Story of the Week: The Gadarene Swine

²⁶They sailed to the region of the Gerasenes, which is across the lake from Galilee. ²⁷When Jesus stepped ashore, he was met by a demon-possessed man from the town. For a long time this man had not worn clothes or lived in a house, but had lived in the tombs. ²⁸When he saw Jesus, he cried out and fell at his feet, shouting at the top of his voice, "What do you want with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I beg you, don't torture me!" ²⁹For Jesus had commanded the evil spirit to come out of the man. Many times it had seized him, and though he was chained hand and foot and kept under guard, he had broken his chains and had been driven by the demon into solitary places.

³⁰Jesus asked him, "What is your name?"

"Legion," he replied, because many demons had gone into him. ³¹And they begged him repeatedly not to order them to go into the Abyss.

³²A large herd of pigs was feeding there on the hillside. The demons begged Jesus to let them go into them, and he gave them permission. ³³When the demons came out of the man, they went into the pigs, and the herd rushed down the steep bank into the lake and was drowned.

³⁴When those tending the pigs saw what had happened, they ran off and reported this in the town and countryside, ³⁵and the people went out to see what had happened. When they came to Jesus, they found the man from whom the demons had gone out, sitting at Jesus' feet, dressed and in his right mind; and they were afraid. ³⁶Those who had seen it told the people how the demon-possessed man had been cured. ³⁷Then all the people of the region of the Gerasenes asked Jesus to leave them, because they were overcome with fear. So he got into the boat and left.

³⁸The man from whom the demons had gone out begged to go with him, but Jesus sent him away, saying, ³⁹"Return home and tell how much God has done for you." So the man went away and told all over town how much Jesus had done for him.

Luke 8:26-40

Quote for the Week

Truth as Circe: Error has turned animals into men; might truth be capable of turning man into an animal again?
-Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

The Virtue of Indifference: a review of "Stalker" (1979)

Stalker (1979), like many of Tarkovsky's films, proceeds slowly and thoughtfully through familiar landscapes made strange.  The plot is allegorical: two men, one a scientist and the other a writer, engage a "stalker" to guide them to the heart of the "Zone."  The Zone looks for the most part like normal countryside, except that there are burned out tanks and a few ruined, Soviet-style bunkers laying about.  It was cordoned off by the military of the small, imaginary country in which the film is set, after a few units of soldiers had mysteriously disappeared.  But rumors have it that in the heart of the Zone, there is a room that grants the deepest desire of those who step through its door.  

The Zone represents the Unconscious, and the film is an investigation of the logic of desire.  Its argument is that desire invents its own objects (success, revenge, meaning, escape) but can never be satisfied.  A desiring existence is unbearable--endlessly deferring and disappointing.  

Not until the conclusion of the film does Tarkovsky seem to suggest two alternatives to the manacles of desire.  These are presented by the wife and daughter of the Stalker.  The wife, speaking directly towards the camera, attempts to make suffering into a universal principle, something to be accepted even.  But whom is she trying to convince?  Her eyes, her nervous way of smiling, clearly belie her desperate rationalizations.  The stalker's daughter, on the other hand, never says a word.  In the final scene, her father places her at a table (she was born crippled...or perhaps without the desire to walk); when he leaves, she lays down her head and with a disinterested, bored look on her face seems to push three glasses across the surface with her mind...or at least appears to.  She, it seems, is wired differently, with a mind that does not desire nor accept but rather rejects and destroys indifferently.

Free at Last: a review of "The Unincorporated Man"

I am unfortunately that kind of person who has a hard time not finishing a book once I've begun it, even after I've decided it's worthless, but thankfully I'm finally free, free at last! from the nearly 500-page long The Unincorporated Man (2009) after putting it down and picking it up over the course of about a month and a half.  I'm almost exactly a year late with this review, as Annalee Newitz at io9 already said just about everything I have to say about it back in March of 2009, but I feel like I have to do something to recoup the time I lost reading it, so I'll waste just a little more time writing a blog post about it.

But I won't be as mean as a feel I could be, partly because this is the first novel written by brothers Dani and Eyton Kollin but also because, according to Dani's personal blog, their mother passed away this winter.  So...my condolences.

The premise of this novel is that a brilliant industrialist from our time, Justin Cord, is un-frozen three hundred years in the future into a world that, having survived both the Grand Collapse of the global economy and a plague of Virtual Reality that almost wiped out humanity with sloth, has become a utopia spanning the solar system thanks to the wonders of nanotechnology and society's universal embrace of an extreme form of market capitalism in which people themselves are incorporated and split into shares.  The (very limited) government owns 5% of an individual's stock, one's parents start out with 20%, and another 50% can be sold to whomever cares to invest in that individual's future productivity.  Most people own less than a majority of themselves.

