The first two films I’ve seen at the Seattle International Film Festival are Guy Maddin’s two most recent films, Cowards Bend the Knee and The Saddest Music in the World. They were both of a piece with Maddin’s earlier work: murky, scratchy mostly black-and-white cinematography, emulating silent film (or rather the decayed state of 75-year-old silent film reels), and kitschy, beyond absurd, hyper-melodramatic plots, with over-the-top oedipal and incestuous fantasies and an obsession with amputation and bodily disfigurement, all played in ridiculously over-effusive camp style, and yet ultimately hyper-emotional, as if the camp were not so much a deflation of the emotion as its protective coloration.
The Saddest Music in the World stars Isabella Rossellini as a Canadian beer baron with no legs (though at one point she is given glass, beer-filled legs as a substitute). She holds a contest to find the saddest music in the world, since she firmly believes that sad people buy the most beer. There are two brothers in conflict (a frequent configuration in Maddin films) who also represent crass American optimism and go-getterism on the one hand, and old European melancholia on the other. (Their father, the mediator between them, stands in for Canadian dourness). Everything ultimately issues in catastrophe, needless to say. The film has rightly been touted as Maddin’s most accessible, which is not necessarily a bad thing, though it doesn’t have the density of some of his other works.
On the other hand, I’m inclined to think that Cowards Bend the Knee is the best thing that Maddin has ever done: which is saying a lot. It’s a silent film (with music), which manages to crowd in ice hockey, hairdressing, prostitution, abortions back in the day when they were illegal, revenge melodrama, amour fou, miscegenation, amputated hands, homoerotic humiliation, patriarchal humiliation, ghosts, Communism, and spermatazoa under a microscope, all in a span of only 60 minutes.
Visually, Cowards is amazing: blurry, slightly out of focus expressive montage, with obsessively repeated images, the fragmentation and multiplication of crucial events via closeups, rapid jump cuts, and zooms, and an extraordinary tonal luminosity in the black-and-white; as well as other things I won’t be able to describe until I see the film a few more times. Maddin gives the effect of shooting an MTV video on primitive equipment; he shows how contemporary digital effects are grounded in the cinematic language and techniques of the 1920s (not just Soviet montage, but Griffith melodramas as well). The result is to suggest, at one and the same time, archaism and the invention of an entirely new cinematic language.
Maddin often uses camp in order to disavow, or provide a cover for, the strongly affective elements of his work. But in Cowards, the camp elements barely work for disavowal; they just add to the general atmosphere of delirium. The more retro and conservative the film’s postures (with its array of Victorian-via-silent-film postures and acting techniques), the more it delves into territory that makes Bunuel seem prudish in comparison.
Cowards, like all of Maddin’s films only more so, is about cognitive dissonance (fusing elements that cannot possibly fit together), morbid nostalgia (a dwelling on the past, precisely in its irrevocable pastness, its fatal unchangeableness which is also, ironically, its constant changedness due to memory loss and physical decay), and the psychology of abjection (in which every impulsion of desire, no matter how slight, is paid for in excruciating rituals of humiliation). It’s something that has to be seen again and again.
The first two films I’ve seen at the Seattle International Film Festival are Guy Maddin’s two most recent films, Cowards Bend the Knee and The Saddest Music in the World. They were both of a piece with Maddin’s earlier work: murky, scratchy mostly black-and-white cinematography, emulating silent film (or rather the decayed state of 75-year-old silent film reels), and kitschy, beyond absurd, hyper-melodramatic plots, with over-the-top oedipal and incestuous fantasies and an obsession with amputation and bodily disfigurement, all played in ridiculously over-effusive camp style, and yet ultimately hyper-emotional, as if the camp were not so much a deflation of the emotion as its protective coloration.
The Saddest Music in the World stars Isabella Rossellini as a Canadian beer baron with no legs (though at one point she is given glass, beer-filled legs as a substitute). She holds a contest to find the saddest music in the world, since she firmly believes that sad people buy the most beer. There are two brothers in conflict (a frequent configuration in Maddin films) who also represent crass American optimism and go-getterism on the one hand, and old European melancholia on the other. (Their father, the mediator between them, stands in for Canadian dourness). Everything ultimately issues in catastrophe, needless to say. The film has rightly been touted as Maddin’s most accessible, which is not necessarily a bad thing, though it doesn’t have the density of some of his other works.
On the other hand, I’m inclined to think that Cowards Bend the Knee is the best thing that Maddin has ever done: which is saying a lot. It’s a silent film (with music), which manages to crowd in ice hockey, hairdressing, prostitution, abortions back in the day when they were illegal, revenge melodrama, amour fou, miscegenation, amputated hands, homoerotic humiliation, patriarchal humiliation, ghosts, Communism, and spermatazoa under a microscope, all in a span of only 60 minutes.
Visually, Cowards is amazing: blurry, slightly out of focus expressive montage, with obsessively repeated images, the fragmentation and multiplication of crucial events via closeups, rapid jump cuts, and zooms, and an extraordinary tonal luminosity in the black-and-white; as well as other things I won’t be able to describe until I see the film a few more times. Maddin gives the effect of shooting an MTV video on primitive equipment; he shows how contemporary digital effects are grounded in the cinematic language and techniques of the 1920s (not just Soviet montage, but Griffith melodramas as well). The result is to suggest, at one and the same time, archaism and the invention of an entirely new cinematic language.
Maddin often uses camp in order to disavow, or provide a cover for, the strongly affective elements of his work. But in Cowards, the camp elements barely work for disavowal; they just add to the general atmosphere of delirium. The more retro and conservative the film’s postures (with its array of Victorian-via-silent-film postures and acting techniques), the more it delves into territory that makes Bunuel seem prudish in comparison.
Cowards, like all of Maddin’s films only more so, is about cognitive dissonance (fusing elements that cannot possibly fit together), morbid nostalgia (a dwelling on the past, precisely in its irrevocable pastness, its fatal unchangeableness which is also, ironically, its constant changedness due to memory loss and physical decay), and the psychology of abjection (in which every impulsion of desire, no matter how slight, is paid for in excruciating rituals of humiliation). It’s something that has to be seen again and again.
I had the pleasure of hearing Bruce Sterling give a reading the other day. He was touring on behalf of his new novel, The Zenith Angle, which he explained was a “techno-thriller,” rather than science fiction. The excerpt he read was funny and charming, in its affectionate portrayal of the book’s uber-geek protagonist. (I suspect tech people will get off on it much more than the general reading public). But what was really great about the reading was Sterling’s off-the-cuff riffs, during his introduction and then again during the Q&A, on subjects ranging from security holes in Windows, to the origins of Western capitalism in the building of medieval cathedrals, to advice on how to become a writer, to the limitations the English language when it comes to talking about the future. I’ve liked some of Sterling’s books better than others, but as a commentator/performer/futurist/theorist, the man is a national treasure.
