Outside the Borders of the District: on District 9

Outside the Borders of the District: on District 9
part 1

"At first glance, it appears that the uncanny is a fear of the familiar, whereas nostalgia is a longing for it; yet for a nostalgic, the lost home and the home abroad often appear haunted. Restorative nostalgics don’t acknowledge the uncanny and terrifying aspects of what was once homey. Reflective nostalgics see everywhere the imperfect mirror images of home, and try to cohabit with doubles and ghosts."

Svetlana Boym

"In all mourning there is the deepest inclination to speechlessness, which is infinitely more than ability or disinclination to communicate. That which mourns feels itself thoroughly known by the unknowable. To be named – even when the namer is Godlike and blissful – perhaps always remains an intimation of mourning. But how much more melancholy to be named not form the one blessed, paradisiac language of names, but from the hundred languages of man, in which name has already withered, yet which, according to God’s pronouncement, have knowledge of things …

"In the language of men, however, [things ] are over-named … over-naming as the deepest linguistic reason for all melancholy and (from the point of view of the thing) of all deliberate muteness."

Walter Benjamin

"Time is precisely the impossibility of an identity fixed by a place.

[….]

While place is dogmatic, the coming back of time restores an ethics."

Michel de Certeau

Giorgio Agamben begins The Open with the now-famous passage concerning a painting in the back of a Hebrew bible from the thirteenth century of animal-headed humans at a banquet table of the righteous on the last day, a possible reconciliation of the animal and the human at the point of concluded humanity.

However, with the power of computers in special effects we no longer have to wait for the reconciliations ofthe end of time and concluded humanity, since chimeras are the bread and butter of the film industry. And while theriomorphs (the combination of gods and beasts) can only be simulated who is to tell how far that simulation will, in a thousand years, eventually reach?

District 9, while giving off the glint of a simple metaphor of apartheid, transferred to stranded space aliens, would indeed be a weak film (as would the whole concept of science fiction) if that was the only conjecture/concatenation being proferred. (The very same 'weak' thesis of the movie was put forward by the-president Ronald Reagan in the context of a world that would become united if there were the threat of invasion by space aliens.)

The deeper reading would be two fold and each related to the other: 1) the nature of the exilic condition, of homelessness (and the relation to the uncanny); and 2) the relation of the human to the animal (and that unsettling of relation to one’s own body as home and the uncanniness that results).

The next day after seeing the movie, I recalled the place of the hand in Heideigger’s meditations on techne (the well know ready-to-hand and present-to-hand) and Derrida's attempt to investigate the undecidability of touch and the hand (in both Jean-Luc Nancy and Heidegger). Now is not the time to rehearse any of these positions other than to point out the primacy of the human 'hand' in the movie as it turns into its alien other – which of course would be closer to the parallel of the hand associated with the radical other, the tentacle.

(I’m also now reminded of an earlier project, the text of which follows:

The Discovery of People in the Invisible Part of the Universe

In the recent Korean film ‘Old Boy,’ the protagonist is put into solitary confinement for 15 years, with nothing but popular television for entertainment. When he escapes, the pivot scene happens when he stops into a sushi bar and orders something live. He is delivered a live octopus that he maniacally consumes, then falls into a swoon. Thus begins a switch into another symbolic level of (in)operabilty, signaled by the omnipresent signifier of radical otherness, the tentacle. (As a hint: the film very cleverly plays off the relations between 'octopus’ and 'Oedipus,' both entities signposts of coming forbidden liminal states.)

'Tentacularity' is always a spectacular gateway to various extremes of otherness in cultural representations, a representation of that which is furthest from the human and which is always portrayed as a monstrous collapse into a regime at destructive odds with the human. The most well known popular representative of this visual motif is the portrayal of the aliens' craft in the recent film 'War of the Worlds.'

One can be sure that the arrival of the tentacle is also the arrival of the inhuman and uncanny in opposition to the human. One only has to remember those animations in the fifties of the world picture of the great octopus of communism and its encircling red arms.

