Horror Films for 2022

I have made this list previously here and here if you’re looking for further/older recommendations.

Brief note: Trend wise two things seem more common this year than the last few years in general in horror film (besides more ‘artsy’ A24 films and generally retro moves) and that is more comedy horror films (Bodies, Bodies, Bodies, My Best Friend’s Exorcism, Barbarian, Sissy, Dayshift, Studio 666) and quite a few more cosmic/psychadelic horror films (Glorious, Hellbender, ).

Also Nope is not on the list – I liked it but it is really not a horror film.

8 for Silver (aka the cursed)

A visually striking period-piece werewolf film that actually makes werewolves more visceral and yet still magical in a way that is often not pulled off so well.

Hatchling

Great Finnish film about children too closely mirroring their parents and being wounded by responsbility. Great practical effects as well.

Mad God

Probably the most celebrated low-budget labor of love project this year. The film is made of stop motion and some standard film but is without dialog or really plot.

Watcher

More thriller than horror but a nicely tense serial killer film set in Bucharest.

X

The most straight forward horror film on this list (in terms of a good slasher). Ti West is in good form and the film has some of the best jump scares and editing to scare that I’ve seen in a long time. A group sets out to film an interracial porno in Texas and things get weird…

Prey

Sci-fi horror action mashup that is carried mostly by its lead Midthunder. Gets a lot of points for being so patient

Resurrection

More thriller than horror – a woman is forced to deal with a former abusive ex-lover that involves an increasingly horrific display of violence and trauma. The performance of the two leads is more than memorable…

The Innocents

Stand by me meets Scanners meets Village of the Damned. Set in a Norweigan suburb a group of kids discover supernatural powers that their boredom and cruelty twists real quick.

Speak no Evil

Another northern European hit. An invite to stay a few weeks in the summer goes from a comparison between dutch and danish culture to horror real quick.

We’re all going to the world’s fair

My favorite pick for the year. A teenager plays a you tube game (like digital bloody mary for gen z reminiscent of early pre-streamlines youtube weirdness). The film is so barely a horror film that this actually makes it more scary than the usual fair.

Every scheme, all at once, forever

This past weekend was the memorial service for Jan Ritsema: director, performer, publisher, and social engineer extraordinaire who founded PAF (performing arts forum) – a convent turned art residency that is now collectively cared for nestled in the French countryside. Jan often talked about PAF like self imposed exposure therapy: ‘I don’t like people, or nature, or work, but I did this to myself!’

It is often difficult to convince others of why PAF is worth the trip or at least worth going to without sounding like an evangelist or an outdated hippy. It is tricky to explain why a building, filled with semi-tumultuous groups of people, can feel like something radical on its own.

But it has always been this bubbling sociality fused with lean formal structures and self-organizational capacities that can so effectively corrode one’s social dispositions: you can go to PAF and have your city-habits slowly unwrapped. To be in a place where one could drop academic, or professional, or artworld pretense is an incredible unexpected relief. Having organized or co-organized some half a dozen philosophy events at PAF many of us would see people used to being defensive or ‘knives-out’ suddenly realize they didn’t have to be vicious to impress or ladder-climb to win points for a future career. You can in fact have a wonderful but serious conversation about politics or hermeneutics while cleaning a soup pot the size of a baby cow.

It’s sometimes difficult to sell people on what might sound like communitarian (or sociocratic as Jan preferred) brainwashing summer camp. But the reason many don’t want to leave is that it is singularly difficult to forget how the building nests in your brain as a place of productive proximity. We are so used to sitting around with our friends and saying ‘hey, we should start a reading group,’ or ‘hey let’s make a ‘zine’ or what have you. And we smile and nod even while being very much aware that this will not happen. We will go home, and to work, and the proposal will evaporate by week’s end. But at PAF every farcical idea has a real chance at life: a wrestling royal rumble, daily newspapers, dance parties, spontaneous jelly workshops, nudist lounges, tattoo parlors, lectures during a dawn-lit meteor-shower, and on and on.

But it is not utopia nor ‘a youth hostel for artists!’ If it’s utopia then utopia involves a shitload of meetings. And it is an endless game of changes and disagreements. Dani mentioned during the service how in the early days Jan was the invisible cat: even if they mice didn’t see him he was sure to let them know the cat was still around. And Jan was always busy with one thing or another: lefty crypto-currency dreams, setting up sister pafs, ordering questionable international goods, or delivering copious amounts of (often brutal) life advice. The last two summers I was fortunate enough to spend several weeks with Jan and he interrupted my first day saying ‘hello, how are yo-‘ with ‘why haven’t you published another book!?’ all while surrounded by work clutter in his sick bed.

There are too many intense memories with Jan over the 8 years I knew him but one of the strongest is the following which I relay because, given how he died, it seems like the right one. I lived on and off at PAf for years and after submitting my dissertation I fell into the worst depression in a decade. I sat in my room and tried to think of a way to kill myself without making too much of a mess (‘don’t leave traces’ being a principle of the house). Then, one day, I heard the thunder of doors flung wide and from the other end of the hall Jan bellowed: “Ben Woodard!’ As I scrambled out of bed my first thought was ‘what have I done to anger the gods?’ And then Jan was at my door and said calmly ‘we talk for a bit?’ And then we went to a studio and laid on the floor and he must of spoken with me for almost two hours while staring at the ceiling’s peeling paint.

