. The attempt at articulating a sense of the cultural trauma fails, and instead the monster becomes a representation of the inability to do anything. The monster is reduced, I would argue to pure spectacle – an image of pure and total war in Paul Virilio’s terms – rather than traumatic therapy. My reading of the monster argues that rather than reveling in an ideological split between American and terrorist, the monster instead becomes an interpellation, a rupture in the ideological force of the narrative. Instead, we cannot help but see the monster as the very face of evil, but the face of an American evil. By magnifying the evils of terrorism into this monster, the film’s representation becomes a concave mirror which only reveals how American terror discourse is constructed; indeed, the film itself serves as a premier example.

It is this movement that I call an ideological fission: in attempting to reconcile social trauma into a neat categorical distinction, the film is itself subjected to this ideological fission and we come to see the rupture inherent in the film. I have shown how the familiarity with the monster and monster films, has resulted in this split, and so the very form that the film employs, results in this internal schism. For this reason, it is also no surprise that the film ends with no closure – we do not learn if the main characters survive and we certainly don’t know what happens to the monster. This lack of closure is an attempt, I would say, to reduce the monster to a monolithic vision of evil, as ideologically uncontained and as a disruptive element. In doing so, the film itself rehearses an evil argument, by imposing a totalizing truth on the spectator: by arguing that the monster must always be evil, the film itself takes on the structure of evil, and so becomes not just a vision of evil, but an act evil.

Although the monster is meant to function as an unspeakable deviation, it is rather the film’s projection of the monster onto the Other as terrorist, which is the unspeakable act. The real monster in Cloverfield, I would argue, isn’t the beast that we only see glimpses of, but the film itself. The film is a monster, because it renounces engagement with the Other in order to construct a world when one is one, and not a world where one is two (Badiou). This reductionism is the film’s monstrous act.

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