But tentacularity is part of a larger body of symbology which includes Medusa and the concept of aura. All three, tentacle, medusa, and aura, are active liminalities which reach out beyond their immediate ground to encircle and tear from the human it’s essential humanness, Medusa causing a stone-like paralysis, a mortification of time, and in the aura, or halo, a radiance creating a 'leak' in the human into the divine as well as effecting a porosity into (and out of) the material substrate of it's surroundings.

The recognition of these three facets – an unapproachable and monstrous inhumanness, a lapse into the pure materialty of a stone-like death, and the leakage into and out of the human by some form of transcendance -- signifies a rupture and switch into new forms.

(By the way: these three states all entail some form of luminescence: the octopus uses a form of polarized light to communicate—and it has been theorized that this ability to perceive in the polarized state acts a ‘secret’ form of communication with its kin, perhaps through its ability to change the color and patterns of its skin through chromatophores; the medusa effect is a cessation of sight through a direct seeing of the forbidden, while the aura / halo is an excess of light, radiance, and intolerable to a materialist culture, a form of incompatable de-monstration.)

Even though the protagonist, a human, is slowly turning alien, his hand has apparently turned completely into an alien hand/tentacle , a fact which, significantly, allows him to fire the alien weaponry (which cannot be operated by the human hand). There is certainly 'monstrosity' here but it is uncertain what 'shows forth' (at the root of the word monstrous, eg., de-monstrate): the human, the alien, or the animal. One might say that the coalescence of the alien and animal (the gestures of the scavenging stranded space creatures all reference apes, and predators; the only time that this does not appear to be the case is in the presence of the technology they have hidden and are using to reach their home world: in that case they take on the bearing of the human, even to the point of incorporating an infant alien) yields the possibility of an uncanny third, almost a gnostic concept (perhaps by way of a more contemporary bio-cybernetic) of relation of flesh as sheath and consciousness as inhabitant of vessel.

N.B. Some might wish to look over the J. Derrida's series, Geschlecht (especially Geschlecht II: Heidegger's Hand) where issues of chirology (right/left symmetry) and issues of sexuality and related issues of race, genre, nationalism and the idea of a neutrality between positions; certainly in terms of the aliens in District 9, they seem effectively neutered even though the idea of interspecies sexuality is raised to discredit the protagonist. Not knowing the codes of that species, they seem flattened in terms of the categories humans most often use to make judgements: race, sex, nationality, etc. The idea of the uncanny is largely unfigured here. )

The (square root of two) Resurrection of the Body: Hyrdrocarbon Angels Streaming Down the Gulf

pt 3

"Only a resurrection redistributes death and life to their places, by showing that life does not necessarily occupy the place of the dead."

Alain Badiou: St. Paul ...

"A higher calculus without remain(s): what consciousness wants to be."

j. derrida, Glas

"… it is a question of opening up the earth—dark, hard, and lost in space."

Jean-Luc Nancy, Dis-enclosure of Christiantity

"The (any) return is always a form of technic, always ahumanly existing before the human, and creating the human. To want to return to the before of return is to want to return to either the animal or the divine, difficult sometimes to tell the difference. [….] To want to see the singular (re) appearance of what has gone, died, disappeared: is that not the height of folly as well as the greatest experiment in the technical, the engineering of an alternate world, a world that is potentially present everywhere, all the time, a threshold continuously being opened and closed simultaneously, a world constituted by the individual subject, the human continuously striving for sovereignty, eve the object world brought along, skein of nodes: “In my view, which can be justified only by the exposition of the system itself, everything turns on grasping and expressing the True, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject." (Hegel in Phenomenology of Spirit. This taken from a section in The Political Theology of Paul by Jacob Taubes. Shortly after the quote Taubes glosses this by referencing Spinoza and Schelling as they pursue it in a generalized sense but extends it by allowing as to the possible of the individual 'I' being included in the equations: this would have to be the materialist reserve of any possible Christian vectored resurrection, no generalized eastern resumption of essence but a full-flavored self, the 'I', as improbable and fantastical that sounds to modern ears.)”