I had the pleasure of hearing Bruce Sterling give a reading the other day. He was touring on behalf of his new novel, The Zenith Angle, which he explained was a “techno-thriller,” rather than science fiction. The excerpt he read was funny and charming, in its affectionate portrayal of the book’s uber-geek protagonist. (I suspect tech people will get off on it much more than the general reading public). But what was really great about the reading was Sterling’s off-the-cuff riffs, during his introduction and then again during the Q&A, on subjects ranging from security holes in Windows, to the origins of Western capitalism in the building of medieval cathedrals, to advice on how to become a writer, to the limitations the English language when it comes to talking about the future. I’ve liked some of Sterling’s books better than others, but as a commentator/performer/futurist/theorist, the man is a national treasure.
The Seattle International Film Festival got underway last night. It’s an enormous event, with something like 250 feature films shown in the space of 3 1/2 weeks. There are lots of things I’m dying to see, from Guy Maddin’s two most recent films to a restored 70mm print of Jacques Tati’s Playtime and the director’s cut (with much restored footage) of Donnie Darko to new films, about which I’ve heard great things, by Pen-ek Rantanaruang, Tsai Ming-liang, and Wang Xiaoshuai.
Every year, I buy a Full Series Pass to the Festival. I used to see 40 or 45 films in the course of the Festival. But now, with a small child at home and being busy with preparations for moving across the continent, I won’t be able to manage anywhere near that number.
What especially caught my attention, though, was the following alert sent out by the Festival to all full series pass holders:
NO RECORDING DEVICES AT SIFF SCREENINGS
Due to piracy prevention efforts mandated by the motion picture industry and our film suppliers, recording devices of any kind (including camera phones) will not be allowed into festival venues. This policy will be strictly enforced. At certain screenings film studio representatives may require a physical search of your person or personal property upon entrance to festival venues. These searches are in no way intended for any materials other than possible recording devices–this includes cellular telephones equipped with cameras. We apologize for the inconvenience and will take every step to make these searches as quick, efficient and unintrusive as possible. We do not have facilities to hold or secure these items during film screenings. We strongly suggest that you leave any cameras and cell phones with cameras at home or in your car.
This says a lot about the insane levels of paranoia in Hollywood today, and the sickness of their crusade against piracy. Obviously SIFF can only show local premieres of all those hot new indie soon-to-be-releases by allowing the industry to send its goons to conduct “physical searches.” I’m assuming this is less likely to happen at screenings of the obscure Asian art films I’m most inclined to go to, than at screenings of American films that will be opening soon in the theaters anyway.
But I wonder how far they will carry this. Will they make filmgoers strip, just in case they are hiding illicit recording devices inside their underwear? Will they give refunds to banned filmgoers? Will they compensate us for the trouble they cause us?
I’ve said it many times, the current copyright code is so restrictive and so destructive of any possibility of free speech or creativity, that I believe that violating said code, by disseminating copies of music, movies, etc, for free, is a virtuous act of civil disobedience.
But cameraphones? The picture quality is so poor, and the amount of storage is so low, that I wouldn’t be able to capture images & sounds worth pirating even if I tried.
This draconian regulation puts me in a dilemma. My mobile phone is a cameraphone. It can take pictures, sort of. But it is basically a phone. If I leave it behind when I go to the movies in the evening, then when the movie’s over I won’t be able to call for a taxi, in order to get home. This is a problem, since I can’t drive. Buses in Seattle are fine during the day, but the schedule is much restricted at night, and the bus that goes near my house simply stops running after about 7pm. I don’t relish the thought of waiting half an hour for a bus, then taking a forty-minute ride, then having to walk almost half an hour in the dark in the middle of the night.
So I’m bringing my phone with me to every SIFF screening. What will happen? Will I be asked to submit to a physical search? Will I be ejected from films I very much want to see, and that I have paid for, because I refuse to surrender my device? Will I start frothing at the mouth and shouting obscenities, be blacklisted from SIFF forever, and show up on the nightly news?
Stay tuned.
The Seattle International Film Festival got underway last night. It’s an enormous event, with something like 250 feature films shown in the space of 3 1/2 weeks. There are lots of things I’m dying to see, from Guy Maddin’s two most recent films to a restored 70mm print of Jacques Tati’s Playtime and the director’s cut (with much restored footage) of Donnie Darko to new films, about which I’ve heard great things, by Pen-ek Rantanaruang, Tsai Ming-liang, and Wang Xiaoshuai.
Every year, I buy a Full Series Pass to the Festival. I used to see 40 or 45 films in the course of the Festival. But now, with a small child at home and being busy with preparations for moving across the continent, I won’t be able to manage anywhere near that number.
What especially caught my attention, though, was the following alert sent out by the Festival to all full series pass holders:
NO RECORDING DEVICES AT SIFF SCREENINGS
Due to piracy prevention efforts mandated by the motion picture industry and our film suppliers, recording devices of any kind (including camera phones) will not be allowed into festival venues. This policy will be strictly enforced. At certain screenings film studio representatives may require a physical search of your person or personal property upon entrance to festival venues. These searches are in no way intended for any materials other than possible recording devices–this includes cellular telephones equipped with cameras. We apologize for the inconvenience and will take every step to make these searches as quick, efficient and unintrusive as possible. We do not have facilities to hold or secure these items during film screenings. We strongly suggest that you leave any cameras and cell phones with cameras at home or in your car.
This says a lot about the insane levels of paranoia in Hollywood today, and the sickness of their crusade against piracy. Obviously SIFF can only show local premieres of all those hot new indie soon-to-be-releases by allowing the industry to send its goons to conduct “physical searches.” I’m assuming this is less likely to happen at screenings of the obscure Asian art films I’m most inclined to go to, than at screenings of American films that will be opening soon in the theaters anyway.
But I wonder how far they will carry this. Will they make filmgoers strip, just in case they are hiding illicit recording devices inside their underwear? Will they give refunds to banned filmgoers? Will they compensate us for the trouble they cause us?
I’ve said it many times, the current copyright code is so restrictive and so destructive of any possibility of free speech or creativity, that I believe that violating said code, by disseminating copies of music, movies, etc, for free, is a virtuous act of civil disobedience.