Jan gave me advice but mostly tasks and work, he gave me things to do and never belittled my screwed up brain. Jan was a pragmatist – not in the deflationary sense of ‘let’s just focus on the basics of what works’ but rather in that ‘when something basic works it generates a new environment or mode.’ Jan’s pragmatism was not one of breaking the abstract into little tasks but understanding how the tasks, when askew in just the right way, generated a different context, a non-typical picture. Even the arrangement of tables at dinner should ‘make people feel alienated when they walk in but welcoming when they sit down.’ Once, just for fun, Jan had everyone give a standing ovation to anybody who entered the ballroom one night simply as a way of raising spirits.

When Jan chose to die I told him about when he pulled me out of my depression and how crucial it had been for me then. He looked honestly surprised and said ‘ah yea? Well you just needed some time.’

PAF has always had a haunted quality, a kind of soft spookiness, no doubt a result of all its past lives: as a convent, a boarding school, a military hospital, and (most infamously) as home to a Jungian-Franciscan sect. I’ve capitalized on this – I’ve given scary tours (sometimes in higher dimensional space) of dimly lit attics, and gestured towards rooms favored by particular ghosts (a little boy there, a murmuring nun here) with any old wooden door holding the potential to be a portal to nowhere good. But now Jan has drifted into the building itself and the hall to his apartment with its window now seldom lit is too haunted for me to enter. It seems that even the cat’s smile has vanished in its place. But for Jan, and even more for us, the building stands.

You are right, my child, I responded, but don’t forget that your point of view on the subject can’t be the one that is generally held, at least not in the wild times we are facing now. Of the significance that these institutions once held, they have perhaps kept only the picturesque. However, one will find it easier and more agreeable to close down the institutions altogether than to restore them in accordance with their original aim in a way that would be appropriate for our times. When I see such a quiet cloister down below in the valley, or go past one on a hill from which it looks down, I have often thought to myself: if one day the time should come for all these monuments of a bygone time, please let at least one of our princes think to preserve one or two of these sanctuaries, to keep the buildings and their goods together, and to endow them to the arts and sciences. -Schelling, Clara (1810)

Horror films for Halloween

Previously I made a list of some of my favorite horror films (with some of them being less known). Below are a few of the best horror films from the last two years.

Probably my favorite horror film which is not really scary but creepy and unsettling – it is about a group of women dealing with aging and house that seems to change the deeper go inside it.

Unnerving film about a ‘new mom’ figure who is recovering from a cult experience and unsure if she ever actually left. Very slow burn psychological horror.

Off the rails Brazilian film that messes with the ‘man is the deadliest game’ trope that’s popped up in The Hung and Ready or Not. Probably the best postcolonial horror film that exists? (Blood Quantum would also be a contender)

Censor should get more attention -it’s a video nasty about video nasties (low budget straight to vhs horror films in the UK. The performance of Niamh Algar is enough to sell it.

Two refugees from Sudan experience the horror of English racisim in conjunction with trauma from their past.

Formal Extremities

Remembering Alina

Roberto Matta ‘The Unthinkable’

In August of 2015 Alina Poppa and myself along with several others present at PAF (the Performing Arts Forum) toyed with the idea of a film and text series that would emphasize the mind altering and horrific aspects of mathematics. We created an incomplete list, watching the first film Triangle, and then the idea was set on a shelf and half-forgotten. At the time, I do not think that I realized that the idea was not a mere curiosity for us, but that, especially for Alina and myself, that it was in fact a core concept for us both, namely, that there was something radically alien about the formal and the ways in which it bridged the domains of thought and body, especially in terms of navigation, horizon, and understanding thought in its radically minimalist dimension.

Calculated Escape: Cube/Death and the Compass

Cube is a sci-fi horror thriller in which a group of people find themselves trapped in a maze filled with traps and only factoring prime numbers guarantees one can pass into a safe room and potentially outside. Geopolitical capitalist machinery creates a kettle of stress and guilt (utility and psychosis become radically indistinguishable). But one should not collapse the scene of the crime and the method. Capitalism is the prison/prism of all prisons.

“In your labyrinth there are three lines too many,” he said at last. “I know of a Greek labyrinth which is a single straight line. Along this line so many philosophers have lost themselves that a mere detective might well do so too.”

‘It’s all the same machine, right? The Pentagon, multinational corporations, the police! You do one little job, you build a widget in Saskatoon and the next thing you know it’s two miles under the desert, the essential component of a death machine!’

Number drills in your dreams: Pi (1997)/“The Nightmare of Professor Squarepunt”

“The mathematician, worn out by a long day’s study of the theories of Pythagoras, at last fell asleep in his chair, where a strange drama visited his sleeping thoughts. The numbers, in this drama, were not the bloodless categories that he had previously supposed them. They were living breathing beings endowed with all the passions which he was accustomed to find in his fellow mathematicians. In his dream he stood at the centre of endless concentric circles. The first circle contained the numbers from i to 10; the second, those from n to 100; the third, those from 101 to 1000; and so on, illimitably, over the infinite surface of a boundless plain. The odd numbers were male; the evens, female. Beside him in the centre stood Pi, the Master of Ceremonies. Pi’s face was masked, and it was understood that none could behold it and live. But piercing eyes looked out from the mask, inexorable, cold and enigmatic. Each number had its name clearly marked upon its uniform. Different kinds of numbers had different uniforms and  different shapes: the squares were tiles, the cubes were dice, round numbers were balls, prime numbers were indivisible cylinders, perfect numbers had crowns. In addition to variations of shape, numbers also had variations of colour. The first seven concentric rings had the seven colours of die rainbow, except that 10, 100, 1000, and so on, were white, while 13 and 666 were black. When a number belonged to two of these categories for example if, like 1000, it was both round and a cube it wore the more honourable uniform, and the more honourable was that of which there were fewer among the first million numbers.”

