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SIGNS
"There is no such thing as coincidence." Mel Gibson in Signs
Il n'ya pas de hors-texte (There is no outside text.) Jacques Derrida
"[Allegory] means precisely the non-existence of what it (re)-presents." Walter Benjamin
Let's get this out of the way first. 'Signs' is a tepid, schematic of a movie, a spit-warm polemic about faith, and a hackneyed slapping together of various venerable b-movie conventions from the fifties. I don't understand all the (popular) critical fawning over it and Mel Gibson's doe-eyed portrayal of a priest is workman-like at best. There. I feel like I've done my journalistic responsibility. M. Night Shayamalan seems to have staked out the fringe areas of modern culture (Sixth Sense, Unbreakable…) at least as it comes into collision with faith and a sense of 'rightness' in the world. "Sixth Sense' itself has entered a minor cultural dialogue with it's phrase 'I see dead people.' (And has inspired more extended interpretation because of its theme of contact with the dead, always fertile ground for both psychoanalysts and new-agers; the rest of us just have to live with the lumpen-proletariat of the dead without any particular incorporation. See http://www.othervoices.org/2.2/rickels/index.html ) In 'Signs', humans might have well have been confronted with the Devil and His Works as much as Aliens (http://www.techgnosis.com/martians.html) . The creatures portrayed in the film could easily have been given horns and a forked tail and the audience would have happily gone along munching popcorn. The stagy quality of the interaction with the aliens (and the gaping plot holes) offers us no more substance than the typical fifties black and white film by Jack Arnold. (Don't get me started about that stupid alien at the end.) At least those old films give a wistful glimpse of a different era, one equally beset with worries about the End of the World via the capitalist/communist dialectic we set up. During a conversation in the film (we know it's important because it is repeated), there is a explicit acknowledgement of a division in the world between two sorts of people: those who believe in miracles and signs and those who believe in coincidence. And the film inchoately divides itself between the coincidence of Gibson's wife's death by accident in the film (wherein he discards his faith) and the signs (the crop circles) of an alien invasion whose paltry efforts only seem to last about 45 minutes, wherein presumably he regains some sort of faith. Shayamalan could have just as well staged a puppet show. Even within the terms of the movie the dichotomy doesn't make any sense since the crop circle/signs were not evidence of miracles but rather of aliens … unless we wish to grant a certain creepy slippage from 'aliens' to 'God' (and vice versa: see the Davis technognosis url above)… which would have made the film more interesting than it in fact is…at least it would have acknowledged its B-film heritage, pushed harder on some of it's ontological assumptions, maybe even escaping from a resolutely middle-of-the-bell-curve demographic. As it is it resides as a hokey alien invasion film, with the assigned 'real' allegorical meaning some idea about the loss of faith in modern technologized ('alienated'??!!) humankind. Ok, so what's even the point in writing about it? Most obviously it asserts again the pre-eminence of allegory (http://www.oikos.org/batallegory.htm) as a re-emerging form (in the cinema at any rate) as a mainstream trope, an ongoing phenomena that portends much about culture and society perhaps. It also brings into relief (again) the crop circle phenomena, if only to bury it again in the ridicule of precocious children wearing aluminum foil caps to ward off thought rays from aliens. (We know from an interview with the director that he doesn't 'believe' in the phenoma, or rather that he believes they are elaborate hoaxes.) As seems to be ALWAYS the case, the singularity of phenomena is subsumed under a general warrant to placate the population at large and to assure us that the monsters are not real (after all it IS a movie); or if they are real (after all it IS a movie) then they can be easily vanquished and the human hegemoney (sic) saved. Movies such as this one (or any other large budget Hollywood movie for that matter) seem to be incapable of doing otherwise, almost as if the collective apparatus itself forbade such dire conclusions. Allegory (http://athena.english.vt.edu/~baugh/bosch/R-A-Main.htm) itself, however, seems somewhat neutral or even to favor an openness to the cosmic apparatus of fate. Which means that human fate can be put into question by allegory and the kinds of faces (prosopopeia) it can screw onto phenomena can be greatly expanded. A Trojan Horse as it were, allegory opens the door to what writer Tom Cohen calls the 'allohuman' or