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Katerina Kolozova’s The Real and the “I” is a brilliant text which complicates Francois Laruelle’s non-philosophy with post-structuralist feminist theory, psychoanalysis, and various continental philosophies. Like Brassier’s Nihil Unbound, Kolozova’s project is a heretical reading of Laruelle’s philsopy which, while maintaining the basic tenets of his system (unilateral duality, vision in one, the Real, transcendence and immanence as distinct) pollutes the non-ness of his arguments. Unlike Brassier however, Kolozova is ultimately concerned with the experiential, with the aspects of non-philosophy which touch on existence as experienced by subjects (or strangers in Laruelle’s parlance). Jumping from Judith Butler, to Rosi Bradotti, to Drucilla Cornell, to Derrida, to Lacan (with thinkers such as Badiou, Derrida and Deleuze sprinkled throughout) Kolozova formulates a breathtakingly lucid and powerfully political, theoretical and social system or, at least, the possibilitly of such. My goal here is to introduce and problematize (albeit slightly) Kolozova’s text which deserves serious interpretation and continued engagement.
After critiquing the rampant textuality and playfulness of postructuralism as “hysterical denial” (p. 6) Kolozova goes on to point out how the much hated One (or Real) is cautiously encircled but ultimately denied across a broad spectrum of feminist texts. Kolozova claims that not only do theorists such as Butler and Bradotti unconsciously invoke the Real, but that they unknowingly perpetuate dualism by opposing deconstruction to traditional metaphysics (p. 7). Berrating Butler for her overly cautious rhetoric (which seems in line with Zizek’s humorous comments in Astra Taylor’s documentary film) Kolozova points out that Butler’s disavowal of Real returns in her placing the Real (of power and deconstruction on the whole) in the body itself (21-22). [I have, in the past, critiqued Butler along similar lines here]. In many ways, Kolozova appears as a Speculative Realist version of Joan Copjec.
Kolozova, via an engagement with Laruelle, goes on to show that Butler’s various oppositions are exploded via Laruelle’s vision-in-one which, is always already a unilateral two (42-48). Echoing Brassier’s critique of correlationism, Kolozova points out that all crisis, whether dyadic or not, is domesticated by deconstruction, purported as non-discursive and hence impossible (p. 52). Kolozova then goes on to articulate the dominating political problematic of our era that, in a deep echo of Zizek, is the name and existence of democracy (p. 65) and, in the most interesting passages, discusses how, the non-philosophical subject (as the stranger, the human in human) interracts with the Real via transcendental materialism (the being of language and experience).
While Speculative Realism has been more than slightly ambigious as to its relation to psychoanalysis and its derrivative transcendental materialism (save Brassier’s two swipes at Zizek in the footnotes of Nihil Unbound), Kolozova is clear in that the two doctrines are not opposed but that Laruelle’s system works with the Real whereas transcendental materialism (or what Laruelle denotes as non-analysis or non-psychoanalysis) thinks the human once it has been caught in the worldliness of the world. Whereas Brassier discusses the Real as only impossible, Kolozova acknowledges the varying modalities of the Real (a la Zizek and Zupancic) and how the Real is captured in our singular fragments of being.
One troubling ambiguity is exactly the role of the unconscious, a term that is limply deployed in Brassier’s texts and absent from the works of other Speculative Realists. While Kolozova discusses Butler’s dismissal of a romanticized unconscious as a wellspring of radical intervention (p. 23), she does not herself comment on its use or being. Reading between the lines of Kolozova’s Laruellian formulation, I would argue that the unconscious would be the moment where the human in human is first experienced as an exteriority (and therefore becomes being or transcendental in Laruelle’s formulation) and the Real speaks to this transcendental material (the symbolic) but in a language the subject doesn’t understand (p. 102). The unconscious may also speak to the lived-ness of the stranger, that life is a fiction which escapes language and both allows for and restricts our freewill (p. 44).
