A Global Cinematic Zone of Animal and Technology

This art icle was downloaded by: [ Seung- hoon Jeong] On: 25 June 2013, At : 05: 06 Publisher: Rout ledge I nform a Lt d Regist ered in England and Wales Regist ered Num ber: 1072954 Regist ered office: Mort im er House, 37- 41 Mort im er St reet , London W1T 3JH, UK Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities Publicat ion det ails, including inst ruct ions f or aut hors and subscript ion inf ormat ion: ht t p: / / www. t andf online. com/ loi/ cang20 A GLOBAL CINEMATIC ZONE OF ANIMAL AND TECHNOLOGY Seung-hoon Jeong a a New York Universit y Abu Dhabi , PO Box 129188, Abu Dhabi , Unit ed Arab Emirat es To cite this article: Seung-hoon Jeong (2013): A GLOBAL CINEMATIC ZONE OF ANIMAL AND TECHNOLOGY, Angelaki: Journal of t he Theoret ical Humanit ies, 18: 1, 139-157 To link to this article: ht t p: / / dx. doi. org/ 10. 1080/ 0969725X. 2013. 783435 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTI CLE Full t erm s and condit ions of use: ht t p: / / www.t andfonline.com / page/ t erm s- andcondit ions This art icle m ay be used for research, t eaching, and privat e st udy purposes. 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What is staged in this Disney animation is not a National Geographic on wildlife but a human drama newly mixing the old motifs of Oedipus and Hamlet in the character-driven, goal-oriented classical Hollywood narrative. On the contrary, the SF adventure Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg 1993) shows a utopian theme park with biotechnologically created dinosaurs turning into a catastrophic dystopia by accident, in an instant. Animals may look “beautiful” when put in a touristic zoo under human control, but their potentially insurmountable power is in nature “dynamically sublime” in Kant’s terms, always ready to manifest itself as dangerous monstrosity that can run amok, terrifying us and making us feel powerless. These two oppositional modes of animal representation, however, work in the same anthropocentric paradigm in which the notion of nature, the animal world, could not come into being without its insertion into the cultural dichotomy of nature and culture. Nature did not preexist culture in that its idea was not born until culture named and incorporated it seung-hoon jeong A GLOBAL CINEMATIC ZONE OF ANIMAL AND TECHNOLOGY into the conceptual frame of what humans believe as reality.1 Only within this frame does nature appear to be the opposite of our lifeworld, while the frame itself remains cultural. Therefore, animals exist as the Animal only and always as viewed by, and related to, the Human. We immediately recognize animal allegories for human characteristics, good or evil, brave or cowardly, generous or greedy, and so on (thus animal characters are inherently civilized); otherwise we consider animals to be either domestic and helpful or untamable and harmful (thus the prevailing “pet or pest” binary persists). Our binary attitude to them, at least in our civilized safety without sublime threat from wild animals, is then sentimental ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/13/010139-19 © 2013 Taylor & Francis http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2013.783435 139 Downloaded by [Seung-hoon Jeong] at 05:06 25 June 2013 animal and technology or brutal, “sometimes aglow with the welcoming hearth but just as often coldly shutting out the unwanted outsider” (Chaudhuri and Zurkow).2 The point is not that hospitality can easily change into hostility, but that this Manichean reaction itself deprives animals of their Real that could not be fully symbolized in our reality; or, say, it deprives our reality of room for approaching or encountering their Real. Conversely, the animal Real, even if absolutely aggressive and invincibly destructive to humans, subsists primarily as being-in-itself, which we only secondarily view as being-forus, similar or opposed to us. Then how could we conceive cinematic alternatives that are open to the lost Real? We first need to be aware of a certain self-contradiction in our ideological conception of the animal and nature: the animal is wild in the wilderness, whereas wilderness often connotes nature as the organic, holistic, hippie-spiritualized ground of peace and harmony which has been not only uncontaminated by human civilization but “must be biologically intact and legally protected” as the WILD Foundation states (www. wild.org). This virginal environment valued for moral, cultural and aesthetic reasons remarkably colors the Japanese animation represented by Miyazaki Hayao, whose works have been no less globally consumed and appreciated than those of Disney or Pixar: Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984), My Neighbor Totoro (1988), Princess Mononoke (1997) and Spirited Away (2001), to name a few. Imbued with local animism and spiritualism, the Gaia-evoking Japanese nature he depicts nurtures life and cures wound, exerts magical power and defeats colonial violence. But despite this apparent “green” message, Hayao is evidently not a naı̈ve New Age conservationist appealing mainly to