But cameraphones? The picture quality is so poor, and the amount of storage is so low, that I wouldn’t be able to capture images & sounds worth pirating even if I tried.
This draconian regulation puts me in a dilemma. My mobile phone is a cameraphone. It can take pictures, sort of. But it is basically a phone. If I leave it behind when I go to the movies in the evening, then when the movie’s over I won’t be able to call for a taxi, in order to get home. This is a problem, since I can’t drive. Buses in Seattle are fine during the day, but the schedule is much restricted at night, and the bus that goes near my house simply stops running after about 7pm. I don’t relish the thought of waiting half an hour for a bus, then taking a forty-minute ride, then having to walk almost half an hour in the dark in the middle of the night.
So I’m bringing my phone with me to every SIFF screening. What will happen? Will I be asked to submit to a physical search? Will I be ejected from films I very much want to see, and that I have paid for, because I refuse to surrender my device? Will I start frothing at the mouth and shouting obscenities, be blacklisted from SIFF forever, and show up on the nightly news?
Stay tuned.
Laird Hunt’s The Impossibly is sort of like a Dashiel Hammett noir novel as written by mid-period Samuel Beckett. But maybe that description is unfair, since it sells short the novel’s originality. The unreliable narrator seems to work for some sort of spy or criminal organization. He kills people under its orders, sometimes fails in his missions and is punished, falls in love and then wonders if his beloved has betrayed him on behalf of the organization, gets old, tries to investigate his own death at the hands of the organization. Nothing is conclusive, of course. Hunt manages to perfectly weld the epistemological concerns of the detective/spy novel with those of experimental prose and post-Wittgensteinian philosophy. The gap between perception and conceptualization, or between gathering evidence and solving the mystery, is the same as that between rhetoric and meaning, or performative and constative, or affect and signification. The Impossibly produces the emotion (rather than the philosophical resolution) of all these gaps, as trains of thought are derailed and lead nowhere, aside from the experience of carrying them out, and as the tough-guy persona of American detective and spy fiction quietly implodes. A beautiful book.
Laird Hunt’s The Impossibly is sort of like a Dashiel Hammett noir novel as written by mid-period Samuel Beckett. But maybe that description is unfair, since it sells short the novel’s originality. The unreliable narrator seems to work for some sort of spy or criminal organization. He kills people under its orders, sometimes fails in his missions and is punished, falls in love and then wonders if his beloved has betrayed him on behalf of the organization, gets old, tries to investigate his own death at the hands of the organization. Nothing is conclusive, of course. Hunt manages to perfectly weld the epistemological concerns of the detective/spy novel with those of experimental prose and post-Wittgensteinian philosophy. The gap between perception and conceptualization, or between gathering evidence and solving the mystery, is the same as that between rhetoric and meaning, or performative and constative, or affect and signification. The Impossibly produces the emotion (rather than the philosophical resolution) of all these gaps, as trains of thought are derailed and lead nowhere, aside from the experience of carrying them out, and as the tough-guy persona of American detective and spy fiction quietly implodes. A beautiful book.
Tarantino continues to surprise. Despite everything I had read, I was still unprepared for how different Kill Bill 2 was from its predecessor. For one thing, there’s the return of dialogue: slower and less character-revelatory than in Tarantino’s earlier films, but still quite florid compared to Volume 1. For another, the visual sense of Volume 2 is subtler, if less spectacular, than that of Volume 1. Instead of over-the-top bloodbaths orchestrated like musical production numbers, we get a lot of images of emptiness and waiting between the bits of action. Partly its the desert of the Southwest and Mexico, and the way Tarantino adjusts his visual codes accordingly: the vast empty spaces of Sergio Leone, instead of the baroque mise en scene of Vincente Minnelli. These visual differences have to do with a difference in rhythm: the relative slowness of Volume 2 gives it an affective weight that the ice-cold Volume 1 did not have. (I note that Leone’s films also do a lot with temporality). (There’s also the shift from Japanese samurai films that inspired Volume 1, to the Shaw Brothers and other Hong Kong martial arts films that inspired Volume 2: but I don’t know the genres well enough to comment on the effect of this).
We still don’t have characters like those of Tarantino’s earlier films; though David Carradine’s Bill is rather fascinating, and Michael Madsen’s Budd and Darryl Hannah’s Elle are both quite entertaining. Uma Thurman’s protagonist remains something of a cipher; but I think that this is precisely the point of the film. For what Volume 2 is ultimately about — so powerfully that Volume 1 turns out in retrospect to be about this as well — is the transfiguration and utter exaltation of Uma Thurman. She emerges from death, passing through the grave to be resplendently reborn, not once, but twice (well, figuratively, from a coma, in Volume 1; and literally from the grave in Volume 2). She becomes the center of every value, and every affirmation, in Tarantino’s cinematic universe. She’s both the Warrior and the Nurturer; or better, the Shiva-like Destroyer, the Brahma-like Creator, and the Vishnu-like Preserver, all in one. (I await the film in which Tarantino goes Bollywood). Tarantino manages to get away with an ending that situates Thurman as loving Mom, without that negating her capacity for violence.
Tarantino’s exaltation of Uma Thurman is as extreme and loony, in its way, as Josef von Sternberg’s exaltation of Marlene Dietrich. Of course there are differences. Dietrich is the center of visual fascination, the focus of every shot, the one bright figure emerging out of otherwise ubiquitous chiaroscuro; she makes things happen in the films, less by explicit action, than by the sheer magnetism of the spectacle she produces. The dynamics of Kill Bill are quite different. Thurman is to Dietrich, you might say, as Clint Eastwood is to Humphrey Bogart. Thurman shares much of Eastwood’s eerie affectlessness; the spectacle is not herself, her face and body and clothing, but the action — the mayhem — she creates. And Thurman’s affectlessness results in vicarious identification; in contrast to the delirious, spectacular objectification of Dietrich. But Thurman is being exalted here, as much as Dietrich ever was; it’s as if Tarantino were kissing the very ground she walks on (and sometimes through).
All this means that Tarantino scrambles the gender codes of cinematic spectatorship, in a way that hot-action-babes films like Charlie’s Angels emphatically do not.
Now, I don’t want to claim that this is necessarily progressive or feminist; nor do I want to psychoanalyze it (enough people have already written about Tarantino’s having been raised, like Bill Clinton, by a single mother, and how this relates to the Oedipal configuration of the film: kill Daddy, so that mother and daughter can reconstitute their blissful dyad). (For all of this, see B Ruby Rich on the film — link found via Green Cine).
