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December 31, 2004
Cross the Great Stream
It's obvious to anyone who's tried it that the yarrow-stalk method of consulting I Ching is superior in terms of the production of a meditative state through the routine automatism of the fairly long and convoluted process of drawing stalks. The result is 'seeded' right at the beginning, in the sense that you could count the number of stalks in the two piles and immediately tell the result. However the long drawing-out of the consequences of the random/unconscious division of the stalks seems as important; there's an interesting sense in which the automatism of following the trail seeded by the division, in turn 'seeds' the contemplative state necessary to make the next division.
Anyway, I'd wondered for a long time about the probabilities involved: it seems obvious that the stalks are a more complex procedure than coins and that the chances of getting the different lines are not identical. Luckily, before being tempted into what would inevitably have been another lengthy bout of painful number-crunching, I found this summary which shows the probabilities as follows:
-x- Yarrow : 1/16 Coins 2/16
--- Yarrow : 5/16 Coins 6/16
- - Yarrow : 7/16 Coins 6/16
-o- Yarrow : 3/16 Coins 2/16
Obviously, the stalks are far more 'weighted', and arguably more interesting for it; the slight disparity between the 7 and 8 (--- and - -) lines, and the radical disparity in the chances of getting the two moving lines.
It's easy to work out that (not including moving lines, that's too much to do by hand :) there are four composite probabilities of getting the trigrams : 125/4096 (all 7s), 343/4096 (all 8's) 245/4096 (two 7s one 8) and 175/4096 (two 8s one 7)
___
___ Chhien = 5/16 * 5/16 * 5/16 = 125/4096; 001111101 / 100000000000
___
- -
- - Khun = 7/16 * 7/16 * 7/16 = 343/4096; 101010111 / 100000000000
- -
- -
- - Chen = 7/16 * 7/16 * 5/16 = 245/4096; 011100001 / 100000000000
---
- -
--- Khan = 7/16 * 5/16 * 7/16 = 245/4096; 011100001 / 100000000000
- -
---
- - Kên = 5/16 * 7/16 * 7/16 = 245/4096; 011100001 / 100000000000
- -
---
--- Sun = 5/16 * 5/16 * 7/16 = 175/4096; 010101111 / 100000000000
- -
---
- - Li = 5/16 * 7/16 * 5/16 = 175/4096; 010101111 / 100000000000
---
- -
--- Tui = 7/16 * 5/16 * 5/16 = 175/4096; 010101111 / 100000000000
---
The composite probabilities of the hexagrams, then:
Chhien = 125/4096 * 125/4096 = 15625 / 16777216;
Khun = 343/4096 * 343/4096 = 117649 / 16777216;
Chun = 175/4096 * 175/4096 = 30625 / 16777216;
Mêng = 175/4096 * 175/4096 = 30625 / 16777216;
Hsü = 175/4096 * 245/4096 = 42875 / 16777216;
Sung = 125/4096 * 175/4096 = 21875 / 16777216;
Shih = 343/4096 * 175/4096 = 60025 / 16777216;
Pi = 343/4096 * 175/4096 = 60025 / 16777216;
Hsiao Hsü= 245/4096 * 125/4096 = 30625 / 16777216;
Li = 125/4096 * 245/4096 = 30625 / 16777216;
Thai = 343/4096 * 125/4096 = 42875 / 16777216;
Phi = 125/4096 * 343/4096 = 42875 / 16777216;
Thung Jen= 125/4096 * 245/4096 = 30625 / 16777216;
Ta Yu = 245/4096 * 125/4096 = 30625 / 16777216;
Chhien = 343/4096 * 175/4096 = 60025 / 16777216 ;
Yü = 175/4096 * 343/4096 = 60025 / 16777216 ;
[....TBC.....next year, LOL!]
By pairing up the trigrams, you'd expect there to be more distinct probabilities, but surprisingly there are fewer because 175*175=245*125. But you can see that pairing up the trigrams results in huge disparities, of an order of magnitude, in the likelihood of getting (to take the worst instance) Chhien and Khun. More generally the slightly smaller probability of getting a broken line means that the more a hexagram is dominated by these receptive/female lines the less likely it is to turn up (this takes no account of the different meanings of the relative positions of the lines, of course)
And am I wrong in thinking that these weird-looking probabilities are undecomposable into simpler fractions?
[UPDATE : No, it's true - at least for those hexagrams above, there are no common factors]
None of this helps me work out what the hell the oracle is talking about.
Posted by robin at 10:51 PM
December 30, 2004
Notes on The Uncalculable Real & Chaitin's Omega [first pass]
I.HILBERT AND GĂ-DEL
Hilbert's programme required that an axiomatic system be composed of axioms and rules of inference, be consistent, complete, and have an algorithm (a literally mechanisable procedure, although this virtual implication unfolds in parallel with its technical actualisation) for deciding whether or not a theorem is true (belongs in the system). The system can be thought of as a black box that takes in strings of symbols, evaluates them and returns other strings of symbols.
Gödel showed the impossibilty of the completion of the Hilbert program by:
1.Demonstrating the possibility of mapping a symbolic system onto number in such a way that any symbol or string of symbols has a unique identifier (number-name) (the mapping being therefore reversible (allowing translation back to the original symbolic order). So any string of symbols s has a Gödel number G(s)
2.Thereby, propositions about the symbolic system become arithmetical propositions (propositions about relationships between numbers, or formulae which can either be true or false):
" '1+2' is the beginning of the proposition '1+2=3' "
becomes
G[ödel number for]('1+2') is a factor of G('1+2=3')
and in general x has metamathematical relation R to z or R(x,z) can be given an arithmetical (that is, mechanical, programmatic) definition.
One such purely arithmetic relationship is proof or demonstration:
x proves z
Dem (x,z)
3.Metamathematical characterization of variable substitution
sub (m,13,m) specifies the G-number of a formula resulting from variable substitution - 'the result of substituting 13 for variable 'm' in the formula whose G-number is 'm'.
This is not a formula but a naming of a number, a designator instead of carrying out the calculation. But since it designates the result of an arithmetical operation, it can itself be designated within the system.
NB: if there _is_ no variable 'm' in the formula numbered G(m) then the result is simply the result of the formula numbered G(m) (the substitution has no effect)
4.so -
(x) ~Dem(x,z) - of all G-numbers, there is none which stand in a Dem relationship to the Godel-number z - or, of all possible formulas (strings of symbols), not one proves the formula of which z is the Gödel number.
(x) ~Dem(x, sub(y,13,y)) - of all G-numbers, there is none that stand in a Dem relationship to the G-number for the formula produced by substituting 13 for variable 'y' in the formula whose Gödel-number is y.
given the Gödel number for the above proposition n, we can construct:
(x) ~Dem(x,sub(n,13,n)) - of all G-numbers, there is none that stand in a Dem relation to the G-number for the formula produced by substituting 13 for variable 'n' in the formula whose Gödel-number is n -" this formula denoted by n being, of course, the very same (x) ~Dem(x,sub(n,13,n)).
Thus this proposition is saying that it itself is unprovable, resulting in either inconsistency or incompleteness.
II.CHAITIN : FIXED POINTS AND PARADOX-AS-VIRUS
Chaitin generalises on the Gödel procedure, showing how in a programming language you can construct a 'fixed point' (an expression which yields itself) first by creating a function that 'quotes' itself twice
function f { given variable x, output "x" "x";}
so that applying it to itself:
(f f)
yields itself "quoted" as a string twice:
"f" "f"
forcing an evaluation of these quoted strings, however (ie running them through the system as code):
eval (f f)
precipitates an attempt to process the result "f" "f" as code, leading to a copy of the function ready to process itself as input:
{given variable x, output "x" "x";} {given variable x,output "x" "x";}
...or
(f f)
so that eval (f f) == (f f), the function yields itself or is a "fixed point"; any number of eval eval eval eval (f f) will always yield (f f).
Chaitin uses a biological metaphor for this process: 'the first f is an organism, and the second f, the one that's copied twice, that's the genome. In other words, the first f is an organism, and the second f is its DNA!...Just as in biology, where an organism cannot copy itself directly but needs to contain a description of itself, the self-reproducing function f cannot copy itself directly (because it cannot read itself - and neither can you [by which presumably Chaitin means that it is unable to process itself as process]). So f needs to be given a (passive) copy of itself."
In Gödel's argument, the proposition
(x) ~Dem (x,z) - there is no formula that proves the formula denoted by G-number z
needed to be given a copy of itself in the form of a numerical designator (its own G-number); this was done by the underhand method of using the substitution subroutine to specify the result of the formula-with-substitution (although there would be no actual substitution! ):
(x) ~Dem(x,sub(n,13,n))
can then be seen as a viral algorithm that reproduces itself.
