ANIMAL SPIRITS: philosomorphism and the background revolts of cinema

Abstract

This essay follows two lines – the one “cinematic,” the other “philosophical” – towards an intersection located in what we call “the animal.” Be it the bleak picture of “bare life” drawn by Agamben, or the more positive image of the “animal that therefore I am” depicted by Derrida, philosophers of various hue have shown increasing interest in the idea of the animal as both a normative category (Derrida, Agamben) and a metaphysical one (as when Badiou depicts Deleuze's philosophy as one of “the Animal” in contrast to his own of “Number” – Badiou, Gilles Deleuze and the Theatre of Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1994) 55). One question that arises from this attention is whether or not these myriad philosophies mediate the animal for their own philosophical purpose – as only one, background, instance of aporetic différance (Derrida), proliferated becoming (Deleuze), bare life (Agamben), or even the very model of “bad philosophy” (Badiou). Is every philosophy of the animal a type of what might best be called “philosomorphism” – refracting the animal through an image of itself? Adopting the stance of “non-philosophy” from François Laruelle, this essay asks whether, in its (unacknowledged) attempts to shape the animal in its own image, philosophy also succeeds in refracting itself. There is a circularity of philosophical explanations (as Laruelle finds in all philosophy, in fact) that is linked to this sub-species of anthropomorphism: be it positive or negative, inflationary or deflationary, such philosomorphism is indeed resisted by the Real of animals by mutating or morphing what counts as philosophy. The reduction of the non-philosophical presence of the animal to that of being a proxy for différance, rhizomatics, bare life, or whatever else, gains its apparent force in part only by ignoring other aspects of the animal that are placed in the background, namely those that do not fit (or resist) the philosopher and his/her favoured philosophemes. The background revolts. And cinema – understood here as a kind of animal, visual-thinking in all of us – provides just such a mutation of what we deem thinking to be. The force of cinema simply is the power of the animal that we (always) are when we think in images, or when images think immanently within us. Film images exist where a powerful, animal form of non-human thinking resides. In addition, this essay will argue that the visual-thinking of horror film in particular (or the horrific mode found in all film) demonstrates the monstrous, animal, background as a resistant manifestation of thought. This thought concerns those putatively inert entities that film allows to emerge from the background as living, background life itself, which, by refusing to be ignored any longer, may also reform (or morph) what we mean by philosophy and thought itself. The emergence of the cinematic background horrifies and “revolts” (in both political and affective senses), and this its new kind of thinking.

Keywords:

• animal philosophy
• non-human
• philosomorphism
• cinematic thinking
• Deleuze
• Laruelle

Notes

See Kennedy.

See Williams; Clover.

See Mullarkey, Philosophy.

See Thomas for the difference between “mode” and “genre” here.

For more on the philosophical background to this non-philosophical use of the term “background,” see Mullarkey, “Spirit.”

This is something that Derrida himself avows – “I who always feel turned toward death” (H.C. for Life 36).

See Midgley 349 n. 21.

See Irigaray 141.

Deleuze continues that this is true of the becoming of the animal as well, in its “becoming something else.” But his oblique reference to “something else” is in clear contrast with the order of human becomings (from woman through animal to imperceptible) – animal becoming does not interest him in as much as it might participate in anything affirmative for it.

See Mullarkey, Post-Continental Philosophy 36–41.

The reference to the dying rat cited in the above quotation stems from the use of rat poison by the character of Lord Chandos in Hugo von Hofmannsthal's epistolary fable. See Lawlor.

In A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari 316) there is the example of the Stagemaker bird as a kind of artist (“the stagemaker practices art brut. Artists are stagemakers, even when they tear up their own posters”), but this is on account of the transversal and inhuman nature of art rather than the becoming-human of the bird per se.

For a full critique of Badiou's illegitimate exclusion of animal advocacy from his concept of the political event, at least as described in Being and Event, see Mullarkey, Post-Continental Philosophy 117–21.

Remember that we cannot sidestep this charge (of top-down class-representationalism being operative within an event) by saying that at least all involved were human, because that begs the question as to what/who counts as human (that is, it predefines the human intensionally).

See the essays collected in Daston and Mitman.

The “non-” in “non-philosophy” should be seen in terms of the “non-” in “non-Euclidean” geometries, being part of a “mutation” that locates philosophy as one instance in a larger set of theoretical forms – it is not its negation but a “generalisation” of philosophy. See Laruelle, En tant qu'un 8, 99ff.; idem, Philosophie 247.