The conflict is that Justin Cord views personal incorporation as a form of slavery and so refuses to comply with it, remaining instead the titular "hero."  This singular attitude of resistance threatens to resurrect once more the fractiousness and internecine strife characteristic of the "pre-GC" civilizations and shatter the supposedly dynamic and adaptable harmony of corporate culture.  (What would they have done if they ever met up with aliens?  Maybe you'll find out in the sequels.  I won't, but maybe you will.)

In spite of how nakedly Heinleinian the novel is in its masculine advocacy of self-righteous libertarianism, and also in spite of how fanboy-ish the tone of the novel was when it came to the practical magic of nanotech, I definitely enjoyed a lot of the world-building aspects.

Most of the standard tropes have been done better and more insightfully in other places.  For example, Pohl and Kornbluth at the opposite end of the ideological spectrum had a somewhat more adventuresome take on what happens when corporations take the place of nation-states in The Space Merchants.  Damon Knight, in Dio, thinks more deeply about the relation between freedom and death in a world where technology makes us virtually immortal than the Kollin brothers are probably capable.  And Harlan Ellison, when it comes to examining the cultural relativity of taboos (as the Kollins do primarily through through the "perverse" relationship between Justin Cord and his re-animationist/love interest, Neela), beats these fledgling writers hands-down in "The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World," in which it is no industrialist but Jack the Ripper who finds himself awake in the far future.

Nevertheless, personal incorporation is a pretty novel idea, and the Kollins for the most part do an acceptable job thinking through the details.

But there are, regrettably, at least three major flaws that mar this debut work:

• The protagonist is completely unlikeable.  Scifi has it's bastards...the work of authors like Zelazny and Gaiman is chock full of them, but Justin Cord is just a whiny, charmless baby...like Harry Potter or the girl from the Twilight Series. Childish.  Also, unconvincing as an eccentric billionaire industrialist.  He brought a box of Peanut Butter Cap'n Crunch with him to the future because it was his favorite cereal.  That suggests to me that Cord is a little too transparently based on the lives of the scifi fans who wrote him.
• The narration is about as childish as Cord.  It is uncertain whether the narrative voice is from the past (our time) and therefore partially justified in calling so explicitly and so often on 9/11 as a cultural frame of reference or from the future, and the result is awkward, superficially sci-fi idioms like "stop on a credit" instead of "stop on a dime."  I guess I should be grateful that at least they're not eating space-burgers and washing them down with space-beer.
• Lastly, and most infuriatingly, the "freedom" Cord so values is never really articulated.  According to one character, Cord's definition of freedom "wasn't just semantic, it was intrinsic" (187), but Cord's calls for freeeeedoooom! never amount to more than post-Braveheart sloganeering.  You're really comparing incorporation to southern slavery?  I'd compare it to having credit bureaus.  

So, all in all, pretty crummy.  But you don't have to take my word for it.  The second book in the series, The Unincorporated War, comes out next month.

Politics: My "Meh"-nifesto

A few days ago, Herman Berliner authored a brief post over at Inside Higher Ed about the complaints he occasionally receives as an administrator about faculty members who blog about politics.  Berliner has no trouble separating classroom performance from political belief:

Faculty are very smart individuals and there is no shortage of political (and other) opinions emanating from faculty. And often, I find that my opinion is different from and at times in total disagreement with positions taken by individual faculty. But it would be a bad use of my time and energy to confront opinions which faculty have every right to have. As an educator, I choose to focus on the educational forest, not the opinion trees.

Good for him.  Still, my decision to blog anonymously is at least in part motivated by my hesitation in having the things I write here associated with my professional identity.   In class I tend to keep my political and other beliefs from the students.  That seems proper to me, as well as rhetorically wise...because what if they've been raised to disagree with something I claim to believe?  That might cause them to turn off to any future lesson, regardless of its content.

I accomplish this near-neutrality by telling my students, usually early on in the semester (if not on the first day then the first time we discuss something overtly political or religious), that they shouldn't necessarily believe that I mean anything I say.  And, in fact, I often play devil's advocate or argue an issue from multiple, conflicting sides.  In my comp-rhet classes I'll even make deliberately flawed arguments designed so that my students can call me out, overcoming any automatic deference they might maintain towards my authority.

But the real reason I link to Berliner's post is not to occasion some meditation about partisanship and neutrality in the classroom context, but because I've been thinking of becoming more explicitly political in this context.  I waste a depressing amount of my time following American politics and reading the analyses of various commentators, and while it's not my intention to fashion this blog into one more surface for the echoes to bounce against, I thought some sort pronouncement of political convictions was in order.