Proof Duration: Fermat’s Room/The Pre-Persons

21 (2008)

with selections from Collapse 8

The Oxford Murders (2008) with Wittgenstein

The Dot and the Line (1963)

Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions – Edwin Abbott Abbott

[Carl Sagan on the tesseract from Cosmos]

Agora (2009)

Moebius (1996)

“A Subway Named Moebius” – AJ Deutsch (Ian McEwan’s Solid Geometry)

Conceiving Ada (1997)

Selections from Zeroes and Ones – Sadie Plant

What did Darwin do?

The image of Charles Darwin is buried under tons of both saint-making and vilification. In addition the peculiarities of his life, the massive shifts within his profession, and the vastly different interpretations of his work immediately after and long after the publication of The Origin in 1859.

Darwin was an unofficial naturalist when he set out on the Beagle and returned and worked for almost a decade before publishing his most famous book. The Origin was in his own view a bit of a rush job as he wanted to take more time on his ‘big species book’ but news of Alfred Russell Wallace’s similar theory of evolution prompted him to speed up matters.

The method of presentation of Darwin’s book is at odds with the textbook picture of him as having a eureka moment in the Galapagos islands and ‘discovering’ evolution. Nor can Darwin be easily folded into the ranks of either empiricism, mechanism, or materialism (understanding that those terms were starting to have a particular meaning in biology at the time. Darwin was a naturalist who became a theory-laden empiricist in part by hijacking the rhetorical modes of natural theology and analogical comparisons within common knowledge (especially animal breeding and training).

In other words Darwin uses a barrage of fine detail to marvel at the creations of nature but by using analogy to artificial selection (animal breeding) Darwin de-theologizes this wonder and reverses the emphasis – there is no singular force causing all these small changes instead these small changes are the force. As Stephen Jay Gould points out in his massive The Structure of Evolutionary Theory this allows Darwin to co-opt the argument from design without appearing to directly undermine a hands-off (Deistic) treatment of god and the creation of of the natural world. We could sum this all up in that Darwin’s closing attitude in the book is something like ‘isn’t is incredible that god could do something so ingenious and as simple as natural selection and make this wondrous world?’

Of course the elephant in the room is geological time against biblical time. By his own accounts few things haunted Darwin more than the possibility that the gradualist and long geological history needed for his long parade of infinitesimal changes was wrong (as Lord Kelvin famously claimed). But on this point Darwin’s materialism became the focus by way of Huxley – since Huxley spoke for Darwin and for the most controversial notion of common descent – as the upswing of deep time’s long long length.

The current legacy of Darwinism (in its most restrictive but most popular form) resulted from suspending the question of the complexity of causes around natural selection and through statistical analysis sought how to measure its effects. This tendency which was later combined with Mendelianism and then later with DNA analysis is often refereed to as genetic determinism but is in fact deterministic about the effects with retroactive causes that are never fully determined. This is in itself far more pernicious than determinism or teleology since it leaves open a degree of freedom which is technical but also apolitical.

This is why the ongoing battle in evolutionary theory is still over the unit of selection – of the consequences of shifting the unit of selection from the organism down to the gene. Much resistance to the notion that organisms are mere genetic vehicles (as Dawkins put it) is often dismissed as anti-Darwinian or politically motivated or as simply ‘a different way of looking at it’ But the fact that there is so much resistance to macroevolution and epigenetics is often put in terms that are clearly poliitcal/historical while the same geneticists deny that there is anything political about their ‘pure quantitative’ analyses of things like intelligence.

It’s possible that the most dangerous aspect of Darwin’s legacy is that he was agnostic about some things that his followers were very sure of and that still to this day there is not enough constructive betrayal of his ideas.

Colonial Ends/Ends of Life (pt2)

Branching off from last time here the idea is to discuss the human animal relation and how it relates to the question of race. As Zakiyyah Iman Jackson discusses in the introduction to her book Becoming Human many materialist and post-humanities defenses of the human relies upon raising animals up to the level of generic humanness without questioning whether this generic or universal human is simply a repetition of the western european male of neo-liberalist discourse. But it isn’t about repeating this critique but wondering about what grounds could serve as even the beginnings of a replacement.

As Jackson points out the placing of humans and animals on an ontological continuity does nothing to stop the hierarchy of the purported capacities of the races on the earth. Furthermore the common mode of anti-anthrocentrism in contemporary theory has limited stakes other than as a form of self-sacrifice in the name of future species…to ‘let nature heal itself, and let something else evolve.’

Thomas Moynihan in X-Risk opposes this anti-humanist attitude to the recognition of humanity have a vocation, a collective project of constructing a future for future life. The possibility of this project seems to suggest that some universal or shared notion of a species-preserving task can be taken up by humans but the degree to which there can be a we or an us and what the terms are to define that (as historical, biological, normative, functional, ontological, etc) remains itself a gigantic task.