Later on Chaitin remarks "(f f) works in an environment that has a definition for f, but that's cheating [the analogue would be if Gödel already had at his disposal a readymade designator for the proposition]. What I want is a standalone...expression that reproduces itself. But f produces only a stand-alone version of itself, and _that_ is the actual self-reproducing expression. (f f) is like a virus that works only in the right environment (namely in the cell that it infects), because it's too simple to work on its own."
The 'cell environment' is the ability of the system to interpret data as code; to interpret bits of DNA as instructions. The analogue in a programming language is the ability to evaluate a string as a programming expression (which in most programming languages is forced explicitly by the command eval("x")). This ability to translate from data to code is both a strength and vulnerability in programming languages and biological systems alike (it allows both for evolution and for viral corruption). For instance, if a web application contains an eval (x) statement, there is always the possibility that a user can access the x variable, allowing them access not merely to the prophylactically-protected variable-space in the runtime of the application but to the executing power of the programming language itself. We could compare this disastrous situation with the breaching of the Weissman barrier, meaning that the cell, rather than producing data which is ported externally to create new cells, could itself be 'reprogrammed' by its data.
In Gödel's system part of the 'cell environment' is the power of the number-designator to be both a name for an expression and a number in an expression. This was introduced in the phase of the argument where it was shown that meta-mathematical propositions could be dealt with inside the system, thereby collapsing the transcendent relationship of statements about the system to statements within the system.
Chaitin argues that it is the self-replicating nature of Gödel's argument that is the most important; the fact that he needs to devise an underhand way to make this work (arithmetizing metamathematics) is, like the actual system of Gödel numbering, incidental, despite its undeniable elegance.
Given the assumption that there is such a thing as a valid-proof-checker (a minimal requirement for any axiomatic system), and a suitable medium (one in which you can talk both about expressions and evaluate them - both name and process strings - in other words, where data and code can flow into each other) a viral program will always be able to assert that its own unprovability. The details of the system do not matter at all.
Abstractly, then, start by defining a statement that asserts of whatever you give to it, that the formula it represents, applied to itself, is unprovable
function g {given variable "x" output 'it is impossible to prove the formula designated by "x" "x" is unprovable'}
and then you apply it to itself:
(g g)
yielding
it is impossible to prove the formula designated by "{function g'}" "{function g}" [this is the expression that asserts its own unprovability.]
next we extract from the output the part where the output 'names' itself:
last-two-segments-of (g g)
yielding
"{function g'}" "{function g}"
and evaluate them
eval last-two-segments-of (g g)
yielding an 'uncoated' g applied to itself
{function g} {function g}
which, of course, is identical to
(g g)
III.TURING
Turing's argument, unlike Gödel's, does not rely on any technical knowledge of the inside of the system and can be said to be a purer form of virus.
It takes the same form - a piece of code comprises a description of the halting algorithm/proofchecker within itself:
function t {given variable 'x' create representation "x" "x" intenally; using halting algorithm determine whether it halts; then do the opposite}
once again when run on itself:
turing turing
yields (internally to the program, this time):
"turing" "turing"
if halting algorithm says the program this describes will halt then eval ("turing" "turing") [creating an infinite loop]
if halting algorithm says the program this describes will not halt then stop.[halt!]
with the resulting, paradoxical, output.
IV.FROM VIRUS TO OMEGA
We've seen how Gödel demonstrated incompleteness using a sneaky virus, and how turing's uncomputability result cemented this by the same method, proving that there is 'no answer' to the halting problem and getting incompleteness as a side-effect.
The mechanical immanence of process and processed is no surprise to us: after all, everything that happens on a computer is on one plane: ultimately it is all flattened onto a memory device that is a serial arrangement of binary bits. (And the halting problem is a real computational problem (how long does an operating system wait before deciding that an application has crashed?))
Rather than using an artificial device to 'break' axiomatic systems or to perversely break the proof-checker, Chaitin will demonstrate how one can calculate the probability of a program's halting; and show that this probability is strictly random: there is no rule that can predict or generate it; each bit is totally disconnected from the others around it; the only way it can be produced or recorded is by producing or recording ita bit at a time; it is irreducibly, uncalculably real.
He does this by considering an axiomatic system - that is, a programming language - that consists of binary strings for programs. We need to calculate, given all possible programs which halt, the probability that any given program will halt. Chaitin calls this probability Ω and defines it as
Ω = â'p halts 2â'|p|
Omega is equal to the summation of 2 to the minus |p| (program length) for all programs p that halt.
To pick a program at random to see whether it will halt - and we are assuming that the programs in this system are binary - you just need to toss a coin for each bit of the program. Ω is the probability that a program created randomly like this will actually do something, rather than getting into an infinite loop and never terminating.
Lets say you have a list of all the programs which halt:
0001
1001110
0111000
since the probability of getting a 0 or 1 for each bit is 1/2 (like tossing a coin), the probability of getting program one is 1/24, program two 1/26 and program three 1/26. So the probability of the computer halting when running a random program, or the Ω of the system, is simply all of these probabilities added together:
Ω =1/24 + 1/26 + 1/26
or, in binary:
.0001 (probability of getting program one, 4 bits long)
.000001 (probability of getting program two, 6 bits long)
.000001 (probability of getting program three, 6 bits long)
----------
.000110
One important condition that Chaitin had to add is that for this to work programs must be 'self-delimiting'. This means that no extension of a valid program is a valid program; if 001 halts, then we don't count 0011 or 0010 or 0010000100101010. So each halting program in fact chops out a whole swathe of others. In this way, the limit case would be if the two shortest programs in a binary system:
0
1
halted: then the probability of halting would be
Ω =1/21 + 1/21
or:
1
0
-
1
Ω =1 !
without the self-delimiting clause, Ω can diverge to infinity rather than converging to a probability 0 < Ω < 1.
The result of this is that if we know _n_ bits of Ω , then we can predict (the probability of) a program n bits long halting.
Chaitin's algorithm for calculating Ω works like this:
for every value of parameter K 1,2,3,4,5....
run every possible program up to K bits in size for K seconds.
This computes a _lower bound_ on the halting probability (obviously, more accurate as K increases) - it tells you how many programs halted before K time elapsed.
As K increases, Ω converges to its true value. "And as soon as the first N bits are correct, you know that you've encountered every program up to N bits in size that will ever halt." (Chaitin notes: " It should be mentioned that the stage K at which the first N bits of Ω are correct grows immensely quickly, in fact, faster than any computable function of N. ")
Ω is the solution to the halting problem in its kernel form - the most highly compressed 'answer' that can be given to the halting question. Since each bit of Ω can only be found out by calculating it (not from any other more compact rule), each bit must be added as a separate axiom to a system that wishes to make use of it.
Each bit is "true for no reason", in the same way an axiom is - it represents a real unground of mathematics - which is worse than the regulative grounds that fundamental axioms represent (rules that form the basis of a system but have no justification). Worse than that, there are an infinite number of bits in Ω, which means an infinite number of axioms.
V.SPECULATIONS...
In his actual proof, Chaitin constructs a diophantine (using only natural numbers) equation that carries out this procedure, thus demonstrating that simple number theory can produce uncalculable results. He argues that this makes certain areas (at least) of mathematics quasi-empirical. But the problem now is "knowing when things are irreducible"
[We would perhaps have to go back to Kant's 3rd critique here and say something about pattern, teleology, paley's watch. The difficulty of defining information.] Chaitin quotes Leibniz's Discours de métaphysique:
Dieu a choisi celuy qui est... le plus simple en hypotheses et le plus riche en phenomenes
[God has chosen that which is the most simple in hypotheses and the most rich in phenomena]
Mais quand une regle est fort composée, ce qui luy est conforme, passe pour irrégulier
[But when a rule is extremely complex, that which conforms to it passes for random]
(When does a rule r for creating data d become so detailed that they are indistinguishable? Algorithmic Information Theory may be the only way to address such questions.) Chaitin's omega, the discovery of irreducible mathematical facts, uncalculable reals, is the breakdown of the principle of sufficient reason, of the basic belief that the universe is rational, that everything has a reason other than "It's just there"... And perhaps a partial return to experimental, empirical mathematics, against the tradition of Platonic rationality. Chaitin interestingly links this to the birth of the polis:
"In ancient Greece if you wanted to convince your fellow citizens to vote with you on some issue, you had to reason with them. Which I guess is how they came up with the idea that in math you had to prove things rather than just discover them experimentally, which is all that it appears that previous cultures in Mesopotamia and Egypt did."