children. Princess Mononoke, a unique Asian werewolf film, does not just focus on a humananimal’s individual psycho-social struggle in the Western horror format that demonizes either humanity or animality. It rather reveals how the human and the animal are complexly interrelated and how each side is divided as well: beside imperial and samurai forces, a humanitarian leader builds a self-sustaining commune through the early modern manufacture of firearms; the boars and the apes in nature are destructive and even counterproductive, while the deer-like forest deity shishigami, the spirit of nature, stands for neither good nor evil, neither life nor death. Nature is a realm of events simply to be accepted, which appears unfair to the werewolf girl who cries out on her mother wolf’s death by humans (Levi 152).3 In other words, our common sense of wild/erness implies the discrepancy between animal and nature, which actually insinuates the discrepancy within nature itself. Nature is not simply organic in its totality or antagonistic to humans, but deeply antagonistic and even indifferent to itself. One might call this selfdestructive inexplicable nature “anti-nature” (antiphusis), as Jacques Lacan suggests, insofar as it challenges precisely not the human world but the humanist frame of nature. Anti-nature is the barred Real, not a unified wholeness but a fractured materiality blocked from the symbolic order of smooth linguistic translation and logical intellectual understanding (Johnston 34–37).4 If Japanimation exposes this unnatural nature, unlike Hollywood animation, Alfred Hitchcock may be one of the first Hollywood auteurs who introduced a different sort of disaster film with the animal behavior being in no way completely explicable. His famous Birds (1963) begins in a pet shop where Melanie buys a pair of lovebirds, but her romantic boat trip with this animal gift to Mitch is cracked by a seagull’s sudden hit on her forehead. This small incident is followed by all kinds of bird attacks on the entire seaside town of Bodega Bay in their immeasurable number taking on the “mathematically sublime.” We know that this natural violence has a multilayered classical psychoanalytic allegory: the intervention of Mitch’s jealous mother, a Hitchcockian superego, in his romance with Melanie; the unconscious attachment as aggressivity inherent in the mirror phase entered by the couple; the punishment of Melanie’s active sexuality in phallocentric classical narrative; the uncanny return of the repressed in human 140 Downloaded by [Seung-hoon Jeong] at 05:06 25 June 2013 jeong civilization with caged animals turning into wild ones; and so forth.5 We nonetheless find no comprehensively comprehensible answer to the primary question of why birds attack. What is the actual motivation of those peaceful animals’ abrupt change into brutal monsters? But the answer lies in the question itself. This incomprehensibility, this unmotivated selfmutation of natural balance is the nature of nature, the anti-natural core of what we take for granted as nature. The first bird’s attack on Melanie’s euphoric boat in the bay appears, Slavoj Žižek says, as a “Hitchcockian blot” (Looking Awry 88–106); a visual smear that triggers the overturn of our picture of reality, the catastrophe of our harmonious ecology of environment – Greek katastrophē means overturn. We are helpless in accounting for this intrusion of the Real, and our powerlessness proves nothing but the absurd otherness of the animal. The mainstream cinema often leaves room for multiple interpretative entry points to this otherness, but again, anthropocentricity is the common hermeneutic matrix of social, political, mythical, religious references or allegories itself. We easily recognize the biblical plagues of locusts in The Omen (Richard Donner 1976), the crime investigation through the communication with insects in Phenomena (Dario Argento 1985), the bestial eroticism of Western werewolves in Cat People (Jacques Tourneur 1942; Paul Schrader 1982) and Wolf (Mike Nichols 1994), etc. In the genre cycle of disaster film, Gremlins (Joe Dante 1984), for example, where cute eponymous pets turn into malevolently mischievous monsters, sutures the motif of The Birds into the 1980s “campy” trend of disaster comedy that parodies former genre films (Feil 31–58). Rather than confronting animality as such, this kitsch film transforms the animal as the external ontological Other into internal sociological others of the majority in a human community. Gremlins’ mathematically sublime proliferation is then read, ironically or critically, to stand for the growing threat to the mainstream middle-class white America by stereotyped social minorities: the disgusting creatures are black like African 141 Americans, do whatever like liberals, subvert domestic power relationship like feminists … Likewise, ontological others such as zombies, monsters, ghosts, and vampires have been interpreted as figuring such minorities, including communists, immigrants, foreigners, workers, and even capitalists sucking the blood of the proletariat. In short, animal-like beings on screen cannot help being more