More on animals and horror

I've posted before a little on the connection between horror movies and animals. In the most general sense, my argument is that horror cinema is a necessary outlet or byproduct of social sanction for the outrageous violence of factory farming. After watching "Marley and Me," I have another piece of this puzzle to add.

The genre of sentimental boy-dog books and movies has been around for awhile and to an extent is self-evident. Think "Old Yeller": it's sad as hell, about "boy" stuff, and so provides a way for young males to negotiate emotions that they are going to be expected to generally disavow as "men." "Marley and me" is not directed at boys in particular, but I think it is probably intended as a family film. Really, it's about being a young to middle aged professional, but because of the PG rating it presents that arc through the discursive possibilities of a much younger audience. The end is sad because it is inevitable and (for me) refers to pets that have already died and my living dogs who will someday die. As pedagogical, it also presents adulthood and the end of childhood as part of the inevitability of generational cycling. All this humanization through the life of a dog.

The correlative process of learning emotional restraint is, as Noel Carroll argues, ingrained in horror cinema as a ritual for teenage males. (There's nothing particularly "male" about the process he describes, its just an empirical observation that teenage boys are the biggest fans of horror). Adolescent males watch horror movies to practice confronting fear and mastering it; watching movies in a group then displays this mastery and/or buttresses it through communal mockery.

There's certainly a critique to be made of the repression wrought by the Old Yeller process, but I think it is also important that the existence of such documents serves to maintain that border as fragile. The memory of tears welling up is useful to remember that despite outward appearances one retains the capacity to be moved deeply by the lives of others. A predominance of the horror mindset--seeing the mastery of horror as the mastery of affect--gives a comfort that is not so much false as dangerous. (This links up with my criticism of "Blindness" as well: its subject matter has the potential to be sad or disgusting, and it opts for the latter.)

In sum, cinema has two genres for teaching the control of public emotion (fear) and domestic emotion (love, grief) that are organized by an unspoken connection of the animal body: as object of absolute love and absolute violation.

Michael Jackson memoriam

I saw K-Punk's essay on Michael Jackson and decided I would go ahead with the one that had been forming in my head as I walked through endless supermarket corridors the last couple weeks.

I am basically too young to know Jackson's efflorescence. I wasn't alive, or at least not aware, when he was doing his best work. I do remember when the video for "Black or White" came out because it was touted as a semi-event (I was too young to be critical, much less cynical) and was in a way self-fulfilling--the mass mobilization of cultural capital is something, even if it is promoting a lost object. In the case of MJ this was all the more so. His reclusion was something like that of another masterpiece in black and white, Citizen Kane, and the fact of him stepping away from his lugubrious throne was enough to catch attention. But more than that, the video for B&W was pushed as cutting edge digital manipulation (the wikipedia page says that it was previously used only in films such as Terminator). MJ might not have been at the forefront of "music" with Dangerous, but he was still at the crest of some other wave. It was not clear then whether his video was breaking ground in sheer expenditure ("the expense of spirit in a waste of shame") or in technological innovation, and this ambiguity haunts all aspects of the Jackson legacy.

The part of this haunting interesting to me here is how his death has given him and his music new life, a social presence that I believe was being held back by the fact of his personal vitality. I mean "vitality" as the simple fact of living. Life was a negative value, a predicate that diminished him. The same could be said I suppose of any pinnacle celebrity (Elvis is the obvious example, Hitler the other), and really of any of us. But by "life" in this context I don't mean all the messy details that drag us down and sully us with their swarming demands, or the King's beer belly, garish costumes illuminated by historical hindsight, and other indignities of aging in the limelight, I mean "life" as a factical condition. In the way that life would diminish a ghost.

In the last few weeks Jackson's music has become omnipresent on the radio. A weight has been lifted: the child molestation charges, the generally off-putting weirdness of late Jackson, has been paid in blood-gold and the preferred parts of his corpus can be separated from the offal. If he challenged convention by becoming a cyborg, we can now dissassemble him, like the deathless-dead body in Pynchon's V. without disgust or sentiment at the abjection of the human body. The mourning is festal, a wake: thank god, the airways breathe, we can stop qualifying our love of MJ and his music. It's a shame he is dead, but he is so much more alive now. He hasn't been this sonically omnipresent in decades. If anything, he's younger than ever.