Whereas Gödel and Turing's results caused what we might call 'formal shock', their impact on actual mathematical practice was minimal (Gödel complained in a letter to his mother that his ideas had failed to have the impact in mathematics that Einstein's had in physics). Mathematicians realised that these viral contraptions were very unlikely to come up in the course of any calculation, so they could be simply ignored. Chaitin's contention is that his demonstration Ω heralds a more serious shock to the system; it isn't just an assertion that formal systems can be overturned by certain methods, it's the discovery of real mathematical entities that defy systematic rationality, so it's more of a positive fact than the aporias of incompleteness and uncomputability.
It is extremely interesting that Chaitin should quote the following, also from Leibniz:
Sans les mathématiques on ne pénÚtre point au fond de la philosophie.
Sans la philosophie on ne pénÚtre point au fond des mathématiques.
Sans les deux on ne pénÚtre au fond de rien.
[Without mathematics we cannot penetrate deeply into philosophy.
Without philosophy we cannot penetrate deeply into mathematics.
Without both we cannot penetrate deeply into anything.]
What is this if not Badiou's call to arms, the re-entanglement of mathematics and philosophy. And yet Chaitin's speculations lead in an entirely different direction to Badiou's platonic refoundation: or rather, where Badiou seeks to found ontology on the void of being supplemented by the unknowable excess of truth, Chaitin shows that what is in excess of the ordered system of knowledge is a seething mass of uncomputable reality that can only be brought into the system on its own terms.[2]
My work on Bacon (undercurrent passim and more to come), although not initially concerned with Badiou, set out to explore an irreducible real that I believe his rationalist "materialism" cannot deal with, even explicitly rejects (as being-small-b) -" the point of indiscernibility between phenomenology and materialism (which, obviously, needs more careful formulation). But to give Badiou's position the credit it deserves, to avoid being consigned to the scrapheap of phenomenological pottering, I would need to show a mathematical account of real irreducible being-small-b that supercedes the platonic-ontological account of mathematics as Being-big-B and argues for a vagabond vs royal science. To make contingent materiality, rather than 'subjectivity', the source of excess over dead knowledge . To overturn Badiou's mystical excess of void (which remains entirely the property of the Gödelian aporia) in favour of an overflowing of the positive real on the full BwO, a nonorganic life from outside. I believe Chaitin's work provides the necessary tools for this, and that in this light it appears rather [3] that it's Badiou's position that repudiates the holocaust of mechanicity that was the enlightment; in favour of an unknowable connection (pineal gland?) between Being and truth. And Chaitin's speculation about a new quasi-empirical "'biological' complicated mathematics' is particularly poignant given Badiou's dismissal of biology as "that wild empiricism disguised as science"[4] (as if empirical research represented some kind of unacceptable dionysian incontinence!) Maybe the re-entanglement of philosophy and mathematics needs to go not by way of Plato but back further, to the Pythagorean brotherhood and the quasi-empirical experimentation, tracking the real of number, which had as much in common with occult numerology as with scientific rationalism.
On the side of art where the irreducible real must be accessed by abandonment to automatism without reason via the diagram; so on the side of mathematics it must be accessed by abandonment to an automatism without reason via the dogged pursuit of the uncomputable. The mathematician, becoming-automated, meets the artist, becoming-automated, in the uncalculable real. This real continually leaks into the system, provides the mechanosmos with what it needs to exceed reason.
[1] All of the information here is extracted (sometimes almost verbatim) from Chaitin's many publications, all of which are available at this site in digital form. There is also a LISP interpreter and code that enables you to run versions of his proof (and Gödel's and Turing's) yourself.
[2] This point is made brilliantly by Ray Brassier in his paper "Nihil Unbound: Remarks on Subtractive Ontology and Thinking Capitalism" in P.Hallward (ed) "Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy", Continuum 2004, to which I am endebted for my introduction to Chaitin's work. I don't claim to have added anything to Ray's argument here (apart from a more detailed run-through of the Omega algorithm), these notes are mostly just clarification for my own purposes.
[3]Again, see "Nihil Unbound'.
[4] Badiou "Mathematics and Philosophy - The Grand Style and the Little Style", in "Theoretical Writings", Continuum 2004.
Posted by robin at 08:31 PM
December 25, 2004
XMAS=93=ABUSE
During a bout of insomnia last night I realised that translating the alphabet to digits is just pandering to the alpha-numeric scissionists. Why not just use the number-system we've got, base 26? And then do base-26 reduction. Then you have the multi-level connectivity of the HEX+DR without the need for translation into a redundant numbering system.
thus,
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V Q X Y Z
(1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 )
UNDERCURRENT (U+N+D+E+R+C+U+R+R+E+N+T) [ = 21 + 14 + 4 + 5 + 18 + 3 + 21 + 18 +18 + 5 + 14 + 20 = 161]
= FE (FE=65 base-26) [= (6x26)+5]
= K (F+E = K) [=6+5=11]
Posted by robin at 11:29 AM
December 24, 2004
Ever wondered what qwernomics looks like IRL?
One winters day, with snow swarming around the windows of a forgotten bar in a far corner of a cursed seat of unlearning, a roomful of graduate students shifted uneasily on their plastic chairs...
As Sphaleotas somewhat unkindly remarks, "how we laughed."
Posted by robin at 08:24 PM
December 23, 2004
Tactics for Fleeing the Face (Unfinished Visual Essay)
Tactics for fleeing the face. not one, but many.
The face is the body, the face facialises the body, the face exists before the face, before any face.
Picasso - Deux Baigneuses, 1920
The heads are shrunken and shifted aside and back into the shadows; the expressivity of body-as-face. On peyote, two of Don Juan's acolytes saw themselves naked in the mirror and realised that their bodies were alien faces.
Caroline Hausheer - Drawing, 2003
Caroline Hausheer - Drawing, 2003
Haptic Space: I photographed these drawings at an end-of-year show of 1st year fine art students at Falmouth. In the midst of a mixture of neo-expressionism and YBA duchamp-repetition they stood out: She drew them with a blindfold on, touching her face rather than seeing it.
Wedge-shaped or elongated alien heads with blank, huge eye sockets -" it-s like looking into a world stripped of familiar appearances but nonetheless real, solid and consistent.
Interpenetration of sensation and expression. The baroque immanence of Leibniz and Spinoza, libidinal ballistics: everything percieves, everything expresses. The mind of paint, the mind of a pencil. Everything conditions/is conditioned : no face, but continuous chains of interfaces in every direction, traits which can be made into faces but which are not reducible to them.
The cinematographic synthesis/production of the face.
The interesting thing about them is their consistency : not only their self-consistency but the way they remind one of the powerful, characteristic traits of other master draftsmen ie Schiele.
A consistency between the perceived world and the act of representation, motoricity of the act of creation (nevertheless there is still something utterly artificial, of great sophistication, in the translation of haptic space to two dimensional line - no 'mainlining of sensation', instead it's a way to avoid 'expression' ).
1.jpg)
Francis Bacon - Head (Abandoned Painting), 1949
The brutality of photographic fact. Heads not faces. Meatheads.
Francis Giacobetti - Portrait (of Francis Bacon) with Lightbulb, 1991
Giacobetti after Bacon : Make a mechanical mockery of the face
Robin Mackay - Demonographies / 3 Heads, 2003
Henri Michaux : (-Signes-, Paris: Xxe SiĂšcle, Jan 1954)
They were gestures, interior gestures, the ones with which we don-t have limbs but desires for limbs, stretching, impulsive movements and all this with living ligaments that are never thick, never big with flesh nor enclosed in skin-ŠWhat an experience it will be when the time is ripe at last and, having got into the habit of thinking in signs, we are able to exchange secrets with a few natural strokes like a handful of twigs.
Henri Michaux - Gestures
Think with the knee
Joseph Beuys : "Brain as the material substrate of thought: an organ of reflection, hard and shiny as a mirror. Once you realize that this is a mirror organ, it also becomes clear that thought finds its consummation only in death, and that thought faces something higher; its resurrection in the freedom that death gives, a new life for thought. And that in the future this can happen in a completely different way; that it is conceivable that in some future age one will be able to think with the knee. And I maintain that one already can."
Henri Michaux : -En pensant au phénomene de la peinture- -" 1946 in Passages (Paris:Gallimard, 1963)
Draw without anything particular in mind, scribble mechanically: almost always, faces will appear on the paper.
Since we lead an excessively facial life, we are in a perpetual fever of faces.
As soon as I pick up a pencil or brush, ten, fifteen, twenty of them surge up to me on the paper one after the other. And most of them wild.
Are all those faces me? Are they other people? From what depths?