or less personified in the frame of cultural studies whose identity politics is built on differences in class, sex, gender, race, ethnicity, and so on, within human societies. And in this aspect they are treated as favorable or unfavorable, our friends or enemies. Thus, again, the two modes of animal representation mentioned at the beginning are intermingled into one: the Animal as/ for the Human. Undoubtedly, this anthropomorphic tendency works according to what Fredric Jameson calls hermeneutic “depth models”: dialectic, psychoanalytic, existential, or semiotic – the hierarchical dichotomy that there is a latent meaning, essence, signified below the appearance of manifest signifier (Jameson 12). What matters is the invisible deeper level full of human-oriented meanings and not their animal image. Put differently, however, the absolute difference between human and animal is reduced to relative differences among human-looking animal groups. The “reading” of animals as disguised humans is then at risk of being blind to animals themselves; our vision has a blind spot with regards to their animal being as just seen on screen. More significant than the depth of humanized meanings is the surface of the animal; it is the surface that exhibits the animal as radical difference above cultural differences among human-animals. The fundamental conceptual task is therefore to add ontological others (including the machine, as we will see) to cultural others while replacing the latter in reading films. This supplement would help retool established cultural studies while remobilizing identity politics in the contemporary context of the so-called “ethical turn of the political” – to simplify Jacques Rancière’s diagnosis, the political conflict among oppositional identity/interest Downloaded by [Seung-hoon Jeong] at 05:06 25 June 2013 animal and technology groups in a society now gives way to the ethical one between a global community of harmonious differences as a whole and its exception (Rancière 109–32). The national politics of bourgeoisie vs. proletariat in a country, for instance, becomes less fundamentally decisive than the global antagonism between an encompassing multicultural society and a small band of terrorists. Rancière argues that the ethical turn results in the globalized world’s “war on terror” that ends up being indistinct from terror itself in its operation, so he critically points out political side-effects of this turn. Nevertheless, given the direction of ongoing globalization that tolerates ever more diverse class/ sexual/racial identities while generating unprecedented global issues beyond national solutions, the place of the remnant of the world system could be conceived of as larger than just terrorism. It is the place of the environment whose catastrophe would impact the entire global village beyond individual political communities. Ontological others of the human call for our attention in this regard, urging us to explore a larger bio-polis emerging between, and encompassing both, the human world that becomes ever more globally homogenized and its radically external-immanent environment, natural or technological. The question of how to face this environment requires complexly ethical rather than simply political attitudes, since biopolitics concerns not a new public sphere so much as the condition of any such polis, as we will see. We need to review the ethical turn expansively as eco-ontological. redirecting ethics of the animal To do so, I look at a series of contemporary films that seem to embody a facet of “global cinema” made in the twenty-first century in the sense that, even if very locally produced, they could directly confront us with animality as a globally eco-ontological other of the human. Animals in such films, made in Western or Third World countries, appear on the boundary between the Symbolic and the Real, between fictional and documentary aesthetics – that is, at the limit of the symbolic construction of fictive reality. This liminality is another name for animality. A positivist lessen in this context is found in Project Nim (James Marsh 2011), a pure documentary on behavioral scientist Herbert Terrace’s 1970s project of raising a chimpanzee called Nim in a human family and teaching it American Sign Language. Not long after the phenomenon of Woodstock, the project took place not in a laboratory but mostly in a huge house with large natural grounds outside New York. The ambitious experiment of bringing human communication to the animal was conducted in the hippie mood of bringing the human back to nature. Its home-movie-style footage indeed shows the most positive communication that could occur “when species meet,” if we borrow a book title from Donna Haraway, who draws attention to the everyday practice of intersubjectivity between human and animal and their mutual response in work and play. Notably, Haraway criticizes contemporary Continental philosophy on the animal for ignoring ordinary and mundane interspecies companionship. She argues that Derrida’s famous speculation on his cat’s gaze at his naked body, which virtually ignited recent animal studies in the humanities, “failed a simple obligation of companion species” by lacking curiosity about “what the cat might actually be doing, feeling, thinking, or perhaps making available to him in looking back at him” (Haraway, When Species Meet 20). Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s antiOedipal and anti-capitalist project proposed the provocative notion of “becoming-animal,” which, however, proves the profound absence of respect for and with actual animals, only “figuring relentless otherness knotted into never fully bounded or fully self-referential entities.” Against this “philosophy of the sublime, not the earthly, not the mud” (27–32), Haraway builds on behavior semiotics and ecological biology that shed light on life-entities’ autopoiesis, the self-making and self-maintaining feedback with other entities in Gaian systems, cybernetic or otherwise.6 When becominganimal works as the deterritorialization of human subjectivity into the liberating molecular 142 Downloaded by [Seung-hoon Jeong] at 05:06 25 June 2013 jeong state immanent in all beings, animal companionship serves the individuation of animal subjectivity in the systemic environment of communication. Unfortunately, however, Project Nim finally failed despite the deep and long emotional connection made between Nim and his educators. Nim’s understanding of sign language was remarkable but limited, while his occasional violence hurt several dedicated animal lovers. Terrace abandoned the project; Nim was sent to a farm and put in a pen with iron bars. The project started on the hopeful fact that 98.7 percent of the DNA in humans and chimpanzees is identical, but its end suggests that the unbridgeable abyss is inherent in the 1.3 percent difference between the two species. Nim’s linguistic precariousness and unpredictable violence may all be condensed in this small yet decisive portion of alterity for which humans have nothing to offer but the old alternative: care or cage. That is, care-taking companionship between species could not be as symmetrically mutual as Haraway desires; it would still face the risk of treating the animal other as an object of hospitality or hostility, tolerance or intolerance. Haraway, of course, emphasizes the training in the contact zone for practical interactivities with animals that can challenge human exceptionalism. A fundamental question is, however, who initiates such interactivities. It is always the human and not the animal that desires to bridge their gap, and thereby the human always takes the position of a host who invites animal guests to his home. The ideal of mutual companionship, then, evokes the idea of impossible hospitality. For Derrida, pure hospitality is impossible in both ways: first, the host cannot be hospitable towards the guests who take over his property ownership and control of the situation, that is, who threaten the precondition of hospitality itself; second, if unconditional hospitality is offered through non-mastery and the abandon of all property, there is no longer the possibility of hosting anyone as there is no ownership or control (Derrida and Dufourmantelle 135– 55). Conversely, hospitality is possible only as 143 conditioned, limited, just like the religious notion of tolerance taking the form of a Christian charity – its paternalistic gesture of invitation still implies the juridical subordination or assimilation of the other to the host’s symbolic order: “I invite you, I welcome you into my home, on the condition that you adapt to the laws and norms of my territory, according to my language, tradition, memory, and so on.” Pure hospitality, on the contrary, is open “to someone who is neither expected nor invited, to whomever arrives as an absolutely foreign visitor, as a new arrival, nonidentifiable and unforeseeable, in short, wholly other” (Habermas and Derrida 162). The first case of partial hospitality resonates with Žižek’s critical view of capitalist multiculturalism whose liberalist tolerance is limited to benevolent other cultures, music or food, which are deprived of their excessive intolerable otherness: violence, patriarchy, fundamentalism, etc. (Žižek, “Multiculturalism”). The second case of hospitality itself implies the complete loss of anthropocentric initiative that sets up the field of interaction as such, returning to pure nature prior to the birth of the notion of nature. If the first is related to the ethical turn of politics in the public sphere, the second insinuates a state in which this civilized polis as a cultural frame itself no longer exists. This ideal hospitality is put in a double bind: it is inevitably conditioned in practice through the host’s awareness and management of it; or when unconditioned, it couldn’t maintain itself as hospitality. Project Nim tests the limit of such hospitality as cannot but be imperfect in reality. Its concrete trans-species companionship is done through the invitation of the animal to a linguistic community owned and controlled by the human host. The guest who hurts this hospitality is deported and imprisoned, which implies that hospitality cannot be unconditional because of the