This problem seems to be something like a unifying (or maybe really disunifying) feature of contemporary theory and philosophy – is humanity a project and can it be only negatively defined (a la Chakrabarty) or can there be some positive content to the human as a constructor of futurity (without merely reproducing a settler notion of futurity as Tuck and Yang warn in “Decolonial is Not a Metaphor”).

Jackson is very critical of any Hegelian or pseudo-Hegelian view of the human as a project of struggle bay way of self-recognition, of one of self and other. For Jackson the violence of slavery and subjecation is not about dehumanization but about engineering the plasticity of the human. Animality is an immanent designation within the human and black bodies have too often resided at the edge of that animality. For Jackson blackness represents the plasticity of the human on its animal side in a way that allows for constant reengineering of the human in exclusionary means in the name of inclusion.

The backdooring of teleology as an engineering of the human lines up well with Jessica Riskin’s long argument in The Restless Clock that teleology as inherent to living things is replaced with a notion of mechanics by which the goals and capacities of life are defined to leave open the possibility of manipulation and redirection. Genetic determinism is never deterministic (in a physical sense) since it of course leaves open the technological possibility of changing it. This lends itself to a kind of human technological exceptionalism or back to the notion that the human is the construction of a historical being that is either on top of or despite our biological foundations.

But this of course brings us back to the problem that Jackson poses since a continuity between human and animal is still decided in human terms that not only construct the animal in a particular way but also place some humans and certain capacities as more animal like than others. This was already occurring in Darwin’s The Descent of Man and supported by the first eugenicists like Galton. As I’ve discussed before these differences, or the attempt to ground them, can be traced to various competing theological traditions (sin in the pre-adamites, other forms of polygeneism) or to the notion of preexisting germs or dispositions (as rigorously defended by Kant). It is a consistent attribute of the most virulent forms of racism that some discourse of capacity or character is taken over and above any biological ground. Physical and pseudo-biological features are treated as ‘evidence’ of inborn characteristics but when they cannot be formalized they are abandoned and one falls back upon the oldest arguments (moral character, mental capacity, technological development).

This haunts any attempt to describe the human as a historical project even if one recognizes the constructions of racial bias as merely constructions. And this is perhaps why Jackson is somewhat skeptical of Wynter’s call for a new genre of the human. But of course there is a difference between saying this is impossible and risky but the stance from where to begin or where to go or who can go seems like an assumption that is unanswerable. And this opposes a generic critical stance of critical theory to a generic stance in philosophy which both make claims to sufficient historical conditions relative to what is deemed to be methodological and ethical-political.

One lingering question is even if we decide to abandon the Hegelian notion of the historical human subject it still seems that a human subject defined by its historical and collective social being can be articulated in a properly global way. I still think that a detailed history of biology is central to making this possible – that a properly contingent history of the human and the genus homo is necessary for any collective subjectivity. But still this begs the question of whether any account of biological contingency can be connected to a story about ourselves that is generically human.

Colonial Ends/Ends of Life (pt 1)

Recently I did two overlapping talks (one in Brussels one online) on the question of the ends of life (genocide, apocalypse, extinction) and how this relates to the philosophy and history of biology (thinking about ends in terms of goals or thinking life teleologically in the overarching sense in that life is defined by having either local or future-oriented goals). Looking at the past few entries on Sylvia Wynter’s work the connection to the history of colonialism should be relatively straight-forward – namely the question of the definition of the human (especially if it is a narrow definition that thinks it is a universal definition) is central to the various disasters of European expansion.

We have a tangle of problems concerning how, and whether to, define the human vis a vis the history of biology and its theological and colonial inheritances both implicit and explicit:

-life as fundamentally intentional/goal oriented and whether this is founded about spirit or reason (as defined according to the Judeo-Christian tradition)

-human life as radically or not radically different from animal life (esp leading up to and immediately after Darwin’s On the Origin of Species) and how this in turn plays into race

-the question of whether the human is better defined as a historical or technological being over and above relying on a particular form of life or particular biological form.

-the question of recasting human animal comparisons in light of anthropogenic climate change and planetary extinction and the ‘we’ of the human that causes/faces extinction

The tensions between these various categories again were discussed via Sylvia Wynter’s texts esp in terms of the fact that the conquistadors could doubt whether the Aztecs were humans or not because the question was about their status as rational or not (not about biological similarity). Similarly, post-Darwin, one could not hold onto race as marking a difference in terms of different species but was a gradient internal to humans vis a vis their relation to animals. Hence why in The Descent of Man Darwin entertains proto-eugenical notions about some races being more animal like than others.

The categories of the ends of life (genocide/apocalypse/extinction) pull on these threads in incompatible ways. Genocide indexes a historical event and one that we often think (or did at the time of its coinage) as the intentional killing of a people or a culture made possible by a certain level of technological development. The term was coined in the wake of the Armenian genocide that was followed not long after by the holocaust. But assuming it primarily mean the intentionally killing of a people or destruction of a culture we often see the term applied backwards in history – the treatment of native and indigenous people by colonial forces as genocidal.