Couldn-t they simply be the consciousness of my own thinking head? (Grimaces of a second face: just as, out of shame, the suffering adult has stopped crying when he-s unhappy, only to grimace still more inwardly.) Behind the face with its motionless features, deserted, now no more than a mask, another superiorly mobile face contracts, seethes, simmers in an unbearable paroxysm. Behind the set features, desperately seeking a way out, expressions like a pack of howling dogs-Š
There they are, somehow flowing from the brush in black blotches: they are breaking free.
You-re surprised, the first few times.
Lost, sometimes criminal faces, unfamiliar yet not absolutely unknown to you (a strange, distant correspondence!)-ŠFaces of sacrificed personalities, -I-s stifled, killed, by life, willpower, ambition, by a propensity for rectitude and consistency. Faces that will keep appearing to the very end (it is so hard to stifle, to drown anything out definitively).
Faces of childhood, of childhood fears whose structure and object have been lost more than their memory, faces that don-t think everything has been settled by the transition to adulthood, faces still afraid of some horrible return.
Faces of the will, perhaps, which is always ahead of us and tends to shape everything in advance: faces, too, of seeking and desire.
Or a kind of epiphenomenon of thought (one of the many that the thinking will can-t help provoking, even though it is perfectly useless for intellection -" but it can-t be stopped any more than you can stop yourself from making vain gestures on the telephone)-Šas if one were constantly shaping a fluid face in oneself, ideally plastic and malleable, forming and unforming from ideas and impressions, automatically sculpted into an instantaneous synthesis, all day long and in a sense cinematographically.
An infinite crowd: our clan
-I-m alive, the man with the second face-
Turning the head inside out.
Escaping the face by pursuing the logic of internality to its limits. The face projects inwards, grimaces at viscera.
Parallel to the dichotomy between a phenomenology that talks about a pristine inner sense, and a materialism that seeks to abstract matter from the perception of matter: here, everything is at once perception and expression.
Inner sense no longer comes from an ineffable point of absolute internality, but is rather a reflection, an echo, a refraction whose rhythm owes both to incoming information and to the composition of the -receiver- itself:
Internal faces which are no less faces : because the inside is but a perception of its shell (which in turn is a perception of its environment)
Anonymous - A sequence of paintings by a man suffering from the progressive mental debilitation of Alzheimer's disease.
This extraordinarily poignant series, in which perception and the machinery of perception itself are both progressively transformed. (-depersonalization is marked by a feeling of being unreal, disembodied and floating or like a puppet or robot- - Faceless?)
Posted by robin at 02:22 PM
A World of Fat and Felt
'During this phase Beuys had a carpenter from Kleve make him a wooden crate, which he insisted on having smoothly planed and finished. Then he smeared tar all over this beautifully finished crate, inside and out, and took it to his studio in Heerdt. His idea, as he later recalled, was that the crate was a black, empty, isolated space, in which investigations could take place and new experiences could occur. He felt compelled to sit inside it, to not be anymore, to simply stop living.'
* * *
Heiner Stechelhaus : Joseph Beuys
Posted by robin at 12:54 PM
December 21, 2004
BONUS LASER BASE AWARDED AT 1000 POINTS
Posted by robin at 05:47 PM
December 20, 2004
Experimental Theology
A startling piece of dialogue that succinctly treats the relationship between mathematics and belief (see recent discussions at hyperstition), and the complicity of institutionalised dogma and institutionalised relativism:
"But..." Lyra struggled to find the words she wanted: "but it en't true is it? Not true like chemistry and engineering, not that kind of true? There wasn't really an Adam and Eve? The Cassington Scholar told me it was just a kind of fairy-tale."
"The Cassington Scholarship is traditionally given to a free-thinker; it's his function to challenge the faith of the Scholars. Naturally he'd say that. But think of Adam and Eve like an imaginary number, like the square root of minus one: you can never see any concrete proof that it exists, but if you include it in your equations, you can calculate all manner of things that couldn't be imagined without it"
(Philip Pullman: Northern Lights)
Posted by robin at 01:13 PM
INSERT COINS....for Toshihiro Nishikado
Tribute to the greatest (and it always will be the greatest).
THE SOUND is the prototype of all electronically-induced audio fear, a serialist symphony of digital terror. It begins life as an occasional squared-off blip of sub bass as the alien forms jerk lazily across the empty black sky. Ripples pass across the phalanx as the 8080 processor struggles to render them in their new positions (suggesting that the fearful acceleration as they are dispatched owes as much to technical artefact as to design). The ominous slow-motion percussion is totally consistent with the putative scenario; the aliens hang in the air, malevolent, their slow progression across and down the screen as yet a distant threat. SPACE INVADERS.
Midway through the proceedings, as your shields are getting eroded by an increasingly relentless battery of missiles, the descending four-note phrase becomes a sort of ironic oom-pah, a muffled intimation of the tuba part from an advancing army's marching song.
Then suddenly you're alone, with one surviving invader. The struggle takes on a personal aspect, the little white shape pursuing a fevered kamikaze vendetta against your beleaguered turret. And the sound drops all pretence of being anything but a terror tactic militating against your survival. The blocks of sound merge into each other, the manic buzz of the oversized insect descending too fast. Their vibration bristles in the fingertips of your cramp-plagued hands.
A saucer glides overhead, a remote presence monitoring the status of the endgame below, an ullulating waveform accompanying its reconnaisance flight. But there's no time to target it. The boustrophedon movement that in full phalanx seemed so stately is now an insane zigzag that doesn't leave you a second to think. Need to calculate relative trajectories with pinpoint precision. Every pass it makes, writhing tentacles blur, closer...closer....even if you win the battle, they've won the war, they've taken over your brain.
The xenovirus spreads transversally: first the twitchy feedback loop extends outside the game itself, reconstituted as a parasitical feeding mechanism with a healthy disregard for the comfort of its host ("Many incidents of juvenile crime surrounded the release of this game. A girl was caught stealing $5000 from her parents and gangs of youths were reported to have robbed grocery stores just so they would have money to play the game."). And then into social and economic planes ("The Space Invaders phenomenon stuned conservative adults who were certain the games soured the minds of their youngsters. Residents of Mesquite, Texas pushed the issue all the way to the Supreme Court in their efforts to ban the illicit machines from their Bible-belt community...The game was so amazingly popular in Japan that it caused a coin shortage until the country's Yen supply was quadrupled."). It's the catalyst for a new industry which within 30 years will be one of the most financially significant forces on the planet, a global stealth invasion of youth by alien xenotonic compulsions.
One last explosion of random pixels and it's over.
WELL DONE EARTHLING
THIS TIME YOU WIN
NOW DO BATTLE WITH
OUR SUPER FORCES
Posted by robin at 01:02 PM
December 18, 2004
Return to Dogville
[Warning: no, this is not meant ironically. If you want to be ironic, f**k off out of here.]
One Man and his Dog consists of a televised sheepdog trial, that is a competition between several farmers and their working dogs; the farmers make sounds in an amazing piercing bird-whistle language and the dogs respond with the beautiful physical intelligence only animals have, herding the sheep through gates and into circles. As anyone british will know, for many years One Man and his Dog has been a joke, a well-known absurdity, an embarassing anachronism to be elbowed out of the BBC schedules bit by bit. But in fact it's absolutely fascinating, especially in contrast to the prevailing TV monoculture. It used to be on every week, but now it's once a year, and they've long talked of axing it altogether. If you caught it by chance, not being party to the sneering jokes it has always inspired, it would seem a totally innovative concept: it features people and practices that are not seen on TV anywhere else in the world, ever. It shows an historically and culturally important relationship between humans and animals, a form of communication that is kept alive totally autonomously by a few people in remote places, a trans-species cultural artefact, a living distribution-system. It's not the fact that it's preserving some precious "heritage" that makes it worth salvaging, but simply the fact that it's so totally different to anything else; it's not nature programming, it's not sport, it's something totally other to the rest of TV. I fully expect that if Deleuze and Guattari were watching they'd have got a chapter out of it.
photo by Carsten Gyger
The BBC's perennial search for novelty and 'representation' of minority interests has obviously missed out here. Or rather, it's perfectly obvious how, to the metrocentric media folk who run the place, this supposed open-mindedness is in fact slaved to a very narrow view of what could possibly be interesting to people. Snobbishness always blinds people to learning anything outside their miserable ideas of what's "cool".
The Finals are showing on BBC2 at 5pm tomorrow.
ps the apparent dog theme is totally coincidental. I didn't set out to start a dog-blog.
Posted by robin at 06:39 PM
December 17, 2004
Notes on Badiou, D&G, and the new antiliberation movement
Badiou declares the necessity of the 're-entangling' of philosophy and mathematics, and claims that philosophy (by which we later understand something like, philosophy after Hegel) has systematically excluded mathematics.
