Falling Rocks, Becoming Rock: roll away the stone!

For quite a while I had been looking for a DVD of the 1957 movie by director Jack Arnold (who also did The Creature From the Black Lagoon) called Monolith Monsters. It is apparently not available but I happened to do a search for it yesterday on YouTube and there it was in all its black and white fifties glory.

(It will sometimes give you an option to watch all 8 segments automatically)

The storyline: A small western community is beset by a strange phenomena. Apparent a meteor has fallen and is composed of a strange rock-like material but the fragmented pieces of which have the startling ability to grow a hundred feet tall when water hits it, and then to topple whereupon the tip begins the cycle all over again, rising and falling, crushing whatever is in the path of this roving forest of falling rocks. And of course the town people take various actions to ‘cut them off at the pass’ as the deluge proceeds down from the high desert.

Oh, and I forgot one thing: if a person touches one of the weird rocks, they themselves start to slowly turn to rock.

I suppose if I had not posted the article on otoliths ('rocks' inside the head/ear which establish direction, stability, and hence ‘way-finding’ if I can put it that way) and its opening on the holy ka’ba, the Islamic black rock which some claim to be a meteorite, I would not have been so struck by (re)finding Monolith Monsters, about rocks which seem to have a, albeit crude, life of their own and can cause a reification (becoming thing-like) in living creatures.

I use the term reification purposely. It is often used in socio-political studies to indicate an effect that various state apparatuses can have on the individual, making them purposeless, with little affect or direction other than what the apparatus gives them – rock-like in other words!

And of course we HOPE that artistic/creative activity can have an apotropaic quality [From Greek apotropaios, from apotrepein, to ward off : apo-, apo- + trepein, to turn.]
'referring to an image or device which is designed to ward off unwanted influences' --- and often times by being a part of the evil, or by seducing it, in order to get it closer and deal with it (e.g., homeopathic medicine). Although in this case I think of those Japanese beetle traps which contain a hormone, intending to entice the bugs but ALSO sending out a general signal which can flood the area with unintended consequences. (within the context of the film, the apotropaic magical substance that undoes the rock monsters is…salt, which of course is a crystalline thing itself and if it had to be used widely , that is, outside the saintly mystical precincts of the desert where such monstration often and appropriate takes place, would wind up killing all life!

The line between living/dead, creative/destructive, the sacred/profane wavers tremendously. As far as I can tell, the apparatus seeks to confine that oscillation while creative activity often seeks to live in that oscillation and even to expand it. Of course that used to be the idea of the 'avant-garde' (living in that oscillatory boundary) and all the other arts (which seek comfortable perception and hence form part of the walls and devices that make the apparatus work; this is called ordinary life and can be a good thing...think life in war time -- er, the old sort of war time -- when nothing works).

Now that doesn't seem to be the case, since the central core of capitalism seems to be a sort of experimentalist impulse which it has found out can be a way of expanding markets and inventing new resources (the cyberworld) which it can exploit. We see now that the advance guard in the arts was aptly named. The image and the apparatus have found a way to mutually reinforce themselves, and most times with little regard for the 'human' element but rather most importance placed on the structural supports (not that it’s that easy to tell them apart—but that’s another story…sorta.) In a way, which I won't expand, everyday life now IS a sort of wartime, at least in the speeds, tensions, collisions, accidents, disruptions that now seem continuous.

But the becoming-alive of the obdurate, admantine stuff which surrounds us is an old story (along with the becoming-rock of the human, most famous being the tale of the medusa; but that’s another story too… sorta) as is really the blurred line dividing the two (e.g. Ovid's Metamorphosis). Perhaps what is different now (arguable. Some would say nothing is different now) is the tech we have to facilitate those transitions…what happens when artists are able to make chimera with table top equipment? (which reminds me of a new movie which I haven't seen yet – Splinters - but which seems to have some elements in common with the Monolith Monsters with the same difference as other fifties sci fi / horror films from then: then the horror was always from the outside trying to get in; now its from the inside trying to get out; think Invasion of the Body Snatchers and its remakes.)

Perhaps that is where the apparatus and the image truly fuse … but I wouldn't start jumping for joy just yet …wait until you REALLY hear rocks falling.

Zombies, Apparatus, and the Image of the Nation: pt.1

Zombies, Apparatus, and the image of the nation

Franco Moretti once claimed that the two seminal ‘monsters’ ( from 'de-monstrare', a showing forth, demonstration) for modernity – and the West -- were Frankenstein and Dracula; Frankenstein represented the monster of production turned loose on itself (made up, collaged together, bricoleur, odds and ends gathered and forced to articulate), all subjectivity being turned on a lathe, so to speak, constructed out of numerous parts and sources. The other side of that early industrial model of life and literature was Dracula, a monster who fed on desire and subsisted in the shadow of that other industrial monster, the one based on overweening scientific hubris.
(The book that alludes to these analogies is SIGNS TAKEN FOR WONDER, published in 1983). His new work however is based on quantitative sociological analysis –he works with the history of the novel-- and became controversial.

His new book on graphs, trees and grids as a way to track literature would suggest zombie (systems of analysis, protocols) -- has supplanted has supplanted those early monsters. Nowadays though, zombies are everywhere – just like the idea of the apparatus is everywhere and controls what we can see, where we can go ---and perhaps who we can be.

If the Frankenstein monster maintains life at any cost, taking apart other bodies and lives to do it, so does Dracula sustain life at the cost of death—or vice versa. But the zombie sustains itself in the stroke between life/death, feeding on both death AND life…just as an ‘apparatus’ does in its most formal presentation. 'Zombie banks' anyone? These things live inside us now; and in fact we are unable to separate ourselves from them. (‘Debt’ and the monetary system in particular seeming to form quite dense nests). The zombie IS a sort of apparatus – or rather, is you wish to be less literal, forms the latest incarnation of monstrosity, or a showing forth of the inner workings of human articulations.

And another thing that points to the zombie being an apparatchik: the previous monstrations had their original in canonical texts by Mary Shelly and Bram Stoker, there is no text per se at all for the zombie. First came the image and the concept (I think; if this is not the case and there WAS an ur-text for the zombie let me know) via contact with some tribal cultures (i.e. Haiti) but in industrial cultures, contact came through another apparatus, movies and later video, both are systems of image representation supported by large apparatuses of workmen (see, e.g., Walter Benjamin’s Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction).

But perhaps in some sense, we have never been alive, perhaps life has always had a zombified aspect to it: being inhabited/possessed by another system, our ‘consciousness’ (and what exactly IS that anyway?) a phenomenal result of the clash of of those internalities.

Don't we already 'live' in this place of the resurrected dead, you and I? Sluggishly (or rapidly it could be we now think also) moving over the landscape waiting for the big break, the big event, or maybe just any event which wold release us from the inhabitation of the stroke between life/death.

Perhaps we have always been zombies.