Daniel White

From Monad to man

From Monad to Man: The Concept of Progress in Evolutionary Biology. By Michael Ruse (Harvard University Press, 1997), x + 628 pp.,

Pragmatism vs. Postmodernism: The Struggle between Philosophy and Poetry

49.95 cloth.

Cinema’s Historical Incarnations: Traveling the Möbius Strip of Biotime in Cloud Atlas

The relationship between literature and philosophy has been uneasy since its beginnings in ancient Greece. So in Plato’s Republic Socrates warns that we must neither praise nor adopt new kinds of poetry (in this context ‘‘music’’) without careful critical reflection: ‘‘we should beware of a change to a new form of music, as it could be a danger to all: for the styles of music are never stirred without mixing up politics and norms . . . So the guard-house, I said, apparently ought to be built by our guardians in the realm of music.’’ In Plato’s well known conception, mim esis amounted to ontological and epistemological distancing of the thing represented—a natural entity (z oon) or copy of that (which in his scheme is a copy of a copy, an icon or eikon)—from its foundational idea (or eidos). His Divided Line schematizes the relationship between representation and original in terms of levels of reality and knowledge. Aristotle tries to correct this schema by arguing, ‘‘Mimesis is natural to human beings from childhood and humans differ from other animals by being the most mimetic, as they learn their first lessons through mimesis, and they all take pleasure in mimeses.’’ Aristotle addresses the epistemological issue regarding art by arguing, as he suggests above, that forms of mimesis are species of learning: ‘‘for they [human beings] enjoy viewing icons because it happens that by looking they learn and infer what each thing is, e.g., that this is that [kind of thing].’’ Thus the thing represented becomes logically connected to what it represents, i.e., the copy to the form on which it is modeled. When the ancients eventually give rise to the moderns and they to the postmoderns, the tension between copy and form becomes that between signifier and signified; but the question still remains whether this relationship is simply conventional (a matter of nomos as the ancients would say) or natural (a matter of physis). The question is, in other words, whether signifiers, including the representations of literature, refer simply to conventional beliefs about what the world is or rather to objective reality or ‘‘realities.’’ It is into this longstanding debate that Katrin Amian steps in tandem, she argues, with Charles Peirce, in order to offer a ‘‘negotiated settlement’’ between representation and reality in terms of pragmatism. While the approach that Amian offers is promising, especially in its bringing into potentially fruitful dialogue pragmatic and postmodern factions, her execution of that approach is problematic in that it invokes some inconsistencies arising from a misconstrual of Peirce’s pragmatism. We turn

Documentary Intertext: Robert Gardner’s Dead Birds 1964

This chapter explores the sense of historicity emergent in the Anthropocene as it is articulated in David Mitchell’s novel and the Wachowskis’ and Tykwer’s film Cloud Atlas. The syntax of historical thinking is examined cross-culturally, and a hybrid idea of temporality is postulated based on the metaphor, presented regarding Memento in Chap. 2, of the Mobius strip. In the multicultural consciousness of the new era, as evoked by novel and film, time is both linear and circular. Christian Europe meets Buddhist East Asia in a new sensibility. The dawning historical consciousness evident in these works combines the linear narrative of modernity and its alternatives of “utopia or oblivion,” in Buckminster Fuller’s terms, together with the cyclical “eternal return,” in Mircea Eliade’s (2005) terms, to shape a paradoxical narrative shifting dialectically and cybernetically between the two. All becomes encapsulated from the self-referential and recursive perspective of Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History who, like Janus, looks both ways.

Documentary Intertext: Trance and Dance in Bali 1951

This chapter argues that the rituals of warfare detailed in Robert Gardner’s film study of the Dugum Dani people offer a picture of cyclical human conflict kept in restraint, however chronically painful it might be to the participants, by corrective rituals. It further raises the problems faced by documentary filmmakers who would reconstruct the lives of people to present a coherent picture of societies long gone. The social, political, scientific, and artistic dimensions of film’s epistemology are highlighted, while the wider significance of ethnographic cinema, whatever its shortcomings, is considered in light of the expanded scope of human conflict in the Anthropocene.