Much as I enjoy the fundamental kinkiness of Kill Bill 2, I don’t want to mistake kinkiness for a political gesture.
Kill Bill is evidently still a heterosexual-male fetishist film (as so much cinema always has been, in Hollywood and elsewhere); but it does perform its rites in a genuinely new, and wonderfully crazy, way. And it may well be symptomatic of how hetero masculinity is currently being reinvented — in terms of how it relates to hetero femininity — after films like Fight Club have pushed traditional hypermasculinity to its ultimate reductio ad absurdum.
Tarantino has always been a hyper-aesthete (which is the reason his films have struck many viewers as morally deficient, whether in their reveling in violence or their casual and all too self-congratulatory play with gender, and especially racial/racist, stereotypes). But in Kill Bill 2 we finally get the affect behind this hyper-aestheticism. It’s an affect that can only be expressed through affectlessness, and a hetero masculinity that can only be expressed through a powerful female protagonist. But in its twisted way, it humanizes Tarantino as much as his previous films (and especially Kill Bill 1) had apparently dehumanized him.
Tarantino continues to surprise. Despite everything I had read, I was still unprepared for how different Kill Bill 2 was from its predecessor. For one thing, there’s the return of dialogue: slower and less character-revelatory than in Tarantino’s earlier films, but still quite florid compared to Volume 1. For another, the visual sense of Volume 2 is subtler, if less spectacular, than that of Volume 1. Instead of over-the-top bloodbaths orchestrated like musical production numbers, we get a lot of images of emptiness and waiting between the bits of action. Partly its the desert of the Southwest and Mexico, and the way Tarantino adjusts his visual codes accordingly: the vast empty spaces of Sergio Leone, instead of the baroque mise en scene of Vincente Minnelli. These visual differences have to do with a difference in rhythm: the relative slowness of Volume 2 gives it an affective weight that the ice-cold Volume 1 did not have. (I note that Leone’s films also do a lot with temporality). (There’s also the shift from Japanese samurai films that inspired Volume 1, to the Shaw Brothers and other Hong Kong martial arts films that inspired Volume 2: but I don’t know the genres well enough to comment on the effect of this).
We still don’t have characters like those of Tarantino’s earlier films; though David Carradine’s Bill is rather fascinating, and Michael Madsen’s Budd and Darryl Hannah’s Elle are both quite entertaining. Uma Thurman’s protagonist remains something of a cipher; but I think that this is precisely the point of the film. For what Volume 2 is ultimately about — so powerfully that Volume 1 turns out in retrospect to be about this as well — is the transfiguration and utter exaltation of Uma Thurman. She emerges from death, passing through the grave to be resplendently reborn, not once, but twice (well, figuratively, from a coma, in Volume 1; and literally from the grave in Volume 2). She becomes the center of every value, and every affirmation, in Tarantino’s cinematic universe. She’s both the Warrior and the Nurturer; or better, the Shiva-like Destroyer, the Brahma-like Creator, and the Vishnu-like Preserver, all in one. (I await the film in which Tarantino goes Bollywood). Tarantino manages to get away with an ending that situates Thurman as loving Mom, without that negating her capacity for violence.
Tarantino’s exaltation of Uma Thurman is as extreme and loony, in its way, as Josef von Sternberg’s exaltation of Marlene Dietrich. Of course there are differences. Dietrich is the center of visual fascination, the focus of every shot, the one bright figure emerging out of otherwise ubiquitous chiaroscuro; she makes things happen in the films, less by explicit action, than by the sheer magnetism of the spectacle she produces. The dynamics of Kill Bill are quite different. Thurman is to Dietrich, you might say, as Clint Eastwood is to Humphrey Bogart. Thurman shares much of Eastwood’s eerie affectlessness; the spectacle is not herself, her face and body and clothing, but the action — the mayhem — she creates. And Thurman’s affectlessness results in vicarious identification; in contrast to the delirious, spectacular objectification of Dietrich. But Thurman is being exalted here, as much as Dietrich ever was; it’s as if Tarantino were kissing the very ground she walks on (and sometimes through).
All this means that Tarantino scrambles the gender codes of cinematic spectatorship, in a way that hot-action-babes films like Charlie’s Angels emphatically do not.
Now, I don’t want to claim that this is necessarily progressive or feminist; nor do I want to psychoanalyze it (enough people have already written about Tarantino’s having been raised, like Bill Clinton, by a single mother, and how this relates to the Oedipal configuration of the film: kill Daddy, so that mother and daughter can reconstitute their blissful dyad). (For all of this, see B Ruby Rich on the film — link found via Green Cine).
Much as I enjoy the fundamental kinkiness of Kill Bill 2, I don’t want to mistake kinkiness for a political gesture.
Kill Bill is evidently still a heterosexual-male fetishist film (as so much cinema always has been, in Hollywood and elsewhere); but it does perform its rites in a genuinely new, and wonderfully crazy, way. And it may well be symptomatic of how hetero masculinity is currently being reinvented — in terms of how it relates to hetero femininity — after films like Fight Club have pushed traditional hypermasculinity to its ultimate reductio ad absurdum.
Tarantino has always been a hyper-aesthete (which is the reason his films have struck many viewers as morally deficient, whether in their reveling in violence or their casual and all too self-congratulatory play with gender, and especially racial/racist, stereotypes). But in Kill Bill 2 we finally get the affect behind this hyper-aestheticism. It’s an affect that can only be expressed through affectlessness, and a hetero masculinity that can only be expressed through a powerful female protagonist. But in its twisted way, it humanizes Tarantino as much as his previous films (and especially Kill Bill 1) had apparently dehumanized him.
You were never prepared for this. You never expected it. You grew up poor, in one of the poorest parts of the United States. You were something of a tomboy, but a good sort of person — you got along with folks, and they tended to like you. You were impulsive, sometimes — marrying on a whim at age 18, only to divorce the guy a year or so later — but never nasty or vicious. You joined the Army Reserve, mostly, because it seemed to offer money and opportunities you couldn’t get any other way. You hoped it would allow you to save up for college, and give you some of the skills you’d need in order to get in.
But you never expected you’d be called up to active duty, and sent to Iraq: a country far away, hotter than Hell, and filled with people who we were supposed to have freed from tyranny: you were told that these people would love you, but it seemed that they mostly resented you, in a sullen sort of way; aside, that is, from the ones who actively hated you and tried to kill you.
You were trained as much to be a bureaucrat as a soldier: your job was to sit behind a desk and process the papers of Iraqi detainees. But once you were actually working at the Abu Ghraib prison, you found that a lot more was expected of you.