Kolozova argues that, despite Laruelle’s objections, some interface is needed in which transcendence operates on the Real - that the transcendental material of a specified subject (stranger) carries a particular formulation of the Real which, in the end, means that our various subjective anxieties are both Real and Transcendental (101-103). The political implications of this formulation seem to fall somewhere between Badiou (whose concept of evental sites Kolozova utilizes) and Zupancic/Zizek in trying to act according to or be an instance of the Real (p. 65). This formulation is what allows Kolozova to make claims about the aforementioned Real of democracy, which appear similar to Brassier’s comments about capital in his works prior to Nihil Unbound as well as Zizek’s discussion of capitalism in Contingency, Hegemony and Universality.
If, as Kolozova suggests, the body is the nearest bearer of the Real of our being, how do we articulate a politics which is different from the tired attempts of identity politics? If we carry the real with us, and our experiences can touch upon the real, what is to separate a politics of the embodied Real versus an identity politics? The difference that Kolozova ends on is that since identity is always a failure to grasp the Real and sense the World, as experiential, is what forces and faxes the Real of such materialism, we can only remind ourselves that such a world is not-All, that the World can never grasp identity as such let alone any singular human in their automatic solitude. The strength here is that Kolozova seems bolder than Badiou in dismissing the pre-Evental non-subject and more optimistic than Transcendental Materialism in that not only can the subject think the gap that it is but that the gap does the thinking, that the Real itself desires to be transcendental to, in a sense, be political.
Kolozova gives as a subject that is both always already in tune with the possibility of the evental and the dishiscence of the drive.
/1/ - Cavernous Bodies
Neil Marshall’s horror film The Descent is interesting for a number of reasons. For one, the movie is almost completely devoid of male characters nor is there is any of the juvenile ’sexing up’ of the film’s female cast. Here is the film’s synopsis from IMDB:
“After a tragic accident, six friends reunite for a caving expedition. Their adventure soon goes horribly wrong when a collapse traps them deep underground and they find themselves pursued by bloodthirsty creatures. As their friendships deteriorate, they find themselves in a desperate struggle to survive the creatures and each other.”
Marshall’s masterpiece
There seems to be two large themes going in the the film. The larger theme is the interplay between trauma and guilt. Sarah, the main character, looses her daughter and husband at the beginning of the film and it is evident that Juno, one of her friends, was having an affair with him. Repeatedly, while unconscious, Sarah sees her daughter blowing out the candles on a birthday cake. The deconstruction of the myth of ‘feminine unity’ that kind of ‘girls look out for each other’ kind of illusion which still seems prevalent in some places. One could also connect this myth to the mythical pre-Oedipal state, where the child and mother exist in a fabled harmony. In Speculum of the Other Woman Luce Irigaray argues that Plato’s allegory of the cave is masculinist in that it suggests an abandonment of the cave [the body, the womb] for the male codified realm of the outside, intellectual world. The prisoner’s in the cave, chained forced to gaze upon the masquerade of shadows, for Irigiray, this speaks to ‘feminine sexual passivity’. Slavoj Žižek argues that the allegory should be twisted in that the cave is that which presents itself, there is no external reality it is keeping the prisoners from (The Parallax View, p. 162).
Plato’s allegory
Judith Jack Halberstam in Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters claims that the exploitation of ‘female passivity’ is a undeniable part of contemporary horror films. Halberstam also notes that: “[the] postmodern Gothic warns us to be suspicious of monster hunters, monster makers, and above all, discourses invested in purity and innocence. The monster always represents the disruption of categories, the destruction of boundaries, and the presence of impurities and so we need monsters and we need to recognize and celebrate our own monstrosities” (p. 27).
There is no purity at the outset or end of The Descent, the always-already broken social between the films characters simply deteriorates further with the introduction of the crawlers - cannibalistic prehistoric humans who have adapted to living in complete darkness. The only boundary in the film that is disrupted is that of trust amongst friends which is destroyed on multiple levels before the six even enter the cave. Not only Juno’s betrayal of Sarah but the fact that Juno lied to the rest of the group and took them to an unexplored cave system.
The Six before their expedition
/2/ - Silent Screams
Another way in the which the film has something to say, or more specifically not say, about feminist criticisms towards horror film is in regards to voice. Kaja Silverman as well as film theorist Michel Chion have pointed out that in horror films women are reduced to a panicked scream before they are mutilated for the pleasure of the (assumed male) viewer.
