A GLOBAL CINEMATIC ZONE OF ANIMAL AND TECHNOLOGY

Abstract

Taking the animal and the machine as two ontological others of the human, this paper looks into how they “are added to” and “replace” the humanist others based on race, gender, class, etc. in contemporary cinema. This “supplement” urges us to reframe identity politics and cultural studies in a larger “polis” emerging between and encompassing both the human world, which becomes ever more globally homogenized, and its radical environment, natural or technological. The topic is a global cinematic phenomenon that even local films directly embody. The animal is captured on the boundaries between “the symbolic” and “the real,” between “the actual” and “the virtual” in the artistic works of Werner Herzog, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and Peter Greenaway. The machine convolutes the issues of informatics, embodiment, and cyborgism, often through SF fantasy that pervades Hollywood blockbusters and Japanimation. The rare amalgam of animal–machine receives further attention in David Cronenberg's films, and becoming-animal/-machine in Avatar empowers the human in the posthuman sense of biopower that transforms the body and registers it on a larger network. From this perspective, discourses on the animal (zooesis) and technology (technesis) work together to bring a new political potential. Animality and technology no longer form a naïve dichotomy of nature vs. civilization but combine in ways of making more visible the new condition of life. It unfolds in a cinematic “zone,” an ephemeral “clearing” for “bare life” within the globalized world. This zone exists in the exceptional state of temporary potential to de-/repoliticize any humanistic politics.

Keywords:

• anti-nature
• hospitality
• becoming-animal/-other
• zooesis
• technesis

Notes

The common sense that nature is followed by culture is reversed here, but this reversion does not imply the anthropocentric hierarchy that culture is superior to nature. Recollect Jacques Derrida's deconstruction of this hierarchy: culture is a differed-differing nature just as speech is another writing that is différée and différante; ultimately, différance underlies any conceptual opposition which thereby turns out to be the “theoretical fiction” (Derrida, Marges de la philosophie 18–25). Our view of reality including nature and culture is itself a constructed fiction, an ideological fantasy whose anthropocentricism is hardly recognized, yet always immanent in our daily life.

As Una Chaudhuri and Marina Zurkow say, beloved animals in our pet culture are coddled and pampered at home, shown off and admired in the street, invited to intimate places, given catchy names and special diets, and thus normalized in civic and domestic space. By contrast, when not belonging with humans, animals are made to disappear, are eradicated, excluded, or forgotten.

Antonia Levi examines “the werewolf in the crested Kimono” in comparison with its Western counterpart, looking at other Japanese anime/manga works too: Phoenix: the Sun (Tezuka Osamu 1986), Wolf's Rain (Nobumoto Keiko 2005), InuYasha (Takahashi Rumiko 2004), etc.

Adrian Johnston consults Lacan's several seminars of the 1970s, which must have influenced Žižek's idea on nature even when he does not refer to Lacan (Žižek, “Nature and its Discontents”). Below, we will ask whether the Lacan–Žižek line doesn't still conceptualize the Real of nature only in view of the symbolic and thus cultural frame, but for now I take their schema as a channel to the other side of “our” nature.

These interpretations were common in the 1970s–1980s when film theory first and foremost borrowed structuralist semiotics and classical psychoanalysis centering on Freud's Oedipal triangle and early Lacan's mirror stage (Rose; Bergstrom; Bellour).

She draws on a broad sense of American pragmatist tradition, including such scholars and scientists as Gregory Bateson, Jane Goodall, Marc Bekoff, Babara Smuts, and Lynn Margulis. Obviously, animal studies in this theoretical background repeats and updates the old dichotomy of Continental and analytic philosophy.

In a full review of the film, I pointed out this unnoticed paradox which also resonates with Herzog's ambivalent attitude to Treadwell, attraction and distanciation (Jeong and Andrew).