The higher-ups (both military officers whom you were supposed to obey, and private “contractors” who you were told you should also obey) wanted “information” from the detainees, and they wanted you to help them get it. There were various interrogation techniques they taught you: depriving the prisoners of sleep, stripping them naked and humiliating them sexually, putting hoods over their heads and subjecting them to mild electric shocks; and of course, threatening them with physical violence, and sometimes carrying through on the threats, for the sake of credibility.
It was weird at first; you had never, in your wildest dreams, imagined doing these sorts of things to anyone. But these prisoners really hated and resented you; you knew they’d kill you if they could, if the positions were reversed. So it wasn’t that hard to think of them as less than human; especially since your superiors encouraged you to think this way, encouraged you to be relentless, not to let the fuckers get away with anything, pry their secrets loose from them before more Americans, more of your buddies, were killed. And when you did your part in the interrogations, when you finally got one of the prisoners to break, to lose his defiance, to tell the “contractors” everything he knew, your superiors praised you for a job well done.
And after a while, you even started to enjoy it; it wasn’t the power, exactly, so much as a kind of recognition from your peers: an esprit de corps that kept you going, when you were cut off from home and family; and an acceptance as one of the guys, which was something you had always wanted, proving yourself as their equal even though they originally looked down on you because you were a girl. In a funny way, it was also something that brought you and your boyfriend together more: not that you got off on what you were doing, exactly, but it was a kind of complicity, and a way in which the two of you could feel that you were triumphant, standing together against — and in spite of — everything else, and everyone else in the world.
And it must have been in one of those moments that your boyfriend took those photos: of you grinning and giving thumbs up, and pointing at the genitalia of a naked, abject prisoner; or of you grinning and holding one of those poor fuckers by a leash, as if he were a disobedient dog.
And now those pictures have been published, and you are the most infamous woman in the world; and they’re going to throw the book at you, and basically you have no future and no hope. But of course somebody has to take the fall; and of course it will never be the people who imagined it, who organized it, who trained you in it, who told you to do it, and whose dreams of conquering and looting the world you were never really privy to. They can’t be blamed, so it has to be somebody like you, who was poor and without prospects to begin with. No matter how deeply you felt that esprit de corps, you never were a member of that elite, and you never would be; you were expendable from the beginning, and your life is the price our rulers are happily willing to pay, as they pursue their program of conquest and domination.
You were never prepared for this. You never expected it. You grew up poor, in one of the poorest parts of the United States. You were something of a tomboy, but a good sort of person — you got along with folks, and they tended to like you. You were impulsive, sometimes — marrying on a whim at age 18, only to divorce the guy a year or so later — but never nasty or vicious. You joined the Army Reserve, mostly, because it seemed to offer money and opportunities you couldn’t get any other way. You hoped it would allow you to save up for college, and give you some of the skills you’d need in order to get in.
But you never expected you’d be called up to active duty, and sent to Iraq: a country far away, hotter than Hell, and filled with people who we were supposed to have freed from tyranny: you were told that these people would love you, but it seemed that they mostly resented you, in a sullen sort of way; aside, that is, from the ones who actively hated you and tried to kill you.
You were trained as much to be a bureaucrat as a soldier: your job was to sit behind a desk and process the papers of Iraqi detainees. But once you were actually working at the Abu Ghraib prison, you found that a lot more was expected of you.
The higher-ups (both military officers whom you were supposed to obey, and private “contractors” who you were told you should also obey) wanted “information” from the detainees, and they wanted you to help them get it. There were various interrogation techniques they taught you: depriving the prisoners of sleep, stripping them naked and humiliating them sexually, putting hoods over their heads and subjecting them to mild electric shocks; and of course, threatening them with physical violence, and sometimes carrying through on the threats, for the sake of credibility.
It was weird at first; you had never, in your wildest dreams, imagined doing these sorts of things to anyone. But these prisoners really hated and resented you; you knew they’d kill you if they could, if the positions were reversed. So it wasn’t that hard to think of them as less than human; especially since your superiors encouraged you to think this way, encouraged you to be relentless, not to let the fuckers get away with anything, pry their secrets loose from them before more Americans, more of your buddies, were killed. And when you did your part in the interrogations, when you finally got one of the prisoners to break, to lose his defiance, to tell the “contractors” everything he knew, your superiors praised you for a job well done.
And after a while, you even started to enjoy it; it wasn’t the power, exactly, so much as a kind of recognition from your peers: an esprit de corps that kept you going, when you were cut off from home and family; and an acceptance as one of the guys, which was something you had always wanted, proving yourself as their equal even though they originally looked down on you because you were a girl. In a funny way, it was also something that brought you and your boyfriend together more: not that you got off on what you were doing, exactly, but it was a kind of complicity, and a way in which the two of you could feel that you were triumphant, standing together against — and in spite of — everything else, and everyone else in the world.
And it must have been in one of those moments that your boyfriend took those photos: of you grinning and giving thumbs up, and pointing at the genitalia of a naked, abject prisoner; or of you grinning and holding one of those poor fuckers by a leash, as if he were a disobedient dog.
And now those pictures have been published, and you are the most infamous woman in the world; and they’re going to throw the book at you, and basically you have no future and no hope. But of course somebody has to take the fall; and of course it will never be the people who imagined it, who organized it, who trained you in it, who told you to do it, and whose dreams of conquering and looting the world you were never really privy to. They can’t be blamed, so it has to be somebody like you, who was poor and without prospects to begin with. No matter how deeply you felt that esprit de corps, you never were a member of that elite, and you never would be; you were expendable from the beginning, and your life is the price our rulers are happily willing to pay, as they pursue their program of conquest and domination.
Last night I had the pleasure of doing a reading together with my old friend Charles Altieri, at Richard Hugo House. This was the first in what is planned as an ongoing series of readings called “Critics as Performers,” sponsored by Subtext, which is a major resource for experimental writers in Seattle.
I’ve also been reading Altieri’s new book, The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects. It’s a smart and very useful and important book, which does the crucial work of taking on the cognitivists and analytic philosophers who misconstrue affect by subordinating it to moralizing concerns, and ultimately to the imperialism of Reason. That’s my language, not Altieri’s; part of what makes the book powerful and effective is that Altieri takes on the cognitivists on their own terms, and shows cogently how their subordination of imagination to reason and of aesthetics to ethics, together with their general hierarchizing of the mental faculties due to their privileging of cognition, and of normative ethical goals, utterly fails to account for the complexities and richness of affective experience.