Of course as we have just seen these people may very well may not have been seen as human and this dehumanization or animalization is at times applied to the genocides of the 20th century. But the local or faux-universal character of the human seems very different in each case – with the holocaust there was a complex internalization of speculative racist anthropology that allowed other races to be seen as impure or inferior. The justifications of the conquistadors took a completely different path as their appeal to being human or privileged being had no need of the kind of anthropological thinking coupled with technological distanciation.

Emphasizing technology pushes one into the realm of thinking the apocalyptic, of the end of the world. The problem here of course is the assumption of the singular world when world often means civilization, or the west, or the first world when it is presented in post-apocalyptic fiction. With its theological baggage the apocalypse is about an unveiling of a different world, a world after the world while assuming that world is equatable with technologically advanced and ‘civilized.’ The question of life is diffused in apocalyptic thinking, it becomes a question of what the future will hold for ‘the human race’ – it becomes a question of survival and the hope for something more than survival.

This question of the more than obviously lends itself to articulations of the human that separate them from biological existence. The question becomes whether this can be done in a way that does not fall back into a paraochial westernism as comes up in the debates around Chakrabarty’s call for a new concept of species being by way of something like a negative universal history. This of course causes trouble in terms of the category of extinction. In the case of extinction or fighting extinction surviability seems paramount (ie that a species continue is a good in and of itself) and furthermore the claim is often made to say humans (or some well to do humans) are the cause of climate change ignores the various non-human elements, that it runs the risk of inflating human capacities and therefore repeating a definition of the human that led to such crimes in the first place.

Furthermore, those that champion certain forms of the posthuman or nonhuman approaches to ecology may often engage in human-animal comparisons to minimize the gap between us and other species in order to attempt to foster an aesthetics/ethics that is is ontologically charged in some way. Writing from a decolonial perspective Wynter will argue that we still require the construction of a human as a narrative or historical being (in place of judeo-christian Man and socio-bio-economic Man) and this very much pushes against any continuum building between humans and animals as well as any ontological claims about colonial and post colonial life. Various afropessimist writings for instance utilize ontology as a hard block between the trauma and negativity of black life and any attempt to connect or engulf it. In one sense the afropessimist move is one means of attempting to weaponize the internalization of race post-Darwin.

This building of an alternative narrative being is not only challenged by the disastrous failures of european attempts to do so but is also internally riven by the structural and historical aspects and the appeal to experience. This is very much visible with the reception of Fanon’s work – how he is to be read in relation to the shared or specific structures of colonialism and the ways he inherits but also critiques Hegel on the one hand and Merleau-Ponty on the other. This distinction between history and experience again casts a certain light on the confusion or collapse of apocalypse and extinction.

Thomas Moynihan’s new book X-Risk spends a great deal of time holding up the distinction between apocalypse as the sense of an end and extinction as the end of sense. Going extinct can be experienced but being extinct cannot be experienced while one can experience the end of one’s world or witness the ending of another world. Confusing apocalypse and extinction can also have the consequence of seeing extinction as a future event rather than as a slow continuous and already ongoing process. Planetary history bolsters that view in the sense of thinking extinction in terms of the KT impact which annihilated the dinosaurs.

And yet because so many indigenous people and people of color have experienced genocide and apocalypse and because they are often facing the brunt of the effects of climate change and their uneven distribution, one can see why extinction might be viewed as a western or scientistic category. I believe it is mistake to deny the universality of extinction but it is also deeply flawed to be confused by those who might reject any ill-conceived universalism that is historically or globally myopic.

Sociogeny and Biology (pt 2)

Wynter’s various essays (often touching on Fanon and Cesaire among others) makes a case that the stage of human life that we still have not properly understood is that of the human as narrative and as a narrative making being. This follows from Cesaire’s science of the word. She concludes her essay on the sociogenic principle via Cesaire:

“It is such a new science that Fanon’s fellow Martinican, the
Negritude poet, essayist, and political activist, Aime Cesaire, coming
from the same lived experience of being both Man and its liminal
Other, had called for in 1946. In a conference paper, delivered that
year entitled Poetry and Knowledge, Cesaire, after pointing out that
the natural sciences, for all their triumphs with respect to the kind of
knowledge able to make the natural worlds predictable, had
nevertheless remained “half-starved” because of their inability to
make our human worlds intelligible, then proposed that, in the same
way as the “new Cartesian algebra had permitted the construction of
theoretical physics,” so too “the word promises to be an algebraic
equation that makes the world intelligible,” one able to provide us
with the basis of a new “theoretical and heedless science that poetry
could already give an approximate notion of.” A science, therefore,
in which the “study of words” would come to condition “the study
of nature” (Cesaire, 1946/1990: xxix).

And yet after immediately after this paragraph Wynter discusses Cesaire’s work in relation to the theoretical dreams of thinkers such as Chalmer’s search for psychophysical laws and Nagel’s objective phenomenology (both are also quoted alongside Fanon at the opening of the essay). All three thinkers as Wynter places them are interested in generalizing conscious experience in a mix of scientific, historical, and philosophical claims. But it is not clear in Wynter’s text which of these take the lead or forms the ground of her human as narrative being or human being as praxis. Wynter seems interested in the co-implication of epistemology and history in terms of certain groups being overrepresented as universal.