host’s self-protection. In his polis, the host can declare a “state of exception” in which the detention of the threatening other is executed in the way of degrading it from a community member to just a “naked life” whose political subjectivity is suspended like Downloaded by [Seung-hoon Jeong] at 05:06 25 June 2013 animal and technology the homo sacer (Agamben). Politics is underlain by this biopolitics that the host operates through his sovereignty to distinguish the political from the natural state of subjectivity. Yet this bio-polis does not mean that the state of exception restores pure nature, but rather creates a sort of simulated natural state where life becomes vulnerably animal and thus its right to live completely depends on the sovereign’s power. Nim finally becomes an animal after his long human education, but then he is an encaged animal, a bestial terrorist under surveillance and punishment. One may be tempted to save such an animal homo sacer in the name of its “rights” drawn from the liberal justice tradition. Animal activists, protectionists, anti-fur protesters, and even vegetarians more or less assume animal rights to be legally endorsed and accepted, just like the human rights of the unrepresented rabble, voiceless people, Guantanamo prisoners, and so on. Paradoxically, this kind of political struggle results in the ethical turn of politics; the more social subalterns register as equal subjects in a community, the more inclusive the concept of rights becomes – it becomes no longer a political goal to achieve but an ethical bottom to accept, almost like a Kantian categorical imperative: we ought to embrace suffering others! Cary Wolfe, however, points out that ethical standing and civic inclusion in the “rights” conversation are predicated upon rationality, autonomy, and agency as intentionality of a member of what Kant called “the community of reasonable beings” (Wolfe 127). Ron Broglio argues that “rights” thus presumes community as founded on humanist ideals, which would inevitably set juridical limits to the nature and exercise of animal rights (Broglio and Young). As a result, while the ethical turn expands the established polis bioontologically, the humanely endowed rights could paradoxically keep animals more or less segregated, degraded, or at best specially treated through “affirmative actions” taken by the enlarged community. Then hospitality would be reduced back to tolerance, the falsely neutral and potentially hegemonic ideal in the Enlightenment tradition of endorsing others. One should ask here if this humanitarian ideology is not the unavoidable compromise of ethics or the way it is actualized in reality; an ethics that is defined primarily as one’s obligation to the other’s suffering, and furthermore the human’s compassion on the animal’s vulnerability. Judith Butler finds humanity in such an empathy-laden ethics towards the neighbor living a precarious life, its vulnerable face we must not kill in the context of post-9/11 biopolitics (Butler xvii–xviii). But this Levinasian ethics as the reverse of narcissistic aggression is grounded on the cultural (thus still anthropocentric) tradition in which the place of the other traces back to that of infinity opened by God’s calling to which Christian sacrifice could respond fully. What counts is one’s ability to respond to this infinite otherness, one’s “responsibility” for the Other. Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man (2005) leaves room for thinking about a different ethics. To begin with, this auteuristic documentary confronts us with the maximum paradox of hospitality embodied in the life of Timothy Treadwell, a self-claimed animal keeper who was, however, devoured by the very grizzly bears he loved for eight summers in Alaska. The point is not simply that his ethical act led to a perplexing horrible end. The film shows a substantial amount of the video footage made and left by Treadwell himself, in which we actually notice some distance between big “sublime” grizzlies in the background (nature) and the grizzly man with a movie camera as well as a small “beautiful” pet in the foreground (civilization). This physical gap is filled only with Treadwell the speaking subject’s ceaseless words that set his psychological connection to the bears. It is as though language, the lack of which defines the animal for many philosophers from Descartes to Lacan, built an invisible barrier between two species, disguised as their companionate communication. Treadwell’s one-sided verbal love letters to peaceful animals are virtually like a symbolic wall that protects the animal protector from the animal Real, its dangerous unpredictable violence.7 Despite his proclamation of animal protection, or rather, because of its linguistic humanism itself, the 144 Downloaded by [Seung-hoon Jeong] at 05:06 25 June 2013 jeong grizzly man thus remains an ecological multiculturalist whose hospitality partakes of patronizing distanciation from the animal other. All his talk to bears might imply this hidden message: “I love you, but please stay there!” Liberalist tolerance works only insofar as others are not