even onto Jean-Francois Lyotard's comment that perhaps at the core of the human is the inhuman, even what other authors have called the machinal. There is a certain oddity in the fact that 1) it is no wonder that the nihilism of the modern regime would attempt to pull the rug out from under allegory, to discredit it while 2) receiving a kind of implicit valorization through the aegis of movie-making! But even to speak of allegory is to assert, in a way, the non-existence (or at the very least, trivialization) of the phenomena, or to phenomenalize it to into a position of mediatization such that the human loop is completed, always, everywhere, like a dog licking its genitals. So much so in fact, that the most hoped for outcome of any sort of hermeneusis of any similar phenomena is its ACTIVE non-existence, as the only way to avoid incorporation into the Same: the only way out is in. Once an item becomes a fact, it is on its way to becoming a 'fact', that is, a phenomena that can begin to untether itself from 'reality' no matter how 'real' it is. "For it is another nature which speaks to the camera rather than to the eye: 'other' above all in the sense that a space informed by human consciousness gives way to a space informed by the unconscious." Walter Benjamin Crop circles are either real or not. If they are real, that is really exist, then they are either made by humans or they are not. The circles themselves are indubitably real, they exist. The second proposition is likewise straightforward to a great many people: they are obviously made by humans because humans are the ONLY creatures who can have made them. Any attempt to shade the 'truth' or to enter some shade of gray is seen as giving aid to the hoaxers (see: http://www.nhne.com/specialreports/srcropcircles/index.html ) and perpetuating some sort of charlatanism, probably to the end of making money off of people's credulity or even for mystical purposes of their own, to bring in a new age of some sort. That is somewhat understandable, so the pragmatic, scientifistical, hence capitalist, would exclaim, money now having become another physical parameter, a fundamental particle. What is less understandable (if at all) is a mentality that does NOT mendaciously assert the 'otherness' of the circles for monetary gain but for some purported 'transcendentality' or to 'contact the space brothers' or the 'spirit of the corn' etc. In such cases , the outlook can only be seen as pathological, a resort to various psychoanalytic dynamics which assert the primacy of the social, oedipal, personal, perceptual warpage, mis-identification, or some species of hick buffoonery which doesn't know any better and is apparently thought to operate under a haze of oafish stupidity which only the presence of an expert (in meteorology/physics/mass delusions/astrophysics) can subdue and make into acceptable (hence truthful) explanations, far from the maddening retorts of those retards who believe what they see, hear and feel….since it should be apparent to everyone prima facie that there can be no 'texts in the fields'. There is nothing but the human and the agents which the human unleashes. Any assertion to the contrary must be a dangerous throw-back to hoary medieval doctrines whose sole emphasis is to succumb to that ever-threatening 'rising blacktide of occultism' with its accompanying racism and eventual fascism. ----------------------- "The ineffable is, in reality, infancy." Giorgio Agamben The closest most of us can come to the hypothesis of radical Other is to relegate it to the murky realm of Art (just as murky as Theology really), a catch-all which does offer the satisfactions of a (temporary) escape from charges of pathology or mischevious miscreancy. (Although where that leaves us no one is quite sure.) But even Art drifts its way down to a sullen claustrophobic art and opens back out into a virtual depiction, a movie let's say, which rounds somewhat steathily but no less viciously back onto the phenomena, and NOW confusing the parameters of the problem even more by introducing mass demographics and journalism into the equation. Nevertheless. The world outside the 'human' appears to be stubbornly hanging on, even if only through the aegis of the unconscious of those who feel compelled to counterfeit a 'program of otherness' which seems to be counter to the western Judeo-Christian (yet curiously resembling it in many instances--or is it the other way around?). One has the uncanny feeling that those who utter jeremiads against vacuous 'pagan gods' secretly believe them not to be so empty after all. Every thing hinges on what we take the 'human' to be, it's interfaces with the material world, on where and how permeable is the membrane between the subject and object, and in fact on whether the subject or the object comes first. 