Compare this: Indeed, panpsychist thought has often been accused of anthropomorphisation; of “retrojecting purely human mental traits into the non-human world” (Harman 212). That is, rather than stopping at the point of saying ice has a world – its own “psychic reality” (ibid.) – some panpsychists might go as far as to say the ice is dreaming of the time when it was water. Likewise, much panpsychist thinking seems to leave the hierarchy and ontological distinction of human and non-human intact: “Panpsychists typically see the human mind as a unique, highly-refined instance of some more universal concept. They argue that mind in, say, lower animals, plants, or rocks is neither as sophisticated nor as complex as that of human beings” (Skrbina). But the response to this is not to say that humans and stones or humans and ice are the same. It is to establish a horizontal continuum where human thought may be construed as “a more complicated variant of relations already found amidst atoms and stones,” but without assuming that more complicated necessarily equals better or more important or valuable or deserving of greater rights (Harman 212).

We must recognise that such a “leap” has always already been made, that this leap is a retroactive construction. See Laruelle, Non-philosophy Project 92–93.

See Nietzsche 119.

It will be in recent Japanese horror where inanimate matter, especially optical devices, takes on life, that the horror in and of cinema becomes most perspicuous.

See Mullarkey's Philosophy for an analysis of the double-edged nature of this specific attempt at a reality effect created through manipulating real death.

Coats cited in Cohen 24 n. 39.

See Rossell.

On weird horror, see Miéville.

If there is an appearance of essentialism as regards both the meaning of horror and the animal for this essay too, one must keep in mind the processual and perspectival “nature” of the two that is being forwarded; that is, these “revolting” animals only indicate an abyss – wherein everything lives (the “animal” here really being a place-holder or Trojan-horse for animism) – to an anthropocentric point of view, which is itself always shifting. (Though, of course, these shifts in what counts as anthropos may be rationalised as the discovery of the same human essence in new populations, rather than a mutation of that essence – which is really to say that it has no essence.) Hence, the revolting animal is both “horrific” in Carroll's terms (repulsively interstitial) and political (because it redraws the lines around what/who count as living beings). But those lines are always perspectival. Latour (137) captures this thought in the following:

The expression “anthropomorphic” considerably underestimates our humanity. We should be talking about morphism. Morphism is the place where technomorphisms, zoomorphisms, phusimorphisms, ideomorphisms, theomorphisms, sociomorphisms, psychomorphisms, all come together. Their alliances and their exchanges, taken together, are what define the anthropos. A weaver of morphisms – isn't that enough of a definition? The closer the anthropos comes to this distribution, the more human it is. The farther away it moves, the more it takes on multiple forms in which its humanity quickly becomes indiscernible […]

It is this loss of discernibility that is horrific to the self-styled “humans.” Matt Hills' event-based definition of art-horror looks at Blair Witch, The Haunting and Event Horizon in terms of which they all fail to conform to a “standard cinematic form” (to use C.S. Tashiro's term) built on “middle distances, the cutting patterns of spaces calculated to human scale” (Hills 146ff.).

It has even been proposed that a “Japanese National Science” could “reconcile us with nature instead of opposing it.” Here we see the possibility of an identification of the human with the inert that would be less likely to bring with it the usual connotations of a horrifying reduction in value: see Stengers 133.

See Powell 27.

There are apparently possessed photographs in Western horror films like The Omen or Final Destination 3, The Shining and The Others, as well as seemingly demonic televisions in Poltergeist and mirrors in Mirrors, but these are usually signs of, or portals, to other realms of life, rather than living entities in themselves.

And again:

the film thus associates ubiquitous technological mediation – that is, the cameras, television sets, videocassette recorders, telephones and other such hardware foregrounded throughout the film – with the intrusion of “posthuman” otherness into contemporary cultural life. (41)

As Dennis Giles writes (37): “cinema is never the raw vision of desire […] the experience of cinema is simultaneously a screening and a screening off.”

See Mullarkey, Reverse Mutations.

Cited in Badiou, Infinite Thought 127.

See Kolozova.

The following all-too-condensed discussion of Laruelle's work can be supplemented with readings contained in Mullarkey and Smith which aim to explain as best as possible the challenging and novel aspects of Laruelle's very “non-standard” philosophy.

See Laruelle, Struggle and Utopia.

Eugene Thacker also links this non-philosophy to a horror of the non-human world “[…] ‘horror’ is a non-philosophical attempt to think about the world-without-us philosophically” (In the Dust of this Planet 9). And further:

what genre horror does do is it takes aim at the presuppositions of philosophical inquiry – that the world is always the world-for-us – and makes of those blind spots its central concern, expressing them not in abstract concepts but in a whole bestiary of impossible life forms – mists, oozes, blobs, slime, clouds, and muck. Or, as Plato once put it, “hair, mud, and dirt.”