harmful. Treadwell’s tragedy is that this distance was too shortened to keep him in safety at a certain point, unawares to him. That is, his hospitality could be maintained only on its own self-contradictory condition that it couldn’t be unconditional, though it pretended to be. Interestingly, however, we realize here that what renders “ecological hospitality” impossible is not the human host’s abandonment of his ownership and control (Treadwell kept this condition) but primarily the animal guest’s complete indifference to the host. No grizzly bear in fact has recognized his hospitality as hospitality; no animal indeed has the concept of and respect for the hospitable human’s property and protection. What underlies this animality is antiphusis as aforementioned, with nature as dark, violent, rotten, hostile, which appears negative in the anthropocentric frame, but which fundamentally implies neutrality for the human. A skeleton of a bear devoured by another bear and decaying animal corpses that Treadwell encounters prove not so much a certain animal tragedy as the natural contingency of anti-nature that resists our symbolic explication. Through Treadwell, Herzog sees this permanent crisis of nature as its own homeostasis which blocks any sentimentalized politics of nature. And despite his well-arranged narration, Herzog’s symbolic language is more into the ecstatic truth of this enigmatic nature through ephiphanic images of animals and thus much less rationalist than Lacan’s formulations of antiphusis as barring the Symbolic, that is, as still conceptualized in relation to culture (Noys 49).8 In passing, Wolfe argues that Žižek treats the animal as a mere metonymy for the Lacanian Real and thus his approach is also still anthropocentric without thinking the “distribution” of subjectivity across species lines (Wolfe 125). But what kind of subjectivity could be distributed to the animal if not 145 vulnerable precariousness? I will go into this issue below, but at this point it seems more important to focus on the total absence of animal subjectivity connected to the human. A remarkable moment in Grizzly Man is when Treadwell finds the steaming lump of a grizzly’s feces and calls it “Wendy’s poop,” as if it were a “gift” by which he can feel the bear’s inside, that is, the inside of what is outside him. The dirty material trace of anti-natural rottenness is named and appreciated by the man who thereby feels belongingness to the other. This means not an intersubjective gifting as giveand-take economy but a paradoxical revelation that what is given to him as a gift is never given and even acknowledged as a gift by the animal giver, thus never to be returned. Is it not a miraculous example of pure gift irreducible to exchange which Derrida views as impossible, just like pure hospitality irreducible to tolerance (Derrida, Given Time 34–70)? In other words, pure hospitality that is always impossible when offered by the human to the animal might be possible when we rethink it the other way around. The subject of gifting, of hospitality, is not Treadwell but an originally anonymous bear which, however, has no subjectivity related or intended to him, that is, which has subjectivity, if any, absolutely indifferent to him. The animal offers Treadwell unconditional hospitality neither with call, contract, control, nor with property, protection, or precondition. In fact, it is not that the grizzly man invites grizzlies to his home but that he is accepted and nurtured in their home (called a national park), which he visits without invitation. Genuine hospitality is, then, that which can be only recognized, retroactively, by the visitor and not the inviter, in an exceptional state where there is actually no host/guest power structure. Derrida also suggests “a hospitality of visitation rather than invitation,” adding that the visit might actually be very dangerous, but “a hospitality without risk, a hospitality backed by certain assurances, a hospitality protected by an immune system against the wholly other” could not be true hospitality (Habermas and Derrida 162). This true hospitality is again Downloaded by [Seung-hoon Jeong] at 05:06 25 June 2013 animal and technology almost impossible to realize whereas its significance may lie in that it serves as the conceptual ideal of actual tolerance, if not perfect, still needed in reality – for Derrida, le don absolu is also like the impossible ground on which actual exchange economy is enabled just as ungraspable différance catalyzes any system of concrete differences. Yet we can go further than this conceptual justification of pure hospitality or gift on the human’s side if we posit the visitor not as the host but as the guest of animal hospitality in a zone of indeterminacy between subject and object. Visitation would thus be viewed as an ethical adventure of abandoning one’s subjectivity as a host, becoming a volunteer homo sacer who can be killed without being sacrificed in anti-nature, and finding oneself to be in an unprepared and unexpected hospitality without any symmetrical exchange or companionship with the other. Does this not suggest an ethics