Janus’s Celluloid and Digital Faces: The Existential Cyborg—Autopoiēsis in Christopher Nolan’s Memento

This chapter argues that so-called “dissociative disorders” in psychology are akin, as Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson thought, to altered mental states invoked by Balinese dancers in their cultural rituals. The evocation of a “trance” by the hypnotic practices of “dance” yielded a “schizophrenic” consciousness that heeded the wider social-ecological network constituting and sustaining Balinese lifeways. Here, the creation of new states of mind is studied together with the linkages between Balinese ritual and, for example, child rearing, in which patterns of aggression—what Bateson called “schismogenesis”—were constrained by complementary social and psychological responses to symmetrical behavioral sequences leading toward “climax.” Further, the expansion of psychological states that ritual entailed in Bali complements Balinese religion, which in turn, in our final film studied, regulates a temple water system on the island and provides a template for the arts. Human-ecological “wisdom” may be derived, Bateson argued, and “conscious purpose” curtailed, by contemplative artistry. The relationship between digital and analogical coding in the arts, play, and evolution is finally explored, as Balinese patterns of culture become, in Bateson’s work in film and photography, not only the discipline of “visual ethnography,” but also metaphoric guidelines for mental ecology.

Janus East and West: Multicultural Polyvocality—Trinh Minh-ha’s The Fourth Dimension and The Digital Film Event

This chapter argues that Leonard Shelby, protagonist of Memento, is a model of selfhood in the Anthropocene. His subjectivity is self-reflexive as he, despite impaired memory, shapes his identity and course of action in a recurring cycle of signs. Recording clues by Polaroid camera and tattoos, he becomes a human artifact, a cyborg or “spiritual automaton … reflected in its own content,” as Deleuze writes, displaying externalized memories like hieroglyphics, positioning himself existentially in an encircling mental ecology where he finds himself cast away: humanity “thrown” on the shore of a new era.

Documentary Intertext: André Singer’s and J. Stephen Lansing’s The Goddess and the Computer 1988

This chapter argues that Chinese and Japanese Buddhism, including its concepts of spatiality, temporality, and phenomenal form, intersects with digital media and late modern industrial technologies, especially high-speed rail, to produce a Janus-faced vision of Japan, old and new. The sensibility evoked by Trinh’s digital film event is in the spirit of what F.C.S Northrop called “the meeting of East and West” (1946). Her work shapes an autopoietic perspective consonant with Varela’s second-generation cybernetics, Dōgen’s Zen, and Bashō’s haibun (prose with poetry) to recreate a sense of itinerancy through the multicultural landscape of the Anthropocene.

Introduction: Stepping into the Play Frame—Cinema as Mammalian Communication

The two faces of Janus emerge in this chapter to invoke the perspectives of the arts and the sciences, C. P. Snow’s two cultures, reconnected in a renewed hybrid persona. The “Goddess” is the mythological narrative of Bali that is wedded here to the “Computer” inscribed in the cybernetic analysis of the human-ecological system. In the present film, they come to a meeting of the minds, embodied in “priests and programmers,” as Stephen Lansing describes their union, working together to create sustainable agriculture. The wider perspective that their meeting implies is mirrored in Roy Rappaport’s landmark work in the functional human ecology of the Maring people of New Guinea. Here, he found and demonstrated functionally, as Bateson surmised about Balinese and Iatmul, the ritual system was coupled with ecological and social systems to produce a form of adaptation in dynamic equilibrium, a relative steady state, with its biotic and social environments. The escalating curves of symmetrical schismogenesis that have so haunted Euro-American civilization and now threaten it with collapse are curtailed by religious ritual in traditional Bali and New Guinea. That the Western escalations of conflict are augmented by modern technology, which to date is still not being effectively tempered by information techniques or the humane ministrations of the arts and humanities, makes the fruitful meeting of the goddess and computer here significant and timely. It depicts a peaceable hybrid identity not unlike the Buddhist persona of Dōgen in dialogue with the self-thinking thought of Aristotle and Hegel, or the logos of Heraclitus: a conversation of distinctive value for audiences in the Anthropocene.

Conclusion: Toward a Transdisciplinary Critical Theory of Film

The critical perspective on film in the Anthropocene fashioned in the present book is both old and new. It is derived from Aristotle and Plato and from Gregory Bateson (Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000a) and Norbert Wiener (1961), as well as a range of philosophical and literary perspectives in between. Its structural principles include the idea of “play” as a form of communicative exchange shared widely across Mammalia, combined with the idea of art as syllogistical mimēsis, derived from Aristotle, to provide “frames” through which to understand film as a multi-layered form of communication. The physical machineries of modernity meet with communicative ones of postmodernity in the digital camera: a hybrid of mechanism and information. The complex problems posed by the Anthropocene, from this perspective, might effectively be addressed in the medium of “film” as an artifact produced by this emerging “informatic” assemblage. The key films studied are summarized.