Inhuman and Insignificant Cinema: absence and the Real

'to deliver human speech from the lie that it is already human'(Minima Moralia p.102)

The joy of photography/cinematography is their inhumanity

As natural artifice and artificial nature, photography excludes the human from anything but selection.

It is not in any sense a 'language'. The remnant that appears linguistic is only the secondary choice of using the photo, as in an advert. Its function in news is precisely to persuade that no choice was involved, and that it has been an inhuman witness.

The question of 'significance' (Minima 142) needs to be attended to in terms not available to Adorno in the 1940s: the sign, and the contest over whether existents are already signs – of what makes them appear, and by appearing makes them appear significant, ie that they appear as existent, that they exist 'for' – perhaps for us, perhaps for each other (as in camouflage) or as evidence – of history or evolution, or God. Each relies on signifying, becoming a sign-for, and on the distinction between the whatever that appears and its appearance, between the substrate of pre-significant matter and the signifier. As the chora somehow pre-dates the signified, sign-ready Symbolic ego, so there is a pre-significant material process, but even that is only to the extent that its appearance as phenomenon makes it possible to signify, and under the rule that it is only by appearing and thus becoming capable of signifying that the possibility of a pre-significant / extra-significant existence becomes possible.

What film tries so hard to record is not the appearance of things as an achieved presentation (things as they are) but the process of their appearing. What slips under the procession of images is their inhuman vulnerability to nuance and process, forming and diffusing like the clouds over Monument Valley – which in turn de-monumentalise the geology, whose appearance appears under this light as a moment in a longer history of evolution and erosion, loosening in a third stage the definitenesss of the colonial wars played out in Ford's narratives. The cinematic sign exceeds ,as it precedes, the administration of Hollywood that seeks to contain it as a circumscribed entertainment and, perhaps, an unambiguous ideology. Thus the failure of realism/naturalism is precisely where it holds the greatest promise.

Post-anti-neo-Darwinism

Neo-Darwinism saw Man as pinnacle of a tree-like structure of evolution. Post-Darwinist evolution gets rid of the idea of the pinnacle, and instead sees the ecology as the triumph of complexity. Anthropocene anti-Darwinism returns to the pinnacle model to tell us that the whole of evolution has culminated, as pinnacle, in the engine of its own destruction: the human species. Post-anti-Darwinism proposes therefore that, if climate change and pollution are human effects, humans can change them but only once the distinction of humans from the ecology ends, and therewith the distinction between the ascent model and the ecological complexity model. Undoing the distinctions human-natural and human technological, as well as the natural-technological distinction these two imply, is thus a fundamentally aesthetic as well as politically fundamental task.

Doubt

The meteorologists predicted today's weather yesterday, with reasonable accuracy, and with a respectable degree of probability.

But predictions of longer and more devastating fire seasons may be a) incorrect (the further ahead the future, the more determinants there are in play, and the less assurance that predictions will be accurate; prediction becomes statistical -- rather than the accuracy of predicting a cool change around 4.00pm). Similarly the larger the scale, the more abstract the forces: not the causality of a weather system approaching from the SE at 5..00pm but combinations of dipole, el Ninõ, ocean surface temperatures . . . Counting in anthropogenic forces including carbon and greenhouse gases, water extraction etc no longer clearly causal, opening the field for doubt.

In a previous note I worked with truth's antonyms as lies, fictions and fantasies, using the distinction that lies and fictions are not believed but truths and fantasies are. Now we need to address doubt. and to distinguish it from systematic (Cartesian) doubt

Systematic doubt, historically the basis for the Western critical tradition, has been a tool for critical theory versus scientism and common sense. But today it is embraced in the new tactics of populist neo-nationalism (with which neo-liberalism clothes itself in the era of its triumph, which is also the era of the crisis of US hegemony. Every nation positions itself urgently to make the most of the rise of China (and beyond that of India, and somewhere down the line of Turkey) as well as in relation to its reluctant and often rebellious citizenry (and of course against its traditional foes, indigenous and migrant). Preliminary distinctions:

DOUBT 1 is a fortified, strategic position that refuses truth by characterising it as merely one belief among many in the 'marketplace of ideas' - ie a pro-position that all truths are equal.