[In some recent horror films this could be connected to the larger shift from thriller to horror in that the suspense is far less important then the satisfyingly gruesome death of the film's protagonists, particularly the female ones. The most prevalent example of this is the 2005 remake of the Vincent Price classic film House of Wax. One of the film's major selling points was the fact that one could see Paris Hilton (who plays Paige) die.]
Scream for me!
There is little screaming in The Descent not only because the characters are strong, cool-headed people, most of the time, but because the creatures that hunt them, the crawlers, are completely blind and hunt by sound. Silence becomes the main act of the female characters. This is in contrast to the Crawler’s constant purring/clicking/hissing and growling noises. In A Voice and Nothing More Mladen Dolar argues that language can be attributed (in psychoanalytic terms) to desire whereas the voice can be connected to the the drives. The two prominent screams emitted by Sarah are both primal screams: one of violence - where she kills a slew of crawlers and one of relief - when she escapes the cave.
Sarah’s escape?
Dolar writes: “Silence seems to be something extremely simple, where there is nothing to understand or interpret. Yet it never appears as such, it always functions as the negative of the voice, its shadow, its reverse, and thus something which can evoke the voice in its pure form. We could use a rough analogy to start with: the silence is the reverse of the voice just as the drive is the reverse side of desire, its shadow and its “negative” (p. 152).
Silence speaks volumes particularly when Sarah wounds Juno and leaves her to the crawlers upon learning of her past relationship with her dead husband. There is a passage from symbolic or calculated silence (in this case tactical silence) to one of the Real, the kind of clamor of the entire universe, where the deafening nonsense of the universe is a horrible silence. The silence of the Real hear emanates from Sarah’s actions which, in a sense, speak to the redoubled loss of her husband - lost life and then lost fidelity (retroactively). The social relation, as such, is made apparent as a void which words can only be lost in. One here is tempted to invoke the tagline of the first Alien film - “In space, no one can hear you scream” of course here we are not talking about outer space but inner space the constitutive lack of (social) being.
/3/ - Gazes, bloody gazes
One scene that is strangely absent from the film is the ‘lights go out scene.’ This is incredible based on the setting - ‘no natural light’ - and the fact that dying batteries, supply of flares etc is mentioned prominently. What is interesting is that the women ’see too much’ whether through their own eyes or that of their camera screen, which is equipped with infrared. One of the more disturbing scenes is when Sarah, in order to keep silent, is forced to watch one of her fellow cavers eaten by the monsters through the handheld camera. In her book Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists Joan Copjec argues against the contemporary (and often times feminist) reading of the subject in film theory. Copjec points out that film should be more of screen then a mirror. Put most simply, film theory focuses on the imaginary identifications one has with the film rather then the symbolic ones.
The Horror of seeing too much of the not-there
She writes: “The subject is the effect of the impossibility of seeing what is lacking in the representation, what the subject, therefore wants to see. The gaze, the object-cause of desire, is the object-cause of the subject of desire in the field of the visible. In other words, it is what the subject does not see and not simply what it sees that founds it” (p. 35-36). We could say then that Sarah’s terror is not ‘I will end up like her’ (the one being eaten) but ‘I do not see how I cannot end up like her.’ With this example we can see how for Lacan, as Copjec argues, the gaze is not identified with the subject and therefore in the thing being looked at, but is instead behind the image. The horrifying aspect of the gaze then is that it always sees right through you, it is that of a blind eye.
How perfect then that the film contains an incredibly intense eye gouging scene. Sarah’s brutal blinding/killing of one of the crawlers is interesting because the creature is blind, literally, and its gaze does not ’see’ see Sarah, as Other, and hence there is no recognition and Sarah remains only a source of food for the creatures. Paradoxically then Sarah blinds/kills the blind creature because it cannot see her.
/4/ - Camera Fodder?