His savage purification gives no quarter to collaborators of any ilk. They are all guilty insofar as they perpetuate a romanticism of finitude, an image of life. It styles itself a neo-enlightenment, insisting on the cold, eternal truths of mathematics as the only corrective, the only weapon against universal superstition.
The disjunction of mathematics is seen as philosophically constitutive of Romanticism - so that romanticism (from Hegel) 'retroactively determines' the Classical age of philosophy as one in which philosophy was conditioned by Mathematics. And "what is ultimately at stake here [is] the following question...can we be delivered, finally delivered, from our subjection to romanticism?"
According to B, Positivism and Empiricism are mere inversions, made from 'within the completed disentanglement of philosophy and the sciences'. They fail to question the premises of this disentanglement. The respective purisms of Heidegger and Carnap merely draw out the dichotomy of the romantic gesture of schism between scientism and the retreat into poetry. Logical positivism and 'Anglo-American linguistic sophistry' (after wittgenstein) are likewise strategic retreats: unable to admit of mathematics as a 'type of thinking' rather than merely a 'language game': "Whatever the case may be, mathematics does not think". In fact they are merely keeping at a distance the fact that mathematics constitutes a reality and a discipline 'which it is impossible to be lazy in'.
What was primarily instrumental in these thinkers maintaining such a distance was the temporalization of the concept (historicism): "It was the newfound certainty that infinite or true being could only be apprehended through its own temporality that led the Romantics to depose mathematics from its localization as a condition for philosophy...Romantic speculation opposes time and life as temporal ecstasis to the abstract and empty eternity of mathematics." The second root of the 'disentanglement' is finitude; the thinking of the horizon and the theme of finitude that characterise german romanticism. So that the re-entanglement of philosophy and mathematics is also 'to have done with finitude'; a finitude which in persisting renders the death of god ineffectual. ("we do not possess the wherewithal to be atheists so long as the theme of finitude governs our thinking"; "Descartes was more of an atheist than we are, because eternity was not something he lacked")
Emerging here is a philosophical expression of the french reactionary anti-liberalism of the 80s and 90s (of which houellebecq is the most incisive and - to his credit - ambiguous interlocutor) ; and Badiou's critique of Deleuze is based on placing him within this romantic lineage (as a 68er and neo-Bergsonian vitalist), as having fudged the movement from one/multiple to multiplicity by totalising the infinity of the cosmos into a big One (BwO) in which consequently all beings are of necessity undifferentiated (ontological liberalism). Deleuze, he argues, still resides in a metaphorical thinking of the infinite as the Open, of beings-as-simulacra and truth as historicised (subject to time) etc...Thus there is a great deal of delight taken in 'exposing' deleuze (never D&G, because Badiou doesn't like to talk about CS, except as a sort of 'bad influence') as an nice but unfortunate fool who in attempting to overturn plato merely ended up with a comically unwitting platonism (whereas B is upholding a 'full-strength platonism'). For where plato would have banished poets and only allowed geometers access to philosophy, today the opposite is the case. The only way we can escape from neo-romanticism without lapsing into a neoclassicism is to re-examine these relationships (between maths, philosophy, poetry) since postmodernism is merely a confused expression of their irresolution.
To 'complete' the enlightenment project requires a renewed effort of desecration, dismantling of historicism, and demystification of the infinite ("the infinite must be submitted to the matheme's simple and transparent deductive chains, subtracted from all jurisdiction by the One...released from the metaphor of the open").
The suggestion is that mathematics (and specifically, the species of set theory that proceeds from Cohen) provides us with the best tools for an ontology of the multiple, or 'the infinite as indifferent multiplicity" (the post-Cantorian treatment of the infinite as plural and numeric that "renders the infinite banal"). "It is in this sense that I have invoked a 'Platonism of the multiple' as a program for philosophy today. The infinite untethered from the one (as indifferent multiplicity)."
The argument for the absolute sovereignty of mathematical thought rests on its violence, and the combined outlandishness and applicability of its results: What we discover, to take a simple example by way of the square root of -1 and the complex number plane, is an astonishing proof of the potency of mathematics. We discover a real entity whose basis lies entirely within number, but which displays none of the stereotypical qualities that those ignorant of mathematics would expect or propound in their folk-philosophies (which could be summarised as linearity, metric regularity, identity, etc.). In fact non-mathematicians would be forgiven, looking at something like the mandelbrot set, for suspecting some sleight of hand, that some empirical germ has been smuggled in somewhere in the process. But ultimately they would have to concede that these entities are real, that is, they consist, and that the pursuit of number offers us far more sophisticated, if outlandish, ways of understanding (for which read 'counting') reality, than could ever be provided by the putative 'thinking' of the philosopher.
It is the strength of mathematics, says Badiou, that, in taking its lead from the order apparent in empirical realities, it can extend them to finally uncover explanatory schema that comprehend not only those empirical realities, but others; a second step to this is to say that in doing so it is found that these realms of number, monstrous efflorescences from the point of view of phenomenologically-led folk-wisdom, often turn out to describe with extreme precision the results of physical experiments; which, in turn, allow us paradoxical insights into the nature of reality which phenomenology could not hope to achieve. Mathematics is the only way to pursue an inquiry about what is true of reality _as such_ with the _guarantee_ of jettisoning phenomenological or other preconceptions. Thus, the sign above the door to philosophy should once again read 'only geometers my enter' . Whether, given the rest of Badiou's ponderous writings, this also implies 'abandon your desiring machines...' is another matter. What is for certain is that under Badiou's conditions, philosophy-mathematics absolutely renounces any ability to say anything about 'beings', that is actually existing contingent material assemblages.
[[For DG, are not the singularities of matter constitutive of the abstract machine as much as mathematics (metallurgy and numerology are instances of tracking processes, just as philosophy should be. Isn't the hardness of rock just as irrecusable as the reality of the complex plane? Is it simply a prejudice against phenomenological data that obscures this?).
- their strength is to present empirically instances as they occur in life, in a multitude of forms
- the problem at the level at which it proposes itself -" which may be as double bind, as calculus, or sets.
- But for B, this is all so much -phenomenological pottering-.
Badiou only wants to concentrate on the quality of mathematical truths
-He exalts maths as that which allows us to become immortal, to lift us up from this 'scurrying on the earth', that which removes us from life
Why are D&G described as 'vitalist'? Is there anything in D&G that suggests the imputation of some transcendental principle beyond pure machinism? If not, what exactly is the content of the charge of 'vitalism'?
]]
My question then is : what is the relation of onto-mathematics to "mechanomics" (that is, the practice of numerical signs as directly-effective real entities)? Given that Badiou's argument would not allow for an argument on historical-materialist grounds (something like a 'proletarian' popular numeracy, or engineering vs geometry, royal vs vagabond sciences) since it would lead back into historicism and thus romanticism, how are the authority of mathematics, as a masterly discipline to philosophically tame the world with its explanatory power, and the sheer machinic potency of number as reality in its rawest state to be distinguished on purely abstract, numeric grounds? And in what way does the former 'depotentiate' the latter?
As I understand it, something like the complex plane would belong, in D&G terms, in the abstract machine, as (the closest we can get to) the pure grain of the real as nummoid difference (here we might return to the idea of vagabond/metallurgical science which would affine to numerological mysticism), or attractors immanent to all matter, activated as contents and forms are zipped together through stratification processes. Badiou takes away any possibility of understanding number as materially effective.
It does seem to me that there is something real at issue here, in terms of this multiversal tendency to react against the multiplicitous undecidable nummoid processes that libidinal materialism unleashes with a masterful discourse of a 'return to rationalism'.
It makes sense to take issue with Badiou from the position of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, because he (and Zizek) consider this to be the worst efflorescence of 'bad' Deleuzism, productive of the -vitalist terrorism- of his -disciples- and constitutive of his ludic complicity with the feverish multiplication of cultural product lines constituted by -digital capitalism-, something from which Deleuze must be rescued before any attempt is made to salvage 'true' (=platonic, even if an inferior platonism) deleuzian thought.
[Alliez's argument] Badiou's reading of Deleuze operates first of all by a strategy of assimilation, allowing him to bring Deleuze into closer proximity with himself by asserting that the carnivalesque parade of -cases- in fact conceals a monotonous indifference. By thus indicating that the two parties are as one in this indifference, Badiou neutralises any differend on the basis of pragmatics (that is, on the very basis that was the driving force of CS) to take up instead an apparently simple choice, presented entirely in his own terms (those of an irrecusable and universal fundamental ontology), between a rigorous mathematical conception of multiplicity and a failed or deluded conception of the multiple-in-one.