Fehta Murghana from That Which Comes

Can a re-gathering of distributed being be considered resurrection? If it is a simple numerical dispersion, it’s a question of: can it be done by human structure or is it an impossible proposition? (We humans consider anything that we can’t do to be impossible). This, even though it has been an imperial command for since we became conscious,. There is something in us that wants to come back, sometimes against our best (collective) wishes. Is that something that knows better than our individual consciousness …or is it a simple remnant of past eras encoded in our thought, myths, conduct? Whatever, it forms the most formidable thought for those who can think it and none can really, fully, since to think it totally means that one has come back. Which means that it passes from thought/potentiality to a fait accompli, ceasing to be impossible, passing from mere zombie thought into total presence, into our very objects, environment, stones, machines, the cry of the inanimate becoming audible, the invisible becoming only transparent.

An interesting article by Fernando Vidal (Brains, Bodies, Selves, and Science: Anthropologies of Identity and the Resurrection of the Body, Critical Enquiry, summer 2002) covers a great deal of ground but a couple of quirky attempts to account for bodily resurrection are those of Bernard Nieuwentijt’s 'stamen' theory from 1714 and Charles Bonnet’s 'other brain' theory. Stamen means filament or thread and if resurrection is possible, reasons Nieuwentijt, then identity must be somehow ‘threaded’ through matter and time, reproducing itself or hatching, like the stamen which continues the flower, into matter but keeping some ur-identity. Vidal glosses this in a footnote: "The stamen theory, which may be called the germ theory of bodily identity, has a descendent in Saul Kripke's notion of the necessity of origin, according to which a person’s identity is ultimately defined by genealogy; the one thing we cannot be is the offspring of parents other than our own". See Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity, Oxford, 1980. Of course this has the taint of that now much feared idea of essentialism, not to even speak of the taint of questions of origin. This reference certainly made me go back to the venerable Kripke book.

Vidal glosses Charles Bonnet (late 1700s) thus (I quote at length because it seems oddly prescient for a futurist, cybernetic world):

"Personal identity depends on memory (Locke’s thesis), and memory is based in the brain. It follows that, if man is to keep his identity in the afterlife, his soul must remain united to some indestructible organ, perhaps the same that functions as the seat of the soul. Bonnet describes it as a 'little ethereal machine' and as an 'indestructible brain' encased in the brains of our terrestrial bodies. In addition to being the seat of the soul, the little machine is the germ of resurrected bodies. I will therefore act in truly embryological fashion, producing bodies in accordance with the preformationist emboîtment theory of generation.

In short, our present brains enclose another brain, destined to develop in the afterlife and to restore our identity, personality, and boy together. Since the resurrected body will be spiritual and incorruptible, the 'small human body' hidden in the seat of the soul must be physically different from our bodies of flesh."

Perhaps the mystery is not that things are different but that they remain the same.

Perhaps science (or at least science's 'body,' technology, the point at which idea becomes material) is another venue for the mystery.

Some wait, as if paralyzed, waiting for the dream.

footnote to previous part 2, regarding number and resurrection:

"In effect, it is law at the purest, formalist level, law as "the ideal of the
matheme," that governs the new coming into being of the subject. Thus, to the
question: "But why is it necessary to reject law onto the side of death?" Badiou answers:
"Because considered in its particularity, that of the works it prescribes, the law blocks the subjectivation of grace's universal address as pure conviction, or faith. The law 'objectifies' salvation and forbids one from relating it to the gratuitousness of the Christ- event." As such, the event is, by itself, an "illegal contingency, which causes a multiplicity in excess of itself to come forth and thus allows for the possibility of overstepping finitude." The evental situation, before subjectivation, is the site of "the excess of grace, thus, of a pure act," i.e. the resurrection.