Reading the cognitivists always infuriates me: but for reasons that I am unable to articulate, since my language and starting assumptions are so different from theirs. (All I can really say is that my 20-month-old daughter’s temper tantrums are at least as important an aspect of what makes her human as is her learning to speak and to grasp abstract concepts).
What Altieri does for me is to articulate those reasons, refuting the cognitivists at their own game and on their own grounds.
It’s all the more effective in that Altieri sidesteps carefully around Deleuze; though he shares with Deleuze a love for Spinoza. Deleuze does provide a clear alternative to normative, cognitivist accounts of things like affect and emotion; but I often fear that my own (and others’) recourse to Deleuze provides too easy a shortcut. Altieri doesn’t take this shortcut; it makes his book difficult going for me in places, but I am learning far more from it as a result.
The centerpiece of the book is Altieri’s critique of Martha Nussbaum’s recent book on the emotions. I will not even try to summarize Altieri’s argument; but only note that it comes down to Nussbaum’s inability to adequately understand and appreciate Proust (page 173). Altieri writes: “For Proust the role of imagination is not to establish norms [such as Nussbaum tries to do] but to develop passions and compassions that make predicates like ‘saner’ and ‘more responsive’ [much valued by Nussbaum] seem painfully inadequate.” The Proustian lesson — if we can even call it a lesson — is that affective intensities involve us in singular experiences that we cannot but value, but whose valuation cannot be reduced to any sort of ethical (generalizable) norms, even humane and humanistic ones. To say this is not to invoke some sort of pseudo-Nietzscheanism cruelty or inhumanism, but rather to respect and honor singularity, against all attempts to call it to “reason.” (I am selectively following Kant here; if the ethical is the universal, then the aesthetic is the absolutely singular that cannot be brought under any universal rule, and that we “judge” therefore entirely without grounds).
(I fear I’m losing coherence here; so I’d better stop, and instead go back and parse Altieri more carefully).
Last night I had the pleasure of doing a reading together with my old friend Charles Altieri, at Richard Hugo House. This was the first in what is planned as an ongoing series of readings called “Critics as Performers,” sponsored by Subtext, which is a major resource for experimental writers in Seattle.
I’ve also been reading Altieri’s new book, The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects. It’s a smart and very useful and important book, which does the crucial work of taking on the cognitivists and analytic philosophers who misconstrue affect by subordinating it to moralizing concerns, and ultimately to the imperialism of Reason. That’s my language, not Altieri’s; part of what makes the book powerful and effective is that Altieri takes on the cognitivists on their own terms, and shows cogently how their subordination of imagination to reason and of aesthetics to ethics, together with their general hierarchizing of the mental faculties due to their privileging of cognition, and of normative ethical goals, utterly fails to account for the complexities and richness of affective experience.
Reading the cognitivists always infuriates me: but for reasons that I am unable to articulate, since my language and starting assumptions are so different from theirs. (All I can really say is that my 20-month-old daughter’s temper tantrums are at least as important an aspect of what makes her human as is her learning to speak and to grasp abstract concepts).
What Altieri does for me is to articulate those reasons, refuting the cognitivists at their own game and on their own grounds.
It’s all the more effective in that Altieri sidesteps carefully around Deleuze; though he shares with Deleuze a love for Spinoza. Deleuze does provide a clear alternative to normative, cognitivist accounts of things like affect and emotion; but I often fear that my own (and others’) recourse to Deleuze provides too easy a shortcut. Altieri doesn’t take this shortcut; it makes his book difficult going for me in places, but I am learning far more from it as a result.
The centerpiece of the book is Altieri’s critique of Martha Nussbaum’s recent book on the emotions. I will not even try to summarize Altieri’s argument; but only note that it comes down to Nussbaum’s inability to adequately understand and appreciate Proust (page 173). Altieri writes: “For Proust the role of imagination is not to establish norms [such as Nussbaum tries to do] but to develop passions and compassions that make predicates like ‘saner’ and ‘more responsive’ [much valued by Nussbaum] seem painfully inadequate.” The Proustian lesson — if we can even call it a lesson — is that affective intensities involve us in singular experiences that we cannot but value, but whose valuation cannot be reduced to any sort of ethical (generalizable) norms, even humane and humanistic ones. To say this is not to invoke some sort of pseudo-Nietzscheanism cruelty or inhumanism, but rather to respect and honor singularity, against all attempts to call it to “reason.” (I am selectively following Kant here; if the ethical is the universal, then the aesthetic is the absolutely singular that cannot be brought under any universal rule, and that we “judge” therefore entirely without grounds).
(I fear I’m losing coherence here; so I’d better stop, and instead go back and parse Altieri more carefully).
Marty Beckerman‘s Generation S.L.U.T.: A Brutal Feel-Up Session With Today’s Sex-Crazed Adolescent Populace is actually not bad. Its naturalistic (apparently — no way I could really know) story of teen promiscuity, alienation, and suicide is fairly convincing and moving, its over-the-top satire is funny and pretty much on target, and its interpolated statistics, headlines, interviews, and autobiographical essays definitely intensify the effect, more because of the way they multiply and collage the text in McLuhanesque fashion, than because of their particular content.
All in all, as a satirist’s moralistic warning about the dangers of a generation growing up without love or passion, the novel is a bit compromised by its own enjoyment of all the scenes it describes (which range from drunken sex between 16-year-olds who don’t even know each others’ names to knockout drugs, gang bangs and date rape) — but if this is a failure in terms of the book’s moral intent, it is only to the good in terms of its artistic success. Beckerman clearly despises jocks, cheerleaders, and proto-frat boys, which is a good thing; but his own smartassitude isn’t as far from frat boy self-congratulatory humor as he might wish. Once again, something which compromises his message, and his clear intent, makes this a better book than it would be if he had carried through that intent unambiguously.
As for Marty Beckerman’s either being a genius or a fraud — he clearly wants us to think he’s one or the other — don’t believe the hype. I don’t buy it, or rather, I don’t think he is a skillful enough media manipulator to carry it off. On Beckerman’s own website, he links to this site, which denounces him as “The Jewish Antichrist”; of course this site is itself actually registered to Marty Beckerman. But the novel works precisely because it is quotidian rather than scandalous, and Beckerman’s attempt to gain some sort of extra cultural cachet by pretending to be scandalous is a dud.