Discussing Krzysztof Kieslowski’s move from documentary to fictional films Žižek discusses how fiction explodes the very concept of documentary facticity. There is a limit to the documentary which can only be filled with a kind of fiction in order to, in a sense, fill in the gaps. (The Parallax View. p. 30-31). But, still, the very concept of documentary has a kind of appeal to it, for instance take for example the fictional documentary The Blair Witch Project. The assumed/advertised ‘reality’ of the film brought in (speaking in terms of cost/profit ratio) insane amounts of money. We could see the obverse here as well with The Descent taking into account some of the films negative reviews. Bill Westbrook writes:
“[A]s with other such films, The Descent seems less about female empowerment than female misery. One wonders if Marshall has issues. No males suffer here, just women who, even if they survive, won’t ever be the same again.”
Earlier in the review Westbrook also notes, disparagingly, how the women become violent while in the cave. Here what stands out more then the supposed reality of Marshall’s ‘issues’ (fiction being exploded by non-fiction) is Westbrook’s presumed fragility of women. If half a dozen athletic risk-taking people (regardless of gender/sex/etc) are attacked and have weapons, why wouldn’t they fight back? Taking Copjec’s definition of the gaze couldn’t we say that what Westbrook sees in the film is what is lacking. Westbrook’s critique of horror film for violence and trauma really reveals his view that violence and trauma cannot be endured/caused by strong female characters.
The last minute or so is cut in the US version so that we see Sarah escape only to find that she is now haunted by the ghost of Juno. In the British cut we then discover that Sarah never really escaped and is joined by her dead daughter as the crawlers approach. What is tortured and destroyed is not primarily the characters but the sense of their collectivity. To go back to the beginning, this sense of collectivity is, like the pre-Oedipal connectivity, mythical, non-existent. One of the promotional posters for The Descent is a take on Phillip Halsman’s photo In Voluptas Mars:
Dali and the Pleasure of Death
To reiterate the function of the Lacanian gaze we could utilize Nietzsche’s words in Beyond Good and Evil: “He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” The horror comes from the void that looks into our void which refuses to see what we are symbolically, materially. What is missing, is missing only in our view and that is when the gaze is returned - the eyes of the skull, the twisted jaw, the toothy grimace…..
The recently released computer game Prey is not a great addition to the grossly unwieldy amount of first-person-shooters, it is a fairly entertaining and (fairly) original game. Gameplay features heavy use of dynamic portals (seamless, randomly appearing, neat looking), rooms with complex gravitational configurations (walking up walls, flipping the floor and ceiling etc.) and some stunning looking visuals allowed by the game’s story.
In Prey you play Tommy - a Cherokee garage mechanic working on a reservation in Oklahoma. At the start of the game you are trying to convince your girlfriend Jenny to leave with you. But after beating up some drunk whites who try to harass her (they call her Pocahantas and talk favorably about her rump) aliens abduct you, her, and your grandfather Enisi.
Tommy, Prey’s protagonist
You (as Tommy that is) find that you’re aboard a large Dyson sphere like (though much too small) object in Earth’s orbit, and that the aliens on board are harvesting humans for food and various objects (cars, buildings etc) for construction. You are liberated by a strange person (later revealed to be one of ‘the Hidden’ who are natives taken from Earth long ago) and watch your grandfather die before set off in search of Jenn. Early on in the game, after having a ‘near-death-experience’ you are brought to the land of your ancestors and Enisi teaches you to take your spiritual form. This is done despite your (Tommy’s) resistance to ‘Cherokee bullshit’ as it puts it. You also start to receive the assistance of Talon, your spirit guide, who is in the form of a phantasmal eagle. (One could do a whole entry on just the stereotypes in Prey, but that’s for another time).
Fodders attacking
Tommy’s spirituality provides an interesting gameplay twist in that, by assuming spirit form, you can pass through forcefields, walk across unseen bridges etc. But what is interesting, looking at Prey as a text, is how spirituality is intertwined with the material. Everything in the Sphere is cybernetic: arachnid monsters emerge from bleeding wound-like apertures jammed between metal bulkheads, cybernetic hunters leap out of portals, large fungal growths and tentacles hang wriggling from steel corridors, your entire arsenal writhes: centipedal structures wrap around energy coils, a cannon contains living ammo that scratches at its confinement and so forth.