Although Badiou addresses a philosophical-political question in his analysis of
Paul and the law, what comes through the apparent antinomianism of the message is, unexpectedly – as if to corroborate the very evental process he describes – the
reanimation of law in a different guise. That is, in the truth-event, there is not a rejection or repudiation of law sensu stricto, but its realignment, rearrangement, to effectuate the resurgence (resurrection) of the subject."

Re-interpretation of Paul's Concept of Law
Tawia Ansah

The Hemipygic Resurrection of the Glorious Body: The Law En-Fortressed and Made to Walk
part 2

I had work done on my car recently and they needed the VIN number, a 17 digit identification number that details type of car, origin, where assembled, the order in which it was asembled etc. I was thinking that it is sort of the car’s DNA code, providing the car with a barebones bid for immortality – at least as much as 17 digits can provide. All the threads that concern the physical makeup of the car and the genetic we might say, as opposed to contingent knocks and bumps of acccidentality that make up real life as opposed to VIN life. The VIN numbers are threads that, when knotted together form the vehicle secret life.

That said, perhaps it would seem feasible to resurrect the car given a totalizing accident. However, and without going into philosophical disquisitions on identity from the Greeks to the computer age, most folks would contend that the car was reconstructed, not resurrected. The 'secret code/life' of a human would have something to do with consciousness and not necessarily with place of assembly (which is not to say that would not have an impact, contingent and genetic somehow coming together in a knotted tsunami of time, place, terrain, perhaps even position in re: to the rest of the universe; to a greater or less degree it seems this is what we think of as the human -- and perhaps other living, impactable entities -- with perhaps even some added dispositions and reckoning that we have little kin of, except by hearsay, myth, magical thinking or other eldritch considerations, none of which I discount by the way). I suppose the purported law-like regularity of the universe, always, everywhere and everywhen, could be called to the bar at this point. (Although, now that I think on it, the VIN resurrection scenario fits perfectly now, at least as far as filmic bring-backs; one only has to think of the Transformers series and maybe even the Terminators…certainly don't seem that far from a zombie re-instatement of an appliance and calling it alive.)

The Law (of matter) perhaps only seems implacable here, filmed over, encrusted with its own come-backs, precedented, trusted to have been here before, perogative of lost innocence, portrait of returns piling ever higher: the Law does not have a human face and after it has broken free from the natural world it has no 'Age' but looks 'back' which it configures silently, invisibly, out in the Open and inato the Forward, Janus -faced. (The Christian Resurrection would say, in its very heart: the Law is made to be broken and it will be done by Him after which we all follow, facing into the sun, rising from our graves, round the rim of the earth, the air on that Last Day filled, packed with shining Dead; well, that's the plan anyway....may take our trusty servant, the Machine, that other Law, to open the graves even more than it has already done.... what is it w. benjamin said? "... even the dead will not be safe", only the barest of the bare lifers will be let in. Huzzah! )

LivingDead the Law marches silently over the frozen tundra, The Law as zombie machine (number) has taken over all possibilities of resurrection, until the real Messiah returns to break one and install another regime. And that is always 'any minute now,' (the same as my grandfather's disposition (deacon's sketch) of time and salvation sketch at the front of this article which hangs on my desk now, timeless Law becoming a matter of genealogic threading though matter, the Law of Reproduction the only law that counts, oddly enough, for an inhuman law, your DNA (the soul's VIN?) nailed to the cross, spiraling, spiraling ever onward...

At the heart of the heart: does anything beat there? There beats the Inhuman Resurrection, composed of those same angel feathers, insanely beating, lifting....


"Resurrection: Borgo San Sepolcro"
Rowan Williams

So the black eyes
fixed half-open, start to search, ravenous,
imperative, they look for pits, for hollows where
their flood can be decanted, look
for rooms ready for commandeering, ready
to be defeated by the push, the green implacable
rising. So he pauses, gathering the strength
in his flat foot, as the perspective buckles under him,
and the dreamers lean dangerously inwards. Contained,
exhausted, hungry, death running off his limbs like drops
from a shower, gathering himself. We wait,
paralysed as if in dreams, for his spring.