The turning point for this rejuvenation is clearly his death. What else could have exonerated him from his history? What Jackson had put forward was a vision of deathlessness--not just in his own facial mask, the Neverland Ranch, media-circus rumors, the myth of the frozen king, and all the other ways he seemed to ascend from corporality to a digital heaven--but of cultural capital as unexpendable. (I am using "expenditure" here in the sense of a discharge of wealth that is not recouped dialectically as it is in the investment). No matter how much money Jackson wasted on personal fantasies--and he is well known to be massively in debt--he had attained an unimpeachable place in cultural and especially musical history that could always turn its own mythic expenditure to profit. This is the point at which restricted economy touches general economy in a schematic sense; MJ gave this bloodless formula very real historical dimensions. The initial, modernist question--can a person of vast wealth forestall death indefinitely a la Howard Hughes--has passed its zenith and has reformulated itself: can such a person die? With the archival, financial, and media technologies that allowed "Michael Jackson" to exist, the answer is no.

"Blindness"

The premise in the movie "Blindness" (based on the novel by Jose Saramago, which I haven't read) is great. People start going blind without cause or cure. Julianne Moore's character doesn't. The result is a zombie movie without disembowelment--all the strengths and weaknesses of the human soul, and the societies it can sustain, are drawn to the surface. It's pretty ugly for awhile but not in the way that I enjoy. Nor is this movie well made by almost any measure I would use. The pacing is uneven and sluggish, the emotions seem forced, the crimes are hideous, the connections stereotypical or unnatural. Plus blind people boycotted it for being derogatory.

It's very similar to "Changeling," actually, another movie I didn't like, because it insists on the significance of representing the worst crimes as an ameliorative for the instincts and conditions that breed them. Yes, rape is wrong; yes, greed that kills is wrong. The problem is that in bringing our blood to a boil over such high crimes, this film--and so many like it--miss the iceberg that sinks the ship. The question is how to represent systems (or networks, if one prefers) over the established short hand of rape-patriarchy avarice-capitalism (Slumdog Millionaire is another example).

This was precisely why I had been excited by the premise of "Blindness": what I am calling for is a kind of blindness. The reason actual blind people protested the movie was that it represents blindness as totally debilitating (and to some extent morally corrupting). It's not. There is a particular irony at the beginning of the film in that one of the characters wears sunglasses all the time; I assumed she was blind and the filmmakers were showing how capable blind people can be. Not so. She was a prostitute. Sight and shame are never disarticulated in this film, and so it misses the big picture.

Hybrids right and left

Two fabulous stories in the news of late: first, that Senator Brownback (R-KS) has introduced a bill to ban "part-human, part-animal creatures, which are created in laboratories, and blur the line between species." (I linked to the Huffington Post blippet because it links to the other relevant data). Second, the recent concern about military robots running amok feasting on the flesh of the living. (Levi brought this first to my attention, but I soon heard about it on NPR's "Wait wait don't tell me" as well--which last week made reference to Sen. Brownback's 'Mermaid bill' as well).

Now, like most people my gut reactions are that robots driven to consume flesh are bad, and that bills banning human-animal hybrids are silly. But on both of these issues there points to be made contrary to one's political intuition. The EATR robot awakens Terminator scenario nightmares, but on the other hand it is "green" in its energy source. Sure, it feeds on organic matter, but where do you think petroleum comes from?

As for the latter issue, it does not seem far-fetched to me--much less far-fetched, in fact, than the apocalyptic EATR scenario--that biotech corporations would invent human-animal hybrids that exist only for profit (both monetary and knowledge-power) and that have no legal existence or protection. Donna Haraway brought some attention to this in her essay on the oncomouse (the mouse designed to grow cancer). The purpose of the oncomouse is to model human bodily conditions through the body of a nonhuman. It would be much more effective for R&D to just have a version of the human body that is nonhuman.

At the same time, there is the more theoretically serious issue that Brownback is reifying "human" and "animal" as an actual opposition and denying the dignity (and pervasiveness) of hybridity. In either case, laughing at Brownback for trying to ban centaurs and mermaids is stupid and politically ignorant. Laughing at Brownback is probably not a bad idea, generally speaking, but that does not take him out of the senate.

"Milk"

An important part of the setting of Melville's "Benito Cereno" is that it takes place in the 1790s, while Melville is writing in the latter half of the nineteenth century. I point this out because, from the modern reader's perspective it is easy to overlook, and from the scholar's perspective it is critical to understanding the refractory gaze that Melville means to cast on the institution of slavery in the U.S. It is a kind of condensation of everything that Marxist literary critics, especially of the Jamesonian bent, would insist on in methodology. Always historicize. Critique of the present proceeds through the representations of the past. History doesn't repeat itself but it does rhyme--wait, that's Twain--I mean, there is a dialectical process that conserves macrostructures and repeats superstructural cycles. "Milk" has that eerie "Benito Cereno" quality of the present existing as more fully itself in a representation of the past.