To begin with, I'm not much in the way of a political scientist and I don't have any principled convictions about tax policy, deficits, interest rates or really any of that shit.  I guess I don't make enough money yet, or else I don't value enough the money I have.  I also don't have any principled preference for "big" or "small" government, except that it seems to me that any institution, large or small, that is too inflexible to adapt to changing circumstances will inevitably fall before them.  And it could probably go without saying that I don't think much of what is described as "left" and "right" in the US.  "Thinking" and "unthinking" would be a meaningful way to divide politicians for me, but it certainly doesn't map onto left and right.  Exhausting the usefulness of labels in politics, I probably see myself as a "left-libertarian" in the style of these guys.

I suffer from a few ideals, I suppose, though they are unfortunately the sort that tend to lack deep-pocketed advocacy.  I support civil liberties.  I think that the drug war is a shameful, murdering farce that empowers criminals (both federal and other) and fuels an ongoing multi-polar fire-fight on our own continent.  I wouldn't particularly mind if the US disbanded its army.  Also, it would be great if you could be an atheist in public and still get elected here.

But although there are occasional moments when the difference between is and ought causes me some pain, I also see myself first and foremost as a pragmatist and admire that characteristic when I rarely observe it in a politician.

Well, that's going to suffice for now.  Hardly a manifesto, and in fact, despite its brevity a little tiresome.  I promise that my next post will be more interesting.  I was planning on reviewing Tarkovsky's 1979 sci-fi thinker, The Stalker, but I just watched Alex Rivera's 2008 sci-fi thinker, Sleep Dealer, and I liked it and it feels a little bit more relevant, so I might do that first.

The Madmen Dialectic

The expelled are uprooted people who attempt to uproot everything around themselves, to establish roots.  They do it spontaneously, simply because they were expelled.  It is an almost vegetable process.  Perhaps one can observe it when one tries to transplant trees.  It can happen that the expelled becomes conscious of the vegetable, almost vegetative aspect of his exile; that he uncovers that the human being is not a tree; and that perhaps human dignity consists in not having roots--that a man first becomes a human being when he hacks off the vegetable roots that bind him.

--Vilem Flusser, "Exile and Creativity," trans. Erik Eisel

A few days ago over at the Valve, Scott Eric Kaufman posted a few thoughts on Mad Men, Matthew Weiner's multiple award-winning television drama set in the early 1960's.  According to Kaufman, the central conceit of the series is that the characters who staff the Sterling-Cooper ad agency "want to be left behind when the rest of the world is raptured by history--at least at first."  He then formulates a contrast between those characters who "learn to love and accept the modernity in their hearts"--thereby becoming us--and Don Draper who instead transcends (or perhaps merely fails to descend into) history--becoming art.

Something about SEK's analysis sounds a false note.  For one thing, It seems to me that the contrast between Draper and his contemporaries has become not more but less stark.  What made him so different at the start and what explained his "inscrutability" in the first season was not his literariness but rather his lack of essential identity (the two qualities are perhaps not mutually exclusive).  Like Hitchcock's mad north-by-northwest man, Roger O. Thornhill (What's the O stand for?), there was nothing at Draper's core...nothing to resist or belie the succession of masks he wore.  Though he appeared selfish, Draper was in fact only the other of others.    Each mask was like an advertisement, modelled on someone else's desire, loving the one it's with.  We alone bore witness to this infidelity to character--at least at first.

But over the course of the series we've watched Draper grow invested as a husband, father, and professional.  His brother commits suicide.  He wife discovers his cheating.  His company is bought out.  The effect of each of these cataclysms has been to draw him gradually into his body, to fill his empty center with stable priorities, to force him to take up permanent residence in particular masks.

At the same time, those characters who seemed at first the most static types have been undergoing the reverse process.  Betsy imagined herself the perfect wife of her perfect husband; Pete was defined by the name of his father, and Joan was the sophisticated mistress.  Each was guided in their own way by a certain idea of perfection, and each has undergone the shock of having those ideal egos turn alien on them.  Betsy gets wise to Don, Pete's father dies, and Joan is raped.  What they all were, they can no longer pretend to be.

So Don is different from the others insofar as the development of his character has consisted of his putting down roots whereas Betsy, Pete, Joan and others have each in their own way become uprooted.  But because rootlessness is, for Don, also a sort of ideal, the discrepancy between art and history, or between the ideal and the real, is what gives a common shape to the modernity that resides in each of their hearts.

The Zombie as Elegy: a review of "Dead Set"

Zombies have been eating at my brain recently.  It all started about a year ago, when I was motivated by my abiding interest in robots to purchase and read Chris Ryall's graphic novel, Zombies vs Robots (fantastic artwork by Ashley Wood...otherwise I don't recommend it).  I began thinking about how robots and zombies operate similarly but differently as Not-Humans.  Both robots and zombies are a means of manufacturing the characteristics we like to identify as uniquely human.  We like to imagine ourselves free-willed, open-minded and compassionate so we project the opposites of those qualities--mindless instinct, prejudice, and cruelty or absence of emotion (qualities of which even humans, especially humans, are capable)--into imagined non-human others.  This sort of formulation won't be new to anyone familiar with the emerging discourses of posthumanism, particular the Derrida-inspired work of Neil Badmington.