CS is a dangerous machine, it was a dangerous path for Deleuze to take.
It is profoundly ambivalent -" the profound ambivalence of the BwO to the organs, and the profound ambivalence of the capitalism, in its conjoint movements of liberation and reterritorialization. So it should be no surprise that it can be, and has been, employed wittingly or unwittingly as a prop to the -ideology of digital capitalism- (zizek's phrase); since this ideology, insofar as it exists, must partake precisely of the same ambivalence. But the strength of CS is that it only takes sides on the level of Desiring-production, which is already double, a double-movement of the BwO and the organs, of construction and flux.
There is no denying that now more than ever we are in need of a reinvigoration of thinking. But it is a machinic thought that will constitute the new enlightenment, not a rationalism made poor by purification. It's a matter of the cold or the hot; the clean and the dirty.
I wonder why, in his survey of how philosophy has wrenched itself away from the mythopoetic continuum by entangling itself with mathematics, Badiou treats in sequence: Parmenides, where the matheme breaks the surface of the poem but ultimately cohabits with it; Plato, where the matheme finally subjects myth to its cold discipline (but Derrida had something to say about the way that myth always has a way of twisting out of the grip of rationality); but not Heraclitus, thinker of fire-myth, exchange and the paradoxical reversibility of sign-systems.
Posted by robin at 12:45 PM
December 14, 2004
To The Dogs
"If you present yourselves to others as a gift, then that is dangerous. The power that this gives people over the individual corrupts them"
It's easy to be suspicious of premeditatedly theory-driven productions, and this prejudice could cause one to shy away from the films of Lars Von Trier. His ascetic manifesto for film-making (no SFX, handheld camera only, telling a story simply and directly) has its attractions: who can deny, scanning a bloated sleepwalking Hollywood, that the cause of its somnolence is an overdose of just those technical irrelevancies that Von Trier rejects?
Nevertheless, to anyone schooled in the disappointments and embarassments of theory-driven cultural production, and with a faith in the unconscious rather than the analytical as the source of innovation, these arbitrary limitations seem dry.
But arbitrary rules provide a framework against which to kick, and von trier's submission to such rules is a partly personal matter, with an interesting relation to the supposedly free but surreptitiously theory-led ideology of 'liberated creativity': he grew up in an atmosphere of super-tolerance in some sort of rationalistic enlightened commune, in which he says, 'everything was allowed except emotion'. Dogme 95, and Von Trier's obsession with 'the rules of the game', can therefore be understood as his attempt to come to terms with the poverty of liberal-rationalism, and its insufficient appreciation of the inconstancy and contradictions of the human animal. Only by limiting ourselves, can we be free. Only under pressure is emotion focussed into a powerful blast.
Von Trier surprised me twice in the space of one week. When you live somewhere 'remote', and you are lucky enough to have a local film society who put on a decent film every week, you go and see it, regardless of prejudice. So it was that I ended up seeing '5 Obstructions'. Of all Von Trier's work, this was most likely to put me on the defensive: A semi-documentary, in which the director sets his mentor Jorgen Leth the task of remaking his 1967 film 'The Perfect Human' five times, the catch being that Von Trier supplies a set of rules for each remake which Leth must follow. What a recipe for curmudgeonly dismissal -" I imagined a nightmare of black-polo-neck chin-rubbing directorspeak, a series of formal experiments interesting only to film-school anoraks, one for the nerds.
These misgivings seemed borne out initially, although the clips from the original 'Perfect Human' are beautiful, and I would have liked to see it in its entirety. Even after seeing '5 Obstructions', I don't know the original film well enough to comment with certainty on it, but it is clear that as well as being a political-aesthetic statement, Von Trier sees it partly as a commentary on Leth himself, on his quest for formal perfection within the medium of film. It soon becomes evident that the 'obstructions' game is a deeply personal challenge on Von Trier's part, an exorcism-of-the-father's-influence, a candid exposition of what he considers to be Leth's faults, which adds a more compelling narrative drive to what could otherwise be a filmmaker's parlour game.
The obstructions begin, and one naturally expects them to continue, as an experiment in apparently bizarre and arbitrary constraint: the film must be made in Cuba; no take must be longer than 12 frames long; no set is to be used. The viewer sympathizes with Leth in his despair and frustration -" surely this is just ridiculous. However his response to it, once he is committed and begins to feel his way around the rules, is a very interesting film (and pretty much indescribable except to say that by necessity it owes more to fast-cutting pop videos than arthouse ponderousness) , and sets the pattern for the rest of the obstructions: von Trier doing his best to trip Leth up, and Leth finding some loophole in the rules, or some unexpected interpretation of them, that allows him to make something of the obstruction.
Nothing in this first obstruction prepares one for the second: It is here that the purpose of the game starts to come into focus: von Trier is not happy with his mentor's making such a good film under the constraints set: he wants to make him howl, he wants the constraints to force Leth to do something he doesn't want to do (why this is so, is not yet clear). In the second film, then, He must shoot in the place which he finds the most personally unpleasant, but must not show the place or its inhabitants themselves. And Leth himself must play the Perfect Human. Leth decamps to a red light district in Bombay, clearly shaken by the task, but steeling himself for it; reassuring the camera and himself that he can carry off this inhuman act with sangfroid. As, indeed he does; the resulting film, which could have been a disgusting act of aestheticization, is rather beautiful, and uses a rich visual device to separate the Perfect Human from the 'real humans' around the set, giving dignity to both, showing how the highest articulation of the aesthetic can, and does, co-exist in this world with the most desperate quotidian reality.
Von Trier responds to this in severely bad humour -" Leth has failed to apply the rules strictly, and has failed to enter into the spirit of the game: by this time it's clear that von Trier really wants not only Leth but also the audience to have a bad time -" in their conversations, he makes it clear that he does not want Leth to make a 'good' film, he wants him to suffer and become unable to do so, and so to reflect on his criteria for a 'good' film.
Hence, the third obstruction emerges as a punishment for Leth's failure in the second: having refused to remake the second (during one of the most intense and philosophically rich documentary sequences, von Trier fully exercises his mental cruelty over Leth, the game once and for all overspilling its artificial boundaries). Leth must make the film with no rules.
Inferior to the original (but as von Trier rightly says, 'you have already made the best version you will make') the remake is set in a Paris hotel, and is a slick production. Von Trier is again disappointed - each of the obstructions is becoming transformed in Leth's hands into a fully-realised, well-formed piece, with none of the rough edges that von Trier wants to expose.
But in the fourth obstruction von Trier truly comes near to this aim of forcing Leth to make 'a crap film'. The rule is that Leth must make a cartoon -" a form for which von Trier and Leth both have nothing but disdain. In fact, the director creates a graphic film out of cut-up sections of the original 'Perfekte Menske' using digital technology. In this obstruction more than the others, the director himself has a questionable role -" essentially making a selection from a range of technical possibilities and parameters, then editing together the result in a sort of collage procedure.
I've seen a film made entirely like this (Richard Linklater's "Waking Life") and not to mention the feeble californian philosophizing in that effort, this film is visually specious and disappointing -" I like cartoons, but as von Trier rightly says, the output of this technical procedure, totally lacking in the life and rhythm of the draughtsman (with which cartoons must replace the life of actual bodies in space), evokes nothing but the endless and dreary ad-world of MTV, a world of kaleidoscopically shifting depthless surfaces: where everything is an ad for something else, and nothing real ever takes place. However von Trier again is both pleased by and disappointed with the result: Again, Leth has 'done his best', has militated against his aggressor's attempted sabotage. The film may be crap, but it is slick, undemonstrative crap.
The final, and most important, obstruction is a sort of final tantrum on von Trier's part, the rules are that Leth must do nothing, von Trier will make the film, Leth will simply read a script prepared by von Trier for him to speak. For von Trier, this is at once a gesture of frustration, an admittance of defeat, and an abandonment of the rules of the game in favour of pure force - having failed to make Leth suffer with his subtle obstructions, he is now forced into a draconian exercise of his power.
