Deep Time

October 10 2009

For those born under the sign of Saturn, that is, those of a melancholic disposition, they—I mean: me—often feel as though they are left holding the bag of time. Or maybe it should be called the Boxing Glove of Time, wherein they are left trying to always dodge a left hook but continually misjudge the punch. This, mainly because they are always looking in the wrong direction; or rather, they are always too farsighted and find it difficult to focus on the close-at-hand, which always seems broken to them. And unlike the Heidggerean thesis of the broken tool (that is: it becomes visible finally to the user), that broken-ness, while all too visible, is also shrouded in an opaqueness, obsidian, granitic in its misprisioned ‘everydayness’. One—I mean: me—sinks into a slough of forbodings, misgivings, and displacements from the Now—even to the extent of a repudiation. The solution is to view the extension of time, with all which that vertigo (keeping in mind the new focusing technique which Alfred Hitchock used in the movie Vertigo: a moving forward, while focusing back; recall also the scene in the redwood forest in re: to deep time) entails for the melancholic, and to draw it into ever deeper folds and distances. (One is reminded o the recent discovery of a huge new ring around Saturn, previously unknown). The melancholic is ‘happiest’ in the leaden folds, densities and depths of those distances and rings out beyond the sandbox. That is to say, he is happiest in his un--or non-happiness.) And certainly those densities can, in fact must be, carried inside, a singularity, seemingly not of one's making, which continually peels away and abrades all senses of subjectivity and solid placement. If nothing else, this is what continental philosophy has taught us: that these aggregate distances – within and without – don’t disappear with the Machine and the New world which it promises, don’t evanesce into the positive pole of the currents of history, but are destined to perennially appear, an abyssal gate always in place, sometimes concealed -- most of the time actually – by the mechanisms of the everyday, non-deep time world. The Virilioian fractionating of the world by speed and acceleration only papers over that time (the buzz word now is messianic time, inhabiting the ordinary world as chips and splinters, as Benjamin had it, occasionally puncturing through) but it continually throbs beneath the surface, waiting. And since it primarily 'inhabits' language, it is not eradicable but is only visible by the tensions it enacts, the torsions of nothing on nothing, a 'face on the void.'

Under these circumstances, the sublime must puncture itself and release something more akin to the uncanny.

Deep time surpasses any notion of human, in fact makes a mockery of any valorizing of the human. The speck of whatever it is to be human is absolutely engulfed by time and mocks…well, it doesn’t even mock since mockery has to be a product of human sensibility; but at any rate it make hash out of all preconceived notions of everything and inasmuch as science is a human pursuit, tends to make short work of any such notion as well.

Gregory Benford has a book out from a few years ago called Deep Time and deals with a 'simple' project to retain human legacy over vast seas of time and to make visible the vicissitudes of relatively recent time, ten thousand years or so; it becomes surpassingly more difficult than one might think to assess its parameters. How much more daunting then to consider even past that mark, a mark that no one will see. Perhaps there are ways around such temporal constraints – but only under deliverance of what might now be considered a supernatural agency … and even so.

An admirable book by Quentin Meilassoux, After Finitude, has catalyzed a whole internet wave of considerations and publications on such speculations under the rubric of Speculative Realism (Check out the Uranomic site and what seems to be the house journal of SR, Collapse). But for now that is neither here nor then. What is the psychological correlate of deep time? And how traumatic must it be? Indeed would we become a society of monks? (as in Neal Stephenson's new book Anathem; interesting also that Greg Bear’s book The City At the End of Time deals with such deep time – if not end of time – propositions. Oddly enough, speculative fiction often tends to be predominantly about deep time while religion and spirituality tends to be a coraling of such, Christianity being the prime example of containment. One might think it the other way round if they were not careful. Perhaps that is why science – and its henchman capitalism -- of necessity must be nihilistic, while religion seems oddly twisted always back into the human community.; I suppose the waters can get quite deep here: Hegel might consider, on the contrary, science to be an example of bad infinity and not religion.)

While loss and yearning seem to be the benchmarks of melancholia, and hence endemic to the human prospect, or at least those born under the sign of Saturn, it does seem more properly a function of modernity itself, even as a side project of modernity. In some respects to be modern is to be forever home sick --- but also and equally to be in denial of such. Perhaps that is why redemption must be forever a thing which always already occurred. Perhaps that is why noise bands, noise as element of composition, has become so…so now: it is the truncating of everything in a premature delerium, no fulfillment, no possibility beyond that null state; not a sounding of the catastrophe (to play off Blanchot here) but a crawling inside, an inhabiting of catastrophe, the complete truncation of Deep Time or any sort of time really other than a equally weighted implosive now. Perhaps a way of avoiding (one thinks) all possibility of homesickness, loss, yearning..but there is no more philosophical music than noise and ultimately there is nothing more empty and loss-filled than philosophical ruminations, nothing more sick of home and hence homesick than philosophy.