This of course is going to pull Fanon between phenomenology and existentialism, between the humanism of his earlier work and the decolonial edge of his later work. This all pervade any attempt at talking about the sociogenic – the generation of social causes and how they can be grasped in a world that is simultaneously colonial, postcolonial, and decolonial. The following from a recent piece by Paul Gilroy points to this:

“Those of us committed to the multidisciplinary study of culture as a primary object of our research, as well as a methodological key to analyses of the interplay of power, language, performance and context, can contribute to interpretation of the nascent forms of this “psycho-politics”. Our attachment to culture points away from the autonomy of race as a category and towards its sedimentation or embeddedness in evolving historical and material conditions. In other words, it underscores the irreducible specificity of cultural life and communication.

Culture is articulated with economic and political structures and flows but they do not determine it. Historical approaches to cultural matters can also foster a distinctive epistemological orientation. Racial difference is not produced by nature, yielding variations that can be misrecognized and thereby transformed into the rational substance of racial hierarchy. Instead, races are assembled, conjured into being, by the–usually violent–workings of racism. Thus races are summoned and animated as political and economic actors.”

Gilroy names and discusses Wynter and Fanon though focuses much of the essay on Du Bois. Similar to his approach in Postcolonial Melancholia Gilroy says the humanities have to be reimagined not abandoned and he often notes how naive this may sound in the current political moment. But he qualifies this account with an argument for a low theory approach on the one hand and challenges, like Wynter, the biocentric models which have come to dominate how thinking about race is a reactive discourse and no longer looks at the the forms of racial discourse changed not only because of colonialism but also post-WW2.

Here we might see a different take on how certain types of histories and speculative fictions operate to over-represent or mythologize (the difference between this is important) the aspects of history we wish to entertain. There is a course a difference between speculative fictions which extend history in order to inflate its importance or strangeness and that which is highlights a forgotten history. The deployment of Drexciya – of the fantastical world that emerged from the children of drowned slaves of course, no matter how hyperfictional, is built upon an all too forgotten history – that of the Zong massacre or the whole bloody enterprise of the middle passage.

This seems quite different (obviously in content but also in function) from the phenomena of ‘stupid jetpack hitler’ where the technological experiments of the nazis lead to stories about nazis on the moon, or all the variants of supersoldiers or clones hiding out in Argentina and so on. While they could be arguably seen to remind us of the horrors of the nazis the speculative element seems to obscure this. Obviously the political and ethical ramifications are vastly different so the question is what are the ethical implications of those modes of world building when posited against one another? If the former posed to critique the latter?

It could be argued that the technological or sci-fi treatment of the nazi legacy serves as a conveint way of critiquing the dangers of science broadly when unchecked by ethics as well as reminding us of how the efforts of nazi scientists benefited the US and other countries after the war. Of course this can also suggest that ethical considerations limit scientific progress and this serves to overlook how much nazi science was bad or pseudo science.

With Drexciya or black quantum futurism the speculative explorations of neglected history point out how are understanding of science fiction is still far too western which is evident with how much is extracted from the nazi program for instance. Other indigenous or minoritarian speculations also serve to show that there was nothing special about the nazi program – that dehumanization had long been a norm of western expansion.

In his Discourse on Colonialism Cesaire talks about the poet Lautreamont’s famous Maldoror:

“[…] I believe that the day will come when, with all the elements gathered together, all the sources analyzed, all the circumstances of the work elucidated, it will be possible to give the Chants de Maldoror a materialistic and historical interpretation which will bring to light an altogether unrecognized aspect of this frenzied epic, its implacable denunciation of a very particular form of society, as it could not escape the sharpest eyes around the year 1865. Before that, of course, we will have had to clear away the occultist and metaphysical commentaries that obscure the path; to re-establish the importance of certain neglected stanzas-for example, that strangest passage of all, the one concerning the mine of lice, in which we will consent to see nothing more or less than the denunciation of the evil power of gold and the hoarding up of money; to restore Then it will be understood, will it not, that the enemy whom Lautreamont has made the enemy, the cannibalistic, brain-devouring “Creator,” the sadist perched on “a throne made of human excrement and gold,” the hypocrite, the debauchee, the idler who “eats the bread of others” and who from time to time is found dead drunk, “drunk as a bedbug that has swallowed three barrels of blood during the night,” it will be understood that it is not beyond the clouds that one must look for that creator, but that we are more likely to find him in Desfosses’s business directory and on some comfortable executive board! But let that be. The moralists can do nothing about it. Whether one likes it or not, the bourgeoisie, as a class, is condemned to take responsibility for all the barbarism of history, the tortures of the Middle Ages and the Inquisition, warmongering and the appeal to the raison d’Etat, racism and slavery, in short everything against which it protested in unforgettable terms at the time when, as the attacking class, it was the incarnation of human progress.”

In part Cesaire is asking after how internal critique is possible without being seen as simply mad or merely speculation or as an aberration. For many years we have seen the attempt to diversify sci-fi met with the claim that there is an attempt to overtly politicize it – as if it were not political before. The question of the shift of what makes the stories seem apolitical is often about the previous whiteness of the cast and the assumption that the battle of good and evil has nothing to do with politics. This seems also to infect stupid jetpack nazis – their inhuman evil seems to be a singularity that expands infinitely into the future. As Cesaire argued Hitler was more of a norm than anyone ever wanted to admit.