Using the documentary footage gathered during the previous obstructions, von Trier adds a script voiced by Leth; Speaking through and as Leth, von Trier's script explicitly states what the 'game' has been all about: breaking through the Leth's cool, aestheticized vision of the world that has always frustrated him; in which everything is framed and formally perfected to make it reassuringly beautiful, and forcing him to the point of breakdown, of acknowledgement of the laceration of existence. Using art to bare suffering rather than to ameliorate it. But, as the script turns from a cruel forensic examination of Leth's character into a reflection on the Obstructions, von Trier ultimately brings into question what is more human: to transform the world, to attempt to turn the shit you're given into gold; or to plumb the depths, to calculatedly strip away the veneer to reveal what lies beneath. The truth is some complex recasting of these 'alternatives', as emerges in this final obstruction: Von Trier, at first finding Leth's cool exterior impossibly impermeable, discovers that the frailty, the suffering, that accompanies his work ('those months of depression' that von Trier knows Leth suffers) need not be explicitly articulated; they are always there to be found, an inalienable part of his creation for those that look beyond the surface polish. And equally, von Trier's own shrill demands for directness are no less the product of aestheticization, of a desire to impress a meaning upon the world. As much as drawing out Leth's vulnerability, von Trier has exposed his own naĂŻvety. Having presumptuously thought to reveal how Leth had prematurely arrested his development at the stage of aestheticizing, beautifying self-protection, von Trier discovers that his own demand for a 'baring of the soul', a 'crap film', is itself a tendentious sentimentalisation of something that Leth takes for granted, the tragic melancholy of human existence. Leth's dignity and poise envelopes and presupposes his vulnerability to despair, to depression, to the depths of the spirit; the apollonian product is wrought from their dark energies, in the same way as the cruelty of each obstruction, and the accompanying despair of the director, has been transformed into a work which for all its flaws radiates positive energy. The limits are formative of their apparent transcendence.
This final 'obstruction' is really very affecting: as well as its philosophical content, it is a touching epistle from a pupil to a master to whom the world now seeks to make him an equal or successor. One important thing is made clear about von Trier, that he is not 'merely' a director : he is a clear and astute thinker. So whilst the documentary sections honestly show the cheery rivalry and intellectual sparring between the two directors, all of which could be smug and annoying, he makes no compromises in expressing the serious intent behind the obstructions. I surprise myself afterwards by having become diametrically opposed to what I supposed my response to the film would be: where other reviewers have called the film 'playful', precisely the sort of annoying film-school treat that I was fearing, I consider it rather serious. If I hadn't been forced by contingent circumstance, I would never have seen it, so In effect von Trier won me over to the cause of arbitrary constraint twice over.
* * *
Having experienced it with only the above knowledge of von Trier's work, Dogville was a revelation, and it may be that it's best to see it like this, with as few preconceptions as possible. However as a caveat to this, I would give the filmgoer one piece of advice -" persevere!
Contrary to one's presuppositions about von Trier's filmmaking, there is no attempt at straightforward realism or naturalism here. Like David Lynch's, his writing and mise-en-scene is its own rule. It makes only the concessions to the real that it needs to become compelling, and no more. Lynch describes how at an early screening of Eraserhead, years and years in the making, and one of the most direct and unfiltered works of imagination ever committed to film, a potential financier got up and walked out, exclaiming furiously 'people don't act like that! People don't talk like that!'. Well, one could say the same of Shakespeare (even in his own time) of course, and von Trier's putting his trust in the potency of creation rather than its slavish adherence to a model of reality is equally welcome.
All the same, the film is unpromising at first. The laconic narrative voiceover , the theatrical set (the whole film takes place in one studio, with the town plan marked on the floor, and no walls) suggests some horrible theatrical experiment, and to eyes and ears used to lush perfected Hollywood productions, actors placed in this situation seem out of place, unavoidably unconvincing and wooden. Worse, the narrative sets up exactly the sort of cloying smalltown pioneer americana that I find unbearable in any form. One feels like one is being subjected to some cruel and unusual Brechtian corrective treatment of Little House on the Prairie (the brecht parallel is not incidental -" von Trier acknowledges the Kidman characters' debt to Seerauber Jenny, and the overall influence of the Dreigroschenoper on the film is evident).
Whether or not the acting actually is worse during the first half of the film, and whether or not this is purposeful, I'm not sure. All I can say is that the film turns, and how it turns. The sheer flat awfulness only makes the deep darkness that succeeds it more intense, and this contrast convincingly argues its necessity. Realising that the whole structure of the piece justifies the painful artifice, you forgive and forget. Unfortunately two of the six people in the cinema left too early, hence my warning to persevere. At the time, I only steeled myself to stay by the memoryof '5 Obstructions', and the worthy thought that even a failed experiment is preferable to a succesful cliché.
Beautiful fugitive Grace arrives in Dogville, a small and isolated town, pursued by mobsters; Tom, an aspiring writer and pedagogue, decides to use her arrival as a moral lesson to the townsfolk by persuading them to open up their community to her and give her two weeks to establish her trustworthiness. She is 'a gift', and they need to learn how to 'accept'.
Grace becomes the very portrait of the hard-working, integrated immigrant here, as her hard work in order to repay the community's trust yields her enough money to purchase from the monopolistic village shop a series of useless, tasteless trinkets that, seduced by the smalltown charm of Dogville, she now finds charming and desirable.
But gradually it becomes evident that each individual is less than happy with their supposedly idyllic lot. One Dogville resident warns Grace against her romanticisation of the tiny town: 'People everywhere are the same -" greedy as animals. Only in a place like this, they're less successful.' And this, we assume, makes them more dangerous.
Lik Straw Dogs, a film with which it shares many preoccupations, Dogville can superficially be read as an indictment of small town insularity. The corporate starbucks-homeliness of globalised amerika can all-too-easily be set against the uneasy but rich specificity of the local. But here we are alerted to an entirely sinister component of that specificity, and to its founding role within those apparently homely globally-exported myths. This puts me in mind of english writer Magnus Mills' novels (especially 'All Quiet on the Orient Express'), where urbane protagonists stumble into remote rural locations, isolated autocratic worlds where interminable series of quid-pro-quo transactions slowly submerge them into inescapable social networks of obligations, with dark undertones of sadism, control, and dread. As in Dogville, the supposedly innocent and human-scale transactions of the communities in Mills' books become by turns more sinister: in delineating this difference between the rural and the metropolitan, human and inhuman, he intimates a disturbing portrait of those 'left behind' by cosmopolitanism : insularity, suspicion, duplicity, exploitation. There is obviously a compelling element in the collective consciousness that recognises this sinister element in the rural/smalltown: witness the numerous Hammer-Horror-style films that turn on the conspiratorial reticence of english villagers. The classic moment when the protagonist walks into the inn, the music and conversation stops and every grizzled inbred visage swivels toward him. It was Straw Dogs which first made explicit this horror.
Which is to say, in spite of our nostalgic idealisation of the 'human-size' community, we have a natural recognition of its dark side, of what we've escaped from. Sometimes the dark side is submerged and confused into its opposite, as in John Major's model for perfect civilisation, the Anglo-Saxon village: the village green which, encircled by dwellings, was conceived as a circumscribed last resort, an inner sanctum to retreat to with the livestock when under siege or attacked by wolves, became from Victorian times a symbol of idyllic bliss, a safe haven of recreation and an oasis of nature-worship. As Nietzsche attempted to show, cultures so easily forget (indeed perhaps much of culture is this forgetting) that those things they value highly originate in mean, evil times.
It is no doubt a well-considered choice to show the famous series of FSA-sponsored photographs of rural communities during the depression in the end credits of Dogville, for the film is an unblinking look at -" and some would say an attack on -" this mean, desperate existence, and the society which is its product. But since the strongest denunciation of the town of Dogville comes from the lips of the one person in the township who has come 'from the city', maybe it is more an attack on metropolitan idealisation of smalltown values, on the way we tend to forget the bad and re-imagine the good aspects of our 'origins'. It is certainly an attack on the longstanding political appropriation of these values, on the texan advocates of a down-home honest-to-goodness pioneer spirit as a model for the freedom and democracy. An examination of all the evils that hide under the skirts of the 'civilised community', and by extrapolation a commentary on recent world events.
Here we get closer to the second, more powerful reading of the film : as Von Trier hints often enough (giveaway lines such as 'you're either for us or against us'), the film can also be understood as an attack on The American Way per se, and specifically on the famous open arms with which America accepts immigrants and refugees : 'give me your poor, your needy,your huddled masses' the film says, 'and I will grind them down, squeeze every last drop from them, humiliate them, and thus teach them how grateful they ought to be, that they have been accepted into our community'. We see how regular people accept gifts; with suspicion, with barely-suppressed sadism, and finally with violence. Grace brings with her the scent of the outside, the proof of the possibility of change. In Dogville, the social coping mechanisms, which unfold unconsciously, automatically, through the townspeople, are entirely negative, entirely dedicated to pulverising this intimation of difference, to violently refusing the gift that brings out their inadequacies by contrast.
At first protesting that they 'don't need anything,' by degrees the townsfolk begin first to depend on Grace for her labour, and then by a slow, sliding, sickening process, to exploit and finally to fully torture her.