Marty Beckerman‘s Generation S.L.U.T.: A Brutal Feel-Up Session With Today’s Sex-Crazed Adolescent Populace is actually not bad. Its naturalistic (apparently — no way I could really know) story of teen promiscuity, alienation, and suicide is fairly convincing and moving, its over-the-top satire is funny and pretty much on target, and its interpolated statistics, headlines, interviews, and autobiographical essays definitely intensify the effect, more because of the way they multiply and collage the text in McLuhanesque fashion, than because of their particular content.
All in all, as a satirist’s moralistic warning about the dangers of a generation growing up without love or passion, the novel is a bit compromised by its own enjoyment of all the scenes it describes (which range from drunken sex between 16-year-olds who don’t even know each others’ names to knockout drugs, gang bangs and date rape) — but if this is a failure in terms of the book’s moral intent, it is only to the good in terms of its artistic success. Beckerman clearly despises jocks, cheerleaders, and proto-frat boys, which is a good thing; but his own smartassitude isn’t as far from frat boy self-congratulatory humor as he might wish. Once again, something which compromises his message, and his clear intent, makes this a better book than it would be if he had carried through that intent unambiguously.
As for Marty Beckerman’s either being a genius or a fraud — he clearly wants us to think he’s one or the other — don’t believe the hype. I don’t buy it, or rather, I don’t think he is a skillful enough media manipulator to carry it off. On Beckerman’s own website, he links to this site, which denounces him as “The Jewish Antichrist”; of course this site is itself actually registered to Marty Beckerman. But the novel works precisely because it is quotidian rather than scandalous, and Beckerman’s attempt to gain some sort of extra cultural cachet by pretending to be scandalous is a dud.
Tattooed Life isn’t Seijun Suzuki’s best film, and it’s far from his most delirious; but still it’s filled with astonishing visual inventions, in fight sequences and elsewhere, that Quentin Tarantino would die for, and surprising emotional depths that Tarantino would never be able to comprehend. I saw this film originally when Scarecrow Video brought Suzuki to Seattle for a retrospective of his films; and now that it has finally come out on American DVD, I’ve been able to see it again.
In the Q&As after nearly all the screenings at that retrospective, Suzuki evaded nearly all the questions he was asked, disclaiming any artistic intent whatsoever, and saying only that he violated continuity rules and skewed camera angles, turned fight scenes into abstract tableaux, mixed genre signals, presented convoluted plot turns as elliptical asides, created absurdly heightened symbolic color schemes, and so on, because he was trying to keep the audience entertained.
In a way, I suppose, he was telling the truth; for the extravagances of Suzuki’s directorial style — at least in his earlier, pre-1967 films; I’m less sure about his hyperstylized recent efforts like Pistol Opera — seem to be refreshingly free of auteurist pretensions. Suzuki doesn’t take his own dedication to pulp with the self-conscious, self-congratulatory seriousness of (yes, again) Quentin Tarantino; rather, Suzuki’s films are themselves so self-conscious and expressionist and daringly extreme that Suzuki himself doesn’t (or didn’t) need to be.
Tattooed Life isn’t Seijun Suzuki’s best film, and it’s far from his most delirious; but still it’s filled with astonishing visual inventions, in fight sequences and elsewhere, that Quentin Tarantino would die for, and surprising emotional depths that Tarantino would never be able to comprehend. I saw this film originally when Scarecrow Video brought Suzuki to Seattle for a retrospective of his films; and now that it has finally come out on American DVD, I’ve been able to see it again.
In the Q&As after nearly all the screenings at that retrospective, Suzuki evaded nearly all the questions he was asked, disclaiming any artistic intent whatsoever, and saying only that he violated continuity rules and skewed camera angles, turned fight scenes into abstract tableaux, mixed genre signals, presented convoluted plot turns as elliptical asides, created absurdly heightened symbolic color schemes, and so on, because he was trying to keep the audience entertained.
In a way, I suppose, he was telling the truth; for the extravagances of Suzuki’s directorial style — at least in his earlier, pre-1967 films; I’m less sure about his hyperstylized recent efforts like Pistol Opera — seem to be refreshingly free of auteurist pretensions. Suzuki doesn’t take his own dedication to pulp with the self-conscious, self-congratulatory seriousness of (yes, again) Quentin Tarantino; rather, Suzuki’s films are themselves so self-conscious and expressionist and daringly extreme that Suzuki himself doesn’t (or didn’t) need to be.
Gilbert Simondon’s book on technology, Du mode d’existence des objets techniques (On the mode of existence of technological objects), is not quite as rich as his books on indivduation (which I wrote about here). But it’s still fresh and thought-provoking (despite having been published as long ago as 1958 — it discusses vacuum tubes at great length, for instance, but doesn’t mention transistors), and it offers radical alternatives to the ways we usually think about the topics it discusses.
Basically, Simondon opposes the commonplace view (held alike by “common sense” and by philosophers such as Heidegger) that opposes technology to nature, and sees technology basically as a tool or mechanism for controlling and manipulating nature. Against this view, Simondon argues that technology cannot be reduced to a utilitarian function, because it is more than just particular tools used for particular purposes. Rather, technology must be understood: 1) as an ensemble; and 2) as a process of invention.
As an ensemble, technology involves more than particular tools or machines; it also involves the relations among these tools and machines, and the relations between them and the human beings who use them, as well as between them and their environments, the materials with which they interact.
Some technology, especially in its simpler aspects, takes the form of a single tool — a hammer, for instance — used by a particular person (a worker or craftsman) for particular tasks.
But most of the time, “technology” cannot be isolated in this way. Tools don’t exist in isolation; they are connected in all sorts of ways. They are connected, first, by the tasks they perform, which are increasingly complicated and require coordination all through the technical sphere. But beyond this, tools are interconnected because of the conceptual schemes that generate them: these same schemes, or designs, can be used in different contexts, in different materials, so that technology is transportable and transferable (“deterritorialized” in the vocabulary of Deleuze, who was greatly influenced by Simondon).
This also means that technology exceeds any narrow utilitarian purposes. As technology expands, its discovers and produces new relations between people and things, or between people and people, or between things and things. Technology is a network of relations: far from marking our alienation from the natural world, technology is what mediates between humankind and nature. It undoes the dualism that such a division implies, by networking human beings and natural entities into all sorts of subtle relations of feedback and mutual dependency. Far from being something deployed by a subject in order to dominate and control nature reduced to the status of an object, technology is what breaks down the subject/object polarity: it is always in between these poles, and it ensures that no human “subject” is free from and uncontaminated by the natural or physical world, while conversely, no “nature” or “materiality” is ever purely passive, purely an object. Every “object” has a certain degree of agency, and every “subject” has a certain degree of materiality; technology is the process, or the glue, that makes the idealist hypostasis of a naked subject facing brute objects impossible. (I do not know if Bruno Latour ever mentions Simondon, but the basis of much of his account of science and technology can be found here).