Now while cybernetic races in video games and sci-fi are prevalent almost to the point of cliche, Prey makes the concept more interesting through its relationship to the spiritual dimension. Donna Haraway’s treatment of the cyborg is interesting in light of the concept of spirit. She discusses it briefly: “Pre-cybernetic machines could be haunted; there was always the spectre of the ghost in the machine. This dualism structured the dialogue between materialism and idealism that was settled by a dialectical progeny, called spirit or history, according to taste” (Simians, Cyborgs and Women, 152). How much of a dualism is actually here though?
or Geist in the Skull
While part of the game is Tommy grudgingly accepting his roots, the gradual increase of spirituality can take on another meaning. At the beginning of the game the Land of the Ancients, seems like a non-place, a kind of heaven where you go to receive training and advice from your recently perished grandfather. This separation is backed up by the fact that when you die in the game, instead of restarting from your last save point (as is fps tradition), you enter the Death Realm where you shoot, with a bow and arrow, the disgraced spirits of the dead to get your health back and come back to life.
But the fallen spirits soon enter the material world, possessing captured children and attacking you. In one of the more tense moments of the game, as you are about to undergo your final set of training, the ‘dark ones’ (aliens) invade the land of the ancients and start to destroy, what up to that point, seemed like the non-material after life.
Spirit (in the religious sense) becomes more and more like spirit (in the revolutionary sense). Looking at this reduction of the space between the material and the spiritual we can bring in the quote from Hegel that Žižek is so found of - “the spirit is a bone” from Phenomeonology of Spirit.
Good ‘ol GWF
Žižek takes the meaning of Hegel’s enigmatic phrase to be indicative of the passage from representation to presence. The bone, the skull in particular, is the objectification of a failure, the failure of the subject’s being (The Sublime Object of Ideology, 208). The duality then, between the spirit and the machine, or between the stupid meat of the brain and the occurrence of thought, is not simply a duality, but, in Žižek’s terms, one of looking awry or of parallax.
How is this complicated by the role of tradition or, maybe as Haraway puts it, history. What might we say the difference is between history and tradition? It seems like that of a formal difference of presence based on formal choice. Put another way we could say that tradition is history imbued by the power of its own presence, its value is because of its own presentation as tradition whereas the force history does not necessarily have this impact. Tradition may very well take into account the weight of history presenting this weight as such. Much like the State re-presents (re-counts) the situation, the basic facts by placing them into groups (in Badiouian terms) we might say that tradition re-presents the presentation of history.
Is tradition the history that demands to be repeated through the tautological presentation of its presence? It seems so. But what then can we make of the pure negativity of spirit (in the Hegelian sense) it relation/contrast to the spirit of tradition? Is history the bone of tradition, the rendering positive of the negative, of the vulgar empty skull of history?
Z and B
No, let us not make that mistake.
In the Badiouian sense spirit is detached from history and tradition. Spirit is the pure negativity of the void, or the ‘night of the world’ in Hegelese. The tautological (re)presentation of tradition displays its own failure - the tautology, in the end means that we obey tradition because it is imposed, because the fact that it is pushed on us. This is in fact the opposite of ‘the spirit is a bone’ for Žižek. The rendering positive of a negative through opposition (spirit and bone) is opposite to the re-doubling, or double positive of tautology (history redoubled as tradition) which exposes the negativity of imposing. So while the synthetic and the flesh meld so well, the spirit remains as both the radical core of one’s being ($), completely separated from the vulgar there-being (material being) of the biological as well as being completely distinct from the mechanical parts but, at the same time, informing cybernetics in that the very notion of innovation is propelled by spirit.
The passage from the organic to the cybernetic should be seen in the sense of the Hegelian doubling of reflection. Biology functions as the ‘posited reflection’ - its appearance, and then the synthetic functions as the external reflection - one becomes an object and determinate reflection is when these two reflect on each other (metaphorically) in the form of the cybernetic. The first reflection or positing implies that the speaker recognizes themselves as different from, but having a relation to the second reflection. The reflection of the two on each other creates something (determinate reflection) that covers over the negativity of being.
Picasso’s Girl Before a Mirror
Looking back at my entry on Love the same process takes place in regards to Lacan’s discussion of the hand reaching towards the burning fruit. We act towards an object, the object acts back, and the relation covers over the negativity of our being.
That is the spirit at work.