DOUBT 2 is a critical move in the process of argument, a transitional stage, a recognition of the fundamentally antagonistic relation between truths. Any truth asserts itself as the only one.This is also the case with highly specific truths (it will rain at 4.00pm tomorrow; it is raining now), where the particular stands over against the universal. Doubt 2, critical doubt, asserts the irreducible difference between truths.

Dominant Ideology

“Environmentalism, the dominant ideology” is itself an ideological statement.

The top ten companies in the Fortune Global 500 for 2019 include six oil companies, two automotive, the Chinese national energy grid and Walmart. All are carbon dependent. They range between 0.5 and 0.27 trillion dollars of earnings in 2019.

The leaders of the USA and China, the largest (almost 25% of the global economy) and second largest (15.5%) economies, are not environmentalists. Nor is the leader of India, the fastest growing economy and about to achieve the largest population, with GDP of 10.5 trillion and growth rate around 7.5%.

An ideology is 'dominant' only when it is embraced by those who dominate. Neither politically nor economically can environmentalism be shown to belong to those who dominate the world today.

The source is Rupert Darwall, described as an 'opinion contributor'to The Hill , picked up via Apple's News app. They might consider what they think constitutes "news"

Return to blogging

When I was leaving the UK, Gareth Stanton observed that this once live site had become moribund. The fact is that I was writing stuff - notably Anecdotal Evicence - and didn't need a place to put thoughts while I had a clear project.

Now as I move to a new job I find I have little time to write substantial pieces, so it's back to these short thoughts, components towards the next big project on aesthetic politics

Commodity fetishism revised

The commodity-form, a hundred and fifty years ago, could be described as "the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things"*

Today however, in the context of social media, the frontline of the real subsumption of consumption under capital, this condition has been reversed. Today, the relation between things assumes the fantastic form of social relations.

*Capital volume 1, part 1, chapter 1, section 4 'The Fetishism of the Commodity and its Secret; page 165 in the Penguin/NLR translation.

Truth (preliminary note)

Truth

1) is a practice.
The Eternal Wisdom has truth a great crystal to which we might ascend. Science, pop science at least, has it something to be approached asymptotically, better with each generation.
Truth is not a construct but the work of constructing, on one side the increasing elegance of its logic, on the other how persuasively it describes the tohu va bohu of the world. The most fascinating practices do both.

2) as legal category
The oxymoron 'formal agreement' is therefore a contradiction: a dialogue (can dialogue ever be exhausted?) that 'ends' in a formal (and performative) statement (guilty/not guilty). Motive (soft) and occasion (hard), testimony (soft) and evidence (hard) assimilated into a single unambiguous verdict.
Query: can ambiguity ever be true? Are some occurrences truly ambiguous.

3) factish, truthiness, post-truth
2018: truth is not to be disdained, even if it means defending institutions we have always criticised (media, intelligence services, judiciary). Is common sense – which is so easily identifiable with ideology – in crisis, eradicating the common in favour of embattled tribes? Or do a) clichés and truisms b) embodied knowledge, habit, know-how and c) 'truths widely acknowledged' still have currency, as common, as commons.

4) hypothesis, proposition, surmise etcetera.
There are subjunctive modes of truth to place alongside ambiguity, the former a trajectory, the latter a condition, not far removed from confusion and proximates like controversy. (Distinguish an ill-formed question that cannot be answered unambiguously or uncontroversially from a well-formed one that is too difficult or whose answer is too complicated. We expect truth to be simple. Is it?)

Reservations: Mathematical (Badiou) and quantum (Barad) ontologies do not much deal in truth in senses 1,2 and 3: concepts of void, multiplicity, intra-action and topology - of the foam of being/becoming – are not crystalline, though persuasively descriptive.
Response: this (descriptive) ontology clashes with (elegant) administration to produce the historical (persuasion, work) as performance of truth in hypothesis testing, verdicts to be picked over.

First diagram on truths

and their contraries.

[annotation: 'Belief' here describes phenomena like pensée sauvage, theology, the hidden hand of the market, certain forms of environmentalism: - a systematisable certainty that x is the case which provides the axiom(s) for a cathedral of thinking. 'Evidence' might perhaps better be expressed as 'Testimony']

a) Truth is a practice and therefore requires media through which it can be practiced: instruments for capturing evidence, means of storing and ordering arguments and beliefs, modes of transmission, persuasion, establishing.
b) therefore truth has a history. As a practice, truth therefore has a media history. The first diagram allows for histories of modes of proof and typologies of data, for example.