Technology is also necessary to the expansion of knowledge, according to Simondon. It is not the mere application of scientific knowledge, so much as it is the precondition for there to be such a thing as scientific knowledge: if only because scientific knowledge is generated when technology doesn’t work as expected, when it breaks down or deviates from its utilitarian function. Even (or especially) in its failures, technology is still “working.”
Another way to say this is to note Simondon’s second point, that technology is a process of invention. That is to say, it is a continuing process, not a fixed product. Tools are not just passively used; they are reconfigured, reinvented, extended and mutated in the process of use. Simondon writes that the “alienation” that has been so frequently noted in modernist discussion of machines, is not the consequence of technology per se; nor is it just the result of exploitation in the Marxist sense, the fact that workers do not own or profit from the machines that they operate (though that certainly plays a role). More fundamental, Simondon says, is the fact that factory workers are not able to participate in the active construction/invention/reconfiguration of their machines, but are only allowed to be their passive operators. In a truly technological culture, where invention and operation would be combined, this alienation would not take place. Decades before the fact, Simondon is here theorizing and advocating what today would be called hacking and hacker culture. Indeed, I think that the culture of hacking still has not caught up with Simondon, in the sense that hacking is mostly justified in pragmatic and/or libertarian terms, whereas Simondon adds a third dimension, a depth, to hacking by showing how it is essentially tied to technology as a basic component of human beings’ presence in the world.
There are a lot more themes and arguments in Simondon’s book that I haven’t been able to bring up here — for instance, his theories on the evolution of technology (which is not simply parallel to biological evolution, but differs from it in certain crucial ways), and on the relation of technology to other basic human activities (religion, art, science, philosophy) and to the split between “theory” and “practice” (Simondon does not consign technology to “practice”, but insists that it is prior to the split, and that a better understanding of technology would help us to overcome the duality between theory and practice). But there’s a lot to think about here, and I haven’t been able to absorb it all in just one reading.
Gilbert Simondon’s book on technology, Du mode d’existence des objets techniques (On the mode of existence of technological objects), is not quite as rich as his books on indivduation (which I wrote about here). But it’s still fresh and thought-provoking (despite having been published as long ago as 1958 — it discusses vacuum tubes at great length, for instance, but doesn’t mention transistors), and it offers radical alternatives to the ways we usually think about the topics it discusses.
Basically, Simondon opposes the commonplace view (held alike by “common sense” and by philosophers such as Heidegger) that opposes technology to nature, and sees technology basically as a tool or mechanism for controlling and manipulating nature. Against this view, Simondon argues that technology cannot be reduced to a utilitarian function, because it is more than just particular tools used for particular purposes. Rather, technology must be understood: 1) as an ensemble; and 2) as a process of invention.
As an ensemble, technology involves more than particular tools or machines; it also involves the relations among these tools and machines, and the relations between them and the human beings who use them, as well as between them and their environments, the materials with which they interact.
Some technology, especially in its simpler aspects, takes the form of a single tool — a hammer, for instance — used by a particular person (a worker or craftsman) for particular tasks.
But most of the time, “technology” cannot be isolated in this way. Tools don’t exist in isolation; they are connected in all sorts of ways. They are connected, first, by the tasks they perform, which are increasingly complicated and require coordination all through the technical sphere. But beyond this, tools are interconnected because of the conceptual schemes that generate them: these same schemes, or designs, can be used in different contexts, in different materials, so that technology is transportable and transferable (“deterritorialized” in the vocabulary of Deleuze, who was greatly influenced by Simondon).
This also means that technology exceeds any narrow utilitarian purposes. As technology expands, its discovers and produces new relations between people and things, or between people and people, or between things and things. Technology is a network of relations: far from marking our alienation from the natural world, technology is what mediates between humankind and nature. It undoes the dualism that such a division implies, by networking human beings and natural entities into all sorts of subtle relations of feedback and mutual dependency. Far from being something deployed by a subject in order to dominate and control nature reduced to the status of an object, technology is what breaks down the subject/object polarity: it is always in between these poles, and it ensures that no human “subject” is free from and uncontaminated by the natural or physical world, while conversely, no “nature” or “materiality” is ever purely passive, purely an object. Every “object” has a certain degree of agency, and every “subject” has a certain degree of materiality; technology is the process, or the glue, that makes the idealist hypostasis of a naked subject facing brute objects impossible. (I do not know if Bruno Latour ever mentions Simondon, but the basis of much of his account of science and technology can be found here).
Technology is also necessary to the expansion of knowledge, according to Simondon. It is not the mere application of scientific knowledge, so much as it is the precondition for there to be such a thing as scientific knowledge: if only because scientific knowledge is generated when technology doesn’t work as expected, when it breaks down or deviates from its utilitarian function. Even (or especially) in its failures, technology is still “working.”
Another way to say this is to note Simondon’s second point, that technology is a process of invention. That is to say, it is a continuing process, not a fixed product. Tools are not just passively used; they are reconfigured, reinvented, extended and mutated in the process of use. Simondon writes that the “alienation” that has been so frequently noted in modernist discussion of machines, is not the consequence of technology per se; nor is it just the result of exploitation in the Marxist sense, the fact that workers do not own or profit from the machines that they operate (though that certainly plays a role). More fundamental, Simondon says, is the fact that factory workers are not able to participate in the active construction/invention/reconfiguration of their machines, but are only allowed to be their passive operators. In a truly technological culture, where invention and operation would be combined, this alienation would not take place. Decades before the fact, Simondon is here theorizing and advocating what today would be called hacking and hacker culture. Indeed, I think that the culture of hacking still has not caught up with Simondon, in the sense that hacking is mostly justified in pragmatic and/or libertarian terms, whereas Simondon adds a third dimension, a depth, to hacking by showing how it is essentially tied to technology as a basic component of human beings’ presence in the world.
There are a lot more themes and arguments in Simondon’s book that I haven’t been able to bring up here — for instance, his theories on the evolution of technology (which is not simply parallel to biological evolution, but differs from it in certain crucial ways), and on the relation of technology to other basic human activities (religion, art, science, philosophy) and to the split between “theory” and “practice” (Simondon does not consign technology to “practice”, but insists that it is prior to the split, and that a better understanding of technology would help us to overcome the duality between theory and practice). But there’s a lot to think about here, and I haven’t been able to absorb it all in just one reading.