The real turn begins with a blackmail staged by a sickeningly unpleasant child (thus Von Trier attacks the innocence of childhood not only as metaphorical social narrative but also literally ) who, demanding to be punished, places Grace into a double-bind from which she is never to escape. And like clockwork, one by one the townsfolk turn on the incomer: von Trier's observation of the subtilization of their sadistic, xenophobic impulses as moral and economic 'lessons-in-life' and improving examples is horrifically acute and will strike a chord with anyone who has experienced the emotional blackmail of being forcibly brought back into the fold of a repressive social group or family 'for the common good', the gleeful punishment inflicted on renegades by those who have given up their own hope of escape.
At every stage, the treatment of Grace is rationalised, apparently proceeding from rules created 'for the good of the community'. And it ends with Grace enslaved, chained up, used as a receptacle for every man's sexual appetites, a scapegoat for every frustration that had previously been stored up and repressed in this little town. Meanwhile saviour and friend Tom ('Edison,' although we also meaningfully glimpse a volume of Tom Sawyer in the film) looks on impotently, endlessly revising his theories but unable to act.
Caught up in this inescapable web of degradation, one can hardly see where it started, can hardly place blame on any individual, and the basic premise becomes one of systemic rottenness, of the diabolical efficiency of the social machine. Where did it start to go wrong? Though there are plenty of allusions to original sin (and the second half of the film pivots around the harvesting of apples), whilst it is possible that male desire is being fingered as the motive force of the infernal apparatus, von Trier makes no bones about the relish with which each individual (and this is very much a film about individuals and individualism) takes up with relish the utter pulverisation of difference. Pointedly, one by one, not only the surly men but the learned wife, the black freed-slave, the cripple, all take their opportunity to crush Grace. Indeed it is only in this sadism that the 'community' truly finds itself bound together. One point of origin is each individual's feeling that they are owed something, that they have done the outsider a favour; an apparent generosity veils a mean-spirited, narrowly economic sense of justice, a barely-supressed self-righteous indignance at the 'outsider-'only barely held in check, ready to be unleashed by the appearance of a face that doesn't fit, at any disturbance of the disingenuous peace of Dogville. A gift is the cue for hatred, charity veils cruelty. The narrative begins with the would-be intellectual Tom berating the people for being 'unable to accept'; it turns out that the inability, in several senses, is pivotal to the film.
It is here that von Trier's staging makes perfect sense. He takes down the walls and we see in toto all the hidden machinery of the community: the exploitation, humiliation, duplicity, sadism, how all the workings of the law, of business, and the shifting sophistry of the spokesman conspire to destroy someone, and to enculture them into conspiring with their own destruction.
A man rapes Grace as everyone else looks away, confined by their walls, absorbed in their own business. Each individual's confinement blinds them to the diabolical apparatus they are part of.
The last moments of the film are taken up with a wavering, almost unbearable indecision between the liberalism inculcated even in a victim, and an cold, analytical quasi-Nietzscheanism. Does one try to 'understand', or does one destroy the rot? Here, in Grace's conversation with her pursuer -" who turns out to be her father - the complexity of the film explodes. The arrogance of liberalism's self-repression versus the arrogance of power. The refusal of power. The left's love affair with the powerless, the 'simple', and the right's appropriation of the 'goodness' of simple folk and simple ideas.
In Straw Dogs we are ultimately drawn to ask where it started to go wrong -" the more that liberal Hoffman indulges or ignores the badly-behaved yokels, the more apocalyptic the final confrontation must be. Liberalism is an ethos which allows its enemies to destroy it.
When it finally happens, we are not sure whether the decision made by the character is made on behalf of the director or not. Certainly having seen von Trier's cruelty on display in 5 Obstructions, one can believe he is capable of considering such a cold act of revenge. Surely even the fact of using an american cast to act out this - von Trier's own 'illustration' of the 'inability to accept' - was some sort of laconic act of sadism? The film is also about examples, illustrations: the example that these perfect honest folk believe they set to the world, the power of illustration, and what happens when illustrations, lessons, and examples impinge upon reality and pathologically subvert their pedagogical purpose (the obvious primary metaphorical target being US Foreign policy, of course, but to call this a single-issue polemic is to limit it). Ultimately, exactly what von Trier wants to say with this film is unclear to me, and I'm not sure he wants to be clear. My one reservation when the darkness started to descend was that the film would turn out to be too directly allegorical, too symbolic. Like all important films, it assembles a complex of vectors, is ambivalent as to the resolution of this collision but meanwhile has them vibrate urgently together, and compellingly convinces you of their relation to the 'real world'. The writing is dense with meaning, countermeaning, reference, that one would have to see the film many times to begin to unravel it.
After the final frenzy, one feels assaulted by the violence of these ambiguous truths, and in this respect the only films I can compare it to, weighty comparisons though they are, would be Straw Dogs and Apocalypse Now. (A film like Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine aspires to this status too, but in its pursuit of the reality-principle was ultimately unequal to the task) .
The credits roll. Bowie's 'Young Americans'. The FSA photos. A sense of having named a demon, having mutually accepted its presence and thus allowed it to enter nakedly the scene of everyday reality for a dark moment. This is far from comforting or cathartic, since it makes it all the more likely that the horror one sometimes feels at human life in general, the suspicion of something vile beneath the veneer of civilization, is not a overwrought product of personal imagination, but has a real referent. The most positive one could be would be to call it a fellowship of dread: that someone else shares the same sense of horror at everything that is supposed to be 'good' in this world. Von Trier is brave enough to question the genealogy of the good we are supposed to be fighting for, and uncovers some uncomfortable truths about its pedigree.
The film is also a revelation of the power of limited means. Von Trier attempts a rescue of film from purely technically-driven productions. On the other hand his method of filmmaking has been enabled by certain technologies (DV, handheld cameras). Here we can see at play the massive gulf between the technological attitudes of a prog-rock tendency (huge budget, every available technology, gargantuan sprawl, quickly dated and forgotted) and cyberpunk (grabbing the most available, usable technology and running with it).
Postscript: A comically vindictive american press review of the film mistakes the pursuit of pure emotional force as an avant-garde gesture, and the film as a simple surface-level anti-american fable: 'Every minute in this hundred-and-seventy-seven-minute movie says that cinema is pure artifice...we're in the dead zone of schematic abstraction and didactic moral rable...avant-gardism for idiots'obtuse and dislikable, a whimsical joke wearing cement shoes...The language is neither theatrically alive nor colloquially tough'
There follows a recourse to the valorization of vulgar realism in the context of the that art which, more than any other, has powerfully and systematically blurred the boundaries between the real and the imag(in)ed, with the global promotion of a call to global belonging through images: Arguing that "the movie is, of course, an attack on America ' though Von Trier is interested not in the life of this country (he's never been here) but in the ways he can exploit European disdain for it" misses the point somewhat; In fact Von Trier himself is candid about this fact:
'I went to Cannes and I was criticized by some American journalists for making a film about the USA without ever having been there. This provoked me because, as far as I can recall, they never went to Casablanca when they made 'Casablanca'. ..so I decided then and there that I would make more films that take place in America...I decided that Dogville would be in the Rocky Mountains because if you have never been there, that sounds fantastic. What mountains aren't rocky? Does that mean these ones are particularly rocky? It sounds like a name you might invent for a fairytale.'
America is a place that exists, for most of the world, firstly as fairytale, in the emotional and political imagination, as a fiction; and it is the real terrain of fictions, the assumptions and methods that shape them, and their lasting effects upon which von Trier's film is played out:
'Dogville' takes place in America but it's only America as seen from my point of view-It's not a scientific film and it's not a historical film. It's an emotional film. In my 'American' films , I mirror what information comes to me and my feelings about that information. '
'I like the individual Americans I know very much, but this is more of an image of a coutry I do not know but that I have a feeling about- What can I say about America? Power corrupts. And that's a fact.'
The attitude of vulgar realism suddenly inverts when our reviewer translates bizarrely the plight of the Grace character into an actual physical assault on the actress (whilst avoiding any criticism of Kidman herself for choosing to play the role):
'No doubt it amuses him to put a major Hollywood star like Kidman in shackles, but what, exactly, is he punishing her for? He's the one mocking her innocence, not the pasteboard Americans onscreen. Von trier treats Kidman as if she were a dumb whore, which may be more indicative of his true attitudes than anything he says.'
Doth the reviewer protest too much, perhaps? (A reviewer who, we note, believes in protecting the innocence of multi-million-earning film actresses against the scourge of scandinavian arthouse directors...) Is this a further example of the overcompensating violence of a fragile people not quite as homely, safe and kind as their preferred images would suggest?
[nb Five Obstructions is showing on British TV (CH4) sometime over christmas]
Posted by robin at 02:05 PM
December 12, 2004
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