At a gut level this is simply depressing for me, most of all because I have just moved to California and must bear the albatross of Prop 8. (On the other hand, I moved from Virginia where an equally shameful if less unexpected law was also passed recently). I visited San Francisco the day before I watched "Milk." If some legal battles for gay rights have been won in the intervening years, the sense of a political struggle has faded in contrast to Harvey Milk's clear sightedness. Linking this with a broader historical narrative, it is the sense of political struggle in general that has faded--compare with the incremental erosion of abortion rights.

But what I'm more interested in than a jeremiad on the decline of political thinking is what "Benito Cereno" might mean for its methodological inheritors--not so much Jameson and the critical crowd as for artists and art objects. The premise of "Milk" as somewhat authentic must be that it has political effectivity. (Of course, it might be politically meaningless, bread and circuses--but let's just suspend and disavow that interpretation for the time being). Like "Benito Cereno" we are taken in to an uncertain political milieu (70s San Francisco) through an interlocutor whose allegiances are uncertain. Harvey Milk is the man in the three piece suit when we meet him, and when he becomes the bearded hippy all in denim he is no less knowable by his sartorial signifiers, just as Melville's Babo is knowable because he is small and Black.

But Milk becomes unknowable, even/especially to those around him, when he sees himself as above all a political actor. This is more than his behavior being unpredictable: it is, rather, completely predictable because it is principled, just as the behavior of various establishment figures around him is predictable because it follows certain other principles--essentially, the principle of non-politicization. He is unknowable in the sense that his subjectivity seems to take on its properly philosophical predicates of disconnection from objectivity, but is still in tune with the world of objects. Subjectivity is not hypothetically removed from the world but secretly available through the port of culture, it is really an inaccessible Cartesian subjectivity. This is not proposed as a vindication or reformation of Descartes but as an example of where an eerie dualism seems against all reason to work.

Melville cultivates such an ambiance of eerie dualism in "Cereno" as the narrator and reader are taken on a tour of a fantastic representation of racial power dynamics. In "Milk" the eerie dualism comes in the form of Milk dictating memoirs not long before his death, a death which is announced at the beginning of the film. As an aside that will go unexplored, this leads on to a reading of "Bartleby"'s ghostly attributes in the political terms I have laid out here. The point I really want to make, aside from a de rigueur and empty endorsement of political "thinking," is that if "subjectivity" as philsophy has developed it takes on this meaning through politics, the outward signifiers of subjectivity that scientists and linguists have sought to discover in animals is a dead end. Assume the political significance of animals and their lack of (scientific) "subjectivity" is the condition of subjectivity as we actually find it.

Capital Gains

Since moving to the Santa Cruz/ San Jose area of CA we have been looking for a starter home to buy. Our thinking was that this area took a beating in the collapse of the real estate bubble; therefore, there would be many houses available at approximately reasonable prices.

In part this is true. There are many houses available at the bottom of the market that would have been priced 20-30% more two years ago. However, they tend to fall into two categories: houses that are genuinely good deals, and houses that are crumbling and filthy. In the former case, investors buy these houses on terms I cannot compete with--of the four(ish) houses we have been seriously interested in, our efforts were stymied by people buying with cash. In the latter category, the houses need a general contractor to take them on, invest in them, and make a profit reselling for them to move. I don't begrudge the GC's for profitting in this way, but it means that the current low price tag is illusory.

This is only anecdotal evidence but it is exactly the cycle one would predict in capitalism's ability to re-entrench itself through periodic failures. People buying 200-300k houses with cash in the first week on the market are not small families, they are speculators. Moreover, while these bank-owned properties are listed in the 200-300 range, they usually sell for 50-100k more. The market is adjusting itself as liberal economics would predict. The end result is that prices will eventually return to (around) their cyclical median, except that more material capital will be in the hands of those persons who are already the wealthiest and more of the least wealthy will be reduced to selling their wage labor for diminishing returns.

I can't complain: my position is better than many, many other.

Law of Ruins

Graham Harman has posted an interesting excerpt on Roman statues. This reminds me of Albert Speer's law of ruins for Third Reich architecture. From White Noise (257-8):

he knew that Hitler would be in favor of anything that might astonish posterity. He did a drawing of a Reich structure that was to be built of special materials, allowing it to crumble romantically--a drawing of fallen walls, half columns furled in wisteria. The ruin is built into the creation, I said, which shows a certain nostalgia behind the power principle, or a tendency to organize the longings of future generations.

It also is evidence to extend being toward death to the architecture of (at least) a certain time and place.