It seems to me appropriate that the new picture of Saturn becomes MUCH more encompassing, extending its rings into every finer regions. Reminds me of nothing so much as the legions of thrones, principalities, et cetera, all the other legions of angels moving eternally around god and passing away only to be eternally replaced.

Come to think of it, much like language also.

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 Hidden

Occasionally the surface of language which we inhabit (and whose promises we fulfill or not) take on a slightly less burnished quality. The everyday seems a bit less reflective, a bit more perplexing. Under the right circumstances poetry can have that effect (though to the extent that it has to announce itself as such, the effect of 'peering beneath/through the surface' may be diminished; I'm fully aware that this terminology is not re rigeur these days and that all we are supposed to have are a gradually escalating/descalating series of imbricated structures proceeding through micor- and macro-scales. I suppose there is little yet in the physicalist spectrum that would lead us to think other wise.) But language may be another matter, so to speak, a peculiar combination of matter and anti-matter whose point of rupture can everywhere be felt and no place where it can effectively be focused on, purely and simply as itself, outside the regime of the necessities of communnication.

I am reminded of the possibilities that language holds encoded in its structure, by a recent article (here) in physics site where in words are modeled after entangled quantum states, (what they call 'spooky action at a distance' after the quantum spukhafte funverkungen of Neils Bohr) and seems to say basically that all words are somehow tangled together and speaking one may somehow elicit a great many others. I will leave it to others to try tosay how reliable such ascheme may be for further exploration, but it does leave the door open for various other weird phenomena e.g., the reverse speech effect (record a speech, play it backward and uncannily there seem to be sections which are intelligible and whcih seem to undo the meaning of the promary speech.

Lest one be though a complete kook, the last years of Ferdinand Saussure's researches involved the anagrammatical properties of language. In his case, a study of an ancient poetic form called the Saturnian in which poets encoded a name (gods, patrons, etc) into the words of the poem: a message within the poem. Apparently he became disturbed by his findings (they existed only as a large series of notes and weren't published in his lifetime); presumably by the poetic, verging on the mystical, taking precedence over the pragmatic. As Julia Kristeva put it, "poetic language adds a second, contrived, dimension to the original word" said second language "transgressing the rules of grammar" at the point where "reason strives to hold madness back to the limit of its own truth." (Sylvere Lotringer, The Game of the Name, a review of Jean Starobinski's book on Saussure's collected and assembled notes, Les Mots sous les Mots, published in 1971.)

But what if there are anagrammatical moments when the contrivance, the method of secondary poetic/prophetic inscription, becomes obscured or even occulted? When the question of who, if anyone, has overlaid one text to another becomes problematic indeed and a secondary structure WITHIN the primary text seems to come alive on its own accord, even haunted by an aspect for which an accounting is hard to come by. That is, Sassure's hunt for an 'authorial intent' was to bear no fruit because this (somewhat anomalous) structure of language itself somehow contrives to write on and beyond itself, as in Heidegger's notion that 'language speaks us.' There psychoanalysis has found fertile ground. One wing of this 'monoblock' thesis of language led to post structuralism and deconstruction. You wouldn't necessarily know it from the academic language but this can be spooky stuff as can be seen by the bible code folks, reverse speech advocates, steganography, and in fact all areas where there is a surface and a hidden, encrypted substrate. Popular culture is filled with examples

Within this doubled 'substance' there is another question of authorial intent: the coding is put there by human agency; the coding appears as an 'accident' of structure (whatever/however accident could be said to operate in such circumstances; off hand I can think of no convincing explanation/proof of the way those two levels would communicate with each other, although I suppose evolutionary biology would contend that the relation between phenotype and genotype has been taken care of. This is not exactly what I'm thinking of, but this is: a code written upon the DNA code. I'm also reminded of the failed attempt by William Newbold to find meaning in the scratches of the penstrokes of the writing of the Voynich Manuscript. It seems that pursuit of an uncanny encrypted world fosters its own form of madness.) And the third possibility would be that it was placed by a non-human agent. The last does not fit any measure of scientific correctness with the exception of the faint possibility of an alien consciousness somehow placing a code.

Anf finally to place somehow in juxtapostion here, the idea of 'telepathy' and 'text' as a massaging of the quantum field effect as postuated above. I would point to the lastest issues of the newly revamped (?) Oxford Literary Review's issue on telepathies which I enjoyed tremendously but which may of little use for someone attempting to solve something.