It is also worrisome to think that this bloated overdetermination of the nazi figure serves as a roadblock to anyone taking the comparison of any contemporary fascism to them seriously. Similarily, and as Cesaire himself states, it continues to be a problem if the notion of the human as western ‘Man’ (in Wynter’s sense) determines the position of all science as such.

The Sociogenic and Decolonial Biology (pt 1)

Jumping off from last time here I am going to make some notes about the history of biology as it concerns the relation of Darwin and Lamarck and how this applies to the social or theoretical uptake of evolutionary theory.

Sylvia Wynter’s “Towards the Sociogenic Principle: Fanon, The Puzzle of Conscious Experience, of “Identity” What it’s Like to be “Black” takes a comment from Fanon’s Black Skin White Masks in which he describes sociogeny as beyond onto- and phylogenesis.

Here Fanon is riffing of off Freud’s rather extensive reliance upon the biogenetic law associated most strongly with Ernst Haeckle and Lamarck but existing in numerous older forms – also called the Meckle-Serres law and with roots in Lorenz Oken and other romantic scientists and naturphilosophen. In its most basic form it is stated as the development of the individual member of the species exhibiting all the stages of its whole history of development as a species (ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny).

In it’s older forms recapitulation could be viewed as either linear or non-linear and could cross or not cross the inorganic/organic boundary. For instance one could insist that the development of a human in the womb repeats all the stages of animals that went into the mammalian or chordate line or could claim it repeats even inorganic stages showing how lifeless material or the sea from which we emerged is even present along the way. In addition to this one can also claim this is a progressive or complexifying process with human beings on top of the ladder of progress.

As recapitulation retreated from being traced in actually embrology it became increasingly metaphorical or situated in the mind of beings as evidenced by habits and tics or in ancestral memories. While Haeckle’s star faded in Germany the idea of recapitulation was very popular in the US with Neo-Lamarkians (which overlap with psycho-Lamarckians) even though for Lamarck recapitulation was not nearly as central to his theory of evolution as is sometimes reported.

For many of the North American biologists such as Hyatt, recapitulation was a way to reinsert some notion of progressiveness that seemed to gel with Darwinian evolution (despite Darwin’s insistence that evolution had no sense of ‘upward’ direction).

Freud’s utilization of recapitulation seems to come from Sandor Ferenczi, Lamarck and the educational psychologist G. Stanley Hall. In Moses and Monotheism and other places Freud discusses a form of psycho-Lamarckianism that emphasizes trauma as having to do with the desire to know one’s own origins. In discussing the case of the wolf man for instance Freud chalks up the child’s strange dream of seeing a tree full of wolves as him trying to process seeing his parents engaged in sex.

But it seems that later in around 1915 that Freud seems even more driven to push recapitulation especially after his discussions with Ferenczi. In Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality Ferenczi pushed an articulation of trauma and of phylogenetic memory all the way back to the emergence of life (if not before). Sexuality was in some way a grand attempt to return to the womb and to the primoridal sea.

But how much of all this strange baggage is Fanon interested in? Or is the sociogenic supposed to disrupt all these strange tales or merely disrupt their eurocentric metropole of interpretation? In otherwords, is the sociogenic meant to say that the judeochristian or biocentric/economic views (again discussed last time) were provisional and violent in the limitation of the human (or ‘Man’) to European standards.

What is left unclear (at least to me) is the form of inscription or praxis that Wynter advocates ultimately. Her work, and other work in decoloniality, functions as a kind of three arm balance between naturalism, formalism, and history or we could say scientific, subjective, and narrative discourses. One has to be careful about connecting biocentrism to the nazis without a through history of the decades in between. As I mentioned in the last entry past the conception of eugenics is overdetermined by the nazis who at the beginning embraced eugenics (as it was internationally rampant) but soon left behind any adherence to its pseudo biological aspects.

The emphasis on blood and heredity (even though they functioned as plastic theoretical objects) was even too strict for the speculative anthropology of the nazi party. While Hitler was a fan of the struggle for existence he had no interest in the kind of contingency that Darwin advocated. Or if one can stomach to look at some of the nazi medical experiments the theories and concepts behind them seem almost premodern or medieval (to say nothing of the non-existent ethics).

But drawing a straight line from Darwin to Hitler (as Richard Weikart famously did) is not only history but it presents such a strangely mutated form of eugenics that one can claim that ‘it could be done otherwise’ or that ‘any political use of biology is immediately nazism’ The overdetermination of eugenics by nazism means that we actually have a higher bar to clear to claim something is eugenics which also has the horrible side effect of making it far easier to erase the eugenics of other countries and those (like in the UK and the US) that in fact that inspired the nazis.

But then we can see where the question of the group of sociogenic is so important particularly when it crosses paths with the biological or the pseudo biological. So many debates in ethics became stranded on a hardline division between normative and naturalist approaches in ethics and the myriad of responses to that division has led to all sorts of ridiculous formulations of analytic moral philosophy.

Yet Fanon’s account of the sociogenic seems to imply that every trauma, every psychiatric form is about a reaction to an environment which must be taken as a socially determined entity. This would seem to greatly curtail Freud’s more universal ambitions to seeing the repressed structures of the generic mind. It would seem that Fanon even wants to go further than Octave Mannoni who attempted to construct a postcolonial version of the oedipal myth via Prospero and Caliban. Again, the tension between nature, form, and history is being constantly renegotiated in what theoretical tools can be seen as capable of dislodging the assumptions of colonialism.