At the end of his essay on Herzog's antiphusis, Benjamin Noys expresses a certain anxiety about the dehistoricization of this nature into mysticism, and argues: “To begin to restore a politics of nature involves the restoration of a signifier, and what Herzog provides are the images that call for the re-inscription of the signifier of nature” (Noys 50). But this need for the Symbolic would be only regressively abstract unless it rather goes beyond the very political frame of reducing the impenetrability of anti-nature to simply ahistorical mysticism.

An interesting literary reference: at the end of Henry James's short story “The Beast in the Jungle,” an uncanny bestial face bursts out of such darkness towards the hero as if it figures his hidden past, his unconscious memory. If the animal is a physical other of the human body, the ghost is a psychological other of the human spirit like one's repressed double. The animal appears in space and nature; the ghost returns through time and memory.

Notably, Herzog's 3D image that maximizes the “indexical” nature of the cinema – the image as the physical proof of real objects – looks both excessive and insufficient. For what it captures in enhanced spatial illusion is the cave's 2D wall with painted “icons” of fictive animal-humans, and not their actual 3D entity. A similar dimensional shift from 3D indexicality to 2D iconicity (3D in the sense of normal cinematic illusory space without using stereoscopic technology) is also found in Tropical Malady, just after Keng encounters the tiger: a low-angle panning of the 3D actual forest connects with a horizontal tracking shot of the 2D painted forest depicting the legend of a tiger stretching out its long tongue to a praying man as if to try to devour him. The point is that becoming-animal is in any event still virtual, only iconically imagined, while always inspiring the human (to create “virtual reality” in which it is possible).

Such eschatological concerns provoke nonsensical conspiracy theories on the event. For example, one of the victims “Obsian Fallicut had a theory that the VUE was an expensive elaborate hoax perpetuated by A.J. Hitchcock to give some credibility to the unsettling and unsatisfactory ending of his film, The Birds.”

I somewhere else took an emphatically Deleuzian perspective on this film (Jeong 183–84), but now slightly modify the view. It must be noted in passing that Greenaway has also created a cinematic zoo with diverse animals screened, as seen in A Zed & Two Noughts (1986; which means “zoo”), among others, though we do not have space for their analyses here.

Vivian Sobchack also discusses the double meaning of passion, “passive suffering” and “active devotion,” embodied by both Jesus Christ and Videodrome. On the level of prereflective and passive material, “passive suffering” engages us with “response-ability,” and “active devotion” with “sense-ability”; on the level of reflective and active consciousness, these correspond to the ethical and aesthetical concepts of “responsibility” and “sensibility” (Sobchack 288–90). Returning to our reformulation of ethics, we could say that the ethics of responsibility for the vulnerable other is less fundamental than the ethics of responsiveness to the hospitable other.

Not only such cutting-edge interfaces but also characters' operation of them are a cinematic spectacle and an attractive show in recent SF films including Minority Report (Steven Spielberg 2002) Déjà vu (Tony Scot 2006), and Iron Man 2 (Jon Favreau 2010).

Ken Hillis points out that the green network of global Pandora has been envisioned through such models as World Brain (H.G. Wells), electronic noosphere (Teilhard de Chardin), Hive Mind (Kevin Kelly), electronic hyperbody (Pierre Lévy), etc. Why not Google?

That is: instrumentality (Heidegger's Zuhandenheit (handiness) concerns the usefulness of the tool), textuality (Derrida's différance operates the text as machine), subject constitution (Lacan's objet a often appears in mass media as technological effect), and social organization (Deleuze's agencement means the assemblage of a social machine).

This critique seems arguable. Hansen (over)interprets the “text” and “mass media” as the clue to the “machine reduction of technology,” though his quotes from Derrida and Lacan do not even contain the word “technology.” He also reduces any ontogenesis to his model of technesis, when one may ask how his notion of material technology could be produced if not mechanically.

Akira Lippit points out that psychoanalysis, X-rays, and cinema all emerged in 1895, opening the interiority of the mind, the body, and the world respectively. His term “avisuality” revolves around Derrida's idea of spectrality of the image (Lippit; Derrida and Stiegler).