Anyway, while I've never considered myself much a fan of the horror genre, Zombies vs Robots took a little bite out of me and now it's infected.  I'm most of the way through a privately-screened Romero retrospective, and additionally I've been consuming loads of other zombie-related media from the past several years.

A few days ago I watched, late into the night, Charlie Brooker's Dead Set, a roughly three-hour mini-series that aired on E4 in the UK in October 2008.  Like most zombie flicks, the plot is dead simple: the production crew of the reality tv series Big Brother is preparing for a live eviction night.  Rambunctious crowds gather outside the BB house/studio in ravenous anticipation of the vote's result.  News reports of ongoing political protests threaten to bump the show from its usual timeslot, but unbeknownst to all the real trouble starts when a driver who is chauffering one house-mate's mother to the studio pulls off the rode to inspect what looks like a car crash and gets zombie-attacked.  To make the story short, the infection makes its way to the studio and converts the crowd.  Nowhere is safe...except inside the Big Brother house, which is fortunately so cut off from the carnage that when Kelly, a lowly member of the production team, enters the house covered in blood and brandishing large shears, the housemates mistake her at first for Big Brother's latest prank before a bitey encounter with one of the zombies gets their minds all right.

The act of taking refuge from zombies in the Big Brother house pretty much exhausts the novelty of the series.  What follows proceeds predictably.  A run for medical supplies.  A reunion between Kelly and her boyfriend, Riq, who's had his own tragic adventure getting to the studio with the help of a lonely, survival-oriented woman.  Ultimately, those taking refuge in the house turn on each other, acting out a parody of the way the real casts of Big Brother act out a parody of real life, and one by one they fall, ostensibly to the zombies, but really to stupidity, selfishness, jealousy, and cowardice.

Romero's influence is present throughout Dead Set, and this is most explicitly announced when Joplin, the cowardly lionizer, explains to Marky why the zombies have begun to amass outside the studio gates: "some primitive instinct....  This was like a temple for them."  Joplin is echoing a line originally spoken by Stephen in Dawn of the Dead (1978) when Francine asks him why the zombies are drawn to the mall:

Some kind of instinct. Memory of what they used to do. This was an important place in their lives.

Romero doesn't skimp on the thrills and gore, but satire and tragedy are the twin spirits that (re?)animate his films, and I think it's fair to say that, most broadly speaking, what he satirizes is human behaviors conditioned to be automatic...knee-jerk actions committed without first thinking through consequences.  Conversely, Romero regards as a virtue (though not, significantly, as a remedy to habit) the cognitive effort of careful planning.  In other words, the classical analogue to Romero's zombie hordes would be Euripides' Bacchantes.  So drunk they're dead-drunk.

As in Romero's Dawn of the Dead, the recipient of Brooker's satirical barbs in Dead Set is the middle-class.  In Dawn of the Dead Romero focuses on their consumer habits, the more meta-fictional Dead Set is organized around the bourgeois cult of television (confession: I never miss Big Brother in the US, but in my half-hearted defense, the differences between the two shows make the US version much more of  a strategy game and much less of a schadenfruede party...I could say much more but maybe I'll save that for a post in the summer when the show returns).

But there is one detail of Dead Set that, according to one zombie purist, violates the spirit of Romero's undead: Brooker's zombies don't shuffle along, they run.  In a tongue-in-cheek review in The Guardian, Simon Pegg, who wrote and starred in the highly-recommended horror-comedy Shaun of the Dead (2004), criticizes the phenomenon of running zombies, a bastard-innovation that he traces to 2002's 28 Days Later, a film that in his view is not, properly-speaking, a zombie movie because its monsters are merely diseased and not re-animated corpses.  Speed, according to Pegg, violates the essence of the zombie:

As monsters from the id, zombies win out over vampires and werewolves when it comes to the title of Most Potent Metaphorical Monster. Where their pointy-toothed cousins are all about sex and bestial savagery, the zombie trumps all by personifying our deepest fear: death. Zombies are our destiny writ large. Slow and steady in their approach, weak, clumsy, often absurd, the zombie relentlessly closes in, unstoppable, intractable.  

Although in Brooker's defense I'll note the inability of Brooker's zombies to turn doorknobs or climb low fences, Pegg's criticism is insightful and informed, and (if I may return to my initial comparison of zombies with robots) I think he identifies in this passage one of the most significant differences between these two types of non-human others.  Both robots and zombies occupy a sort of middle category between life and dead or between being and non-being, but whereas robots negatively embody for us the humanity we like to imagine we've been given, zombies negatively embody the humanity we can lose.  One is busy being born; they other's busy dying.