'Signs' folds these questions resolutely back into a system of technical reproduction such that the subjective/moralistic rounds all scenarios firmly if sereptitiously into the camp of the 'human'. All possibilities of ontologies other than, I mean seriously other than, the god-human dynamic of Judeo-Christianity must be relegated to child's play. Needless to say, a gap opens at this very point, the suture or point de capiton, where, just as all the threads are supposed to come together, to rise above the surface of an indifferent and dead nature, 'childhood', with its inexplicable lacunae, differences, incommensurabilities, masks, liabilities and ecstatic ignorances opens to swallow the certainties which education and social engineering struggle so hard to cover: "The enigma which infancy ushered in for man can be dissolved only in history, just as experience, being infancy and human place of origin, is something he is always in the act of falling from, into language and speech. History, therefore, cannot be the continuous progress of speaking humanity through linear time, but in its essence is hiatus, discontinuity, epoche. That which has its place of origin in infancy must keep on travelling towards and through infancy." Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History ----------- At any rate, while the (perpetual) infant (from in-fans, the one who cannot be speak), or at least some form of infancy (as aporia, skotoma, blind spot) may be necessary for history to 'move', it is also the case that the effect of 'infancy' in adult humans is liable to get them classified as stupid or ridiculous. Or just as bad, as 'New Agers', that is, those who stupidly persist in believing in the patently unbelievable, the supernatural, or the unscientific. There's very little wiggle room there in, as Bruno Latour puts it, the old official modernist culture of purity for events that seem hopelessly contaminated by 'monstrosity' (that is, singularities) or where the subject and objective can not be easily distinguished. (1) Avital Ronell describes the situation aptly for those who fear being the stupid ridiculous one as he who "would turn into the ridiculed figure of the seeker, the improbable hero of thought, a fabulously bumbling tourist of the imaginary." There we would seem to have a description of those who become tarred by the sticky 'black occult tide' of freud's accusation to Jung. And for that matter a good deposition of the way official culture treats those who claim contact with any sort of entity beyond/outside of the realm of the human. (2) The safe position to take in modern society is to always debunk, to deride and to ridicule since that is the closest which the (journalist) man on the street can get to being a pure scientist and the skepticism about the singular, said which popularly believed to be at the heart of the scientific enterprise. "By their fruit shall ye know them." O.K. so where does that leave us? I told you I thought the movie sucked, generally speaking. But you want to know whether the crop circles are real or not, whether they truly do represent a possible counterhistory, even counterontology, and not just in the ordinary sense of Henri Corbin's Imaginal Realm (well, they obviously exist in the fields) but as a PRODUCT of that realm, and in a non-ordinary way, possibly even in a messianic way, a way that changes things for ever. Who knows? Perhaps that speaks more to the scientific need for purity as much as anything else. Let's just put it this way: the results of our poll as to who is stupid enough to believe ANYthing, is dramatic, no matter which way the results are skewed and no matter whether we consider stupidity a necessary ingredient in any kind of knowledge system (and ALL knowledge systems DEPEND on and rest on an oceanic reservoir of ignorance and stupidity); or whether we see stupidity as a childlike naivete which is abolished with 'proper' growth and training. To admit that anyone is stupid (3) always seems to open the door to the dark basal growth of some dark crevasse, which perhaps doesn't even have a bottom. The so-called paranormal is one of those cracks, opening up in the most unlikely of places and, even when questions concerning their reality are dispelled, leaving a lingering tracery of uncertainty. At the very least, and regardless of how marks and signs are made in the world, regardless of their agency, whether human, monkey, or some unknown other, the least that can be said is that the mark INSTITUTES an other of some sort, divides up the world into pieces that effectuate actions and performances IN the world (regardless of where it may reach FROM.) (For the most logical take on that see the work of G. Spencer Brown, The Laws of Form. Of course an intensive part of his demonstrations involves the use of circles. See http://www.lawsofform.org/ideas.html ) notes
atlanta ga august 2002
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