Next time – Cesaire and stupid nazi sci-fi

Envelop/e

There is a particularly odd aspect to the transition from the gothic to the modern, from familial ruins and rotting lineages (themselves already transplanted from their old world haunts across the sea) to the leakiness of the mind and the blurriness of the landscape. This is in some sense at least the beginning of the weird though without being overtly engaged in its materialism per se. From Dracula’s castle, to the house of usher, to the shunned house there is still a haunting of a different sort between the last two.

Mike Flanagan’s recent The Haunting of Bly Manor based on Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw as well as “The Certain Romance of Old Clothes” operates in the not yet material swamp of this leakiness and blurriness. But I want to say James’ tales are less about the constant question of the unreliable narrator, the question of realism, then it is about the cost of externalizing one’s mind and of attempting at the same time to internalize it ‘against’ the world. There is no neutral ground where the flow between the mind and the world is adequately bricked up – rather one is at risk of either being too deeply tucked away in a memory (and hence possessed by it) or seeing ghosts and traces of other people’s lives everywhere.

In this same time period the British Idealist F.H. Bradley dedicated much of his life work to showing how thought is suffuse with feeling and, at the same time, that one must constantly battle the threat of solipsism. Bradley extrapolates heavily from Hegel’s philosophy of mind and attempts to describe a metaphysics that makes sense in world where thought and feeling constantly bleed into each other. At the same time Bradley is well aware of a kind of loneliness that comes with engaging with metaphysics:

“It may come from a failure in my metaphysics, or a weakness of the flesh which continues to blind me, but the notion that existence could be the same as understanding strikes as cold and ghost-like as the dreariest materialism. That the glory of this world is in the end appearance leaves the world more glorious, if we feel it is a show of some fuller splendour; but the sensuous curtain is a deception and a cheat, if it hides some colourless movement of atoms, some spectral woof of impalpable abstractions, or unearthly ballet of bloodless categories.” (Principles of Logic, 1883)

And then decades later:

“A true philosophy cannot justify its own apotheosis. Nay, from the other side the metaphysician might lament his own destiny. His pursuit condemns him, he may complain, himself to herd with unreal essences and to live an outcast from life. It is three times more blessed, he may well repeat, to be than to think.”

And the connected note:

“The shades nowhere speak without blood, and the ghosts of Metaphysic accept no substitute. They reveal themselves only to that victim whose life they have drained, and, to converse with shadows, he himself must become a shade.” (Essays on Truth and Reality, 1914)

This latter essay is entitled “On My Real World” and also discusses Théophile Gautier’s short story “La Morte Amoureuse” in which a priest is tempted by a vampire courtier. Though it has been read as a moral lesson about temptation this is not how Bradley reads it – he sees it as a good argument for our commitments to our dream life being as, or more important than, what we take to be real in a banal sense.

The notion of ‘my real world’ appears earlier in Bradley’s Appearance and Reality in the section that discusses time and space. The artificial finitude of our self is a necessary net cast for coherent meaning just as space and time are. But Bradley thinks that there can be no solid metaphysical justification for the dimension of time having a singular direction or arrow. The fact that we cannot be sure there is a fixed passage of time, that there is a multitude of presents, comes from the self-as-frame problem mentioned above. We cannot pop out of our frame (or spotlight) and check a metric of time and then pop back into our spotlight of perception and assume that the events we are tracking have not themselves changed in someway outside of our limited perception.

The self as a present moment is always pulled between unity and plurality – ‘this is now and this is what now is happening (or what ‘now’ is made of).’ This gives feeling an undeniable ghostly character. Just like James’ characters in The Turn of the Screw one is not immediately aware that one is in a memory if that is externally caused (like a dream via the possession of a ghost). The ghosts of the story anchor themselves in time by taking over the consciousness of the living pushing the living mind into a kind of dream land (essentially making them ghosts but of their own minds and memories and not the external world). In perceiving a ghost the living are not simply seeing what is ‘there but shouldn’t be’ but they are also interacting with a consciousness or a frame of the present that must root itself somewhere and somewhen where it is not.

But because presentness is felt (in Bradley’s sense of being intensely self-referential) one can see the distinction between one’s memories and the gap between one’s frame and that felt state if only with some practice. While I can be possessed by a memory (in the term of a flashbulb memory where a smell or sound sends me deep into my archives) I often think I can peruse my memories at my leisure (‘what are the best meals I’ve had?’ or ‘what are the prettiest views I have seen’ etc). But I am not in control of the affective states which will arise from these strolls down memory lane.

This is why I have argued and given talks that horror is a kind of anti-nostalgia – because if nostalgia is the feeling of the desire of an old wound then horror is about creating disruption around old wounds – wounds that wont stay closed or that insist (such as in a haunting) that they must be closed, that the body be properly interred, that vengeance be had, that a house be left empty etc. Ghost stories are about the presentness of the past with ghosts tipped towards the past and the living tipped towards the present but with both stitched back to back to the other time frame.

If we think we are outside the present when we have a memory ‘now’ we are either inflating the powers of our private world frame or denying the affective character of the past as being different because we are experiencing it now. Being haunted is about being lost in that gap for longer and longer pasts-as-nows that never arrive as fully present.