that is not responsible for the other as a vulnerable sufferer but responsive to the other as a pure gift? A truly ethical act might be to accept the other’s being in itself as a gift to me in the realization that it is I who is vulnerable and thus virtually accepted by the very other, gifted its unintended hospitality. Brilliant in this regard is Tropical Malady (2004) by Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, whose locality depicted in a surreal as well as hyperrealist (often documentarylooking) style has opened a new territory of world cinema. The film consists of the first half showing a shy gay couple Tong and Keng’s euphoric meanderings mostly in a city and the second half unfolding in the jungle into which Tong suddenly disappears and Keng jumps to trace his lost love. This abrupt spatial shift is also temporal, marked by the audacious intermission of a ten-minute blank screen that looks as though “time is out of joint.” It ruptures the present, while opening its subsisting past in itself, the mythical memory of the world retained in the jungle. There, it is narrated that a folkloric shaman has transformed himself into a tiger and is terrorizing the countryside that Keng’s army protects. In effect, Tong, appearing in the jungle as a naked man who can shape-shift into an animal, must be the very shaman-tiger that undoubtedly devoured him. A baboon tells Keng in an animal language (subtitled) to kill the lonesome tiger to free it from its world, or to let it devour him to enter its world. But all this weird setting does not imply the mere anthropocentric antagonism between animal and human, nature and civilization. Rather, the jungle appears as what Charles Baudelaire called “forests of symbols” which correspond to each other, with a Heideggerian “clearing,” an open empty space of the forest where Being is unconcealed. At the end, Keng encounters the tiger in the dark, which has been watching him like the gaze from the Real before his sighting of it (see Figs 1, 2). Perching on a tree, it stares directly forward with its calm, fixed, silent sublimity, evoking the bottomless, unreadable, impassive gaze of Derrida’s cat. And just as naked Derrida feels ashamed in front of his naked pet and yet realizes that the binary of naked/clothed itself is humanist, improper to the animal for which the notion of nudity does not exist, so Keng feels first fearful and undressed, but then disarmed and opened to the tiger that does not appear to be simply a bestial enemy to hunt. The animal gaze destabilizes the frame of nature vs. culture and seemingly addresses the man in an unheard inhuman voice, which Derrida compares to God’s calling (The Animal That Therefore I Am 17–18). But rather than tracing back to Judeo-Christian theology, we could see here the thickly concealed face of the tiger representing neither a vulnerable other to save nor a hostile other to subdue, but an inert interface to a world larger than human, the Virtual immanent in the Actual in Deleuze’s terms, the “plane of immanence” to which Keng whispers: “I give you my spirit, my flesh, and my memories … Every drop of my blood sings our song, a song of happiness.” Of course there is no inter-species dialogue; Keng’s giving of himself would rather indicate his acceptance of the animal gaze as an unplanned invitation to nature, his response (without responsibility) to unbounded hospitality from the universe that offers a chance to 146 Downloaded by [Seung-hoon Jeong] at 05:06 25 June 2013 jeong Fig. 1. The tiger in the dark, which has been watching Keng. Still from Tropical Malady (dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul 2004). Fig. 2. The moment at which Keng encounters the tiger. Still from Tropical Malady (dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul 2004). undress his civilized identity and join an immemorial world. Far from creating a romantic happy ending, this hospitality invites him to a radical dissolution or liberation of subjectivity into a primordial zone where animal and human, body and spirit, matter and memory are all indeterminate in deindividuated happiness. “When species meet,” the human now thus tries no longer befriending animals but experiences “becoming-animal” in multiple senses: not only becoming a bare life detached 147 from society (Agamben) and becoming stripped of humanity in front of the naked animal (Derrida) but also becoming desubjectified in Deleuze’s terms. Though Keng kneels down and moves like a beast, this gesture may not signal the imitation of an individual organism so much as a life-changing line of flight from the (Oedipalizing) organization of subjectivity towards “the marvelous of a non human life” on the plane of immanence (Deleuze and Guattari 231–34). Downloaded by [Seung-hoon Jeong] at 05:06 25 June 2013 animal and technology Furthermore, as his face loses its identity in the dark jungle, just like the tiger immersed in darkness, becoming-animal involves becoming part of the environment where animality and humanity become indistinct in their molecular state. The tiger is virtually “apparent without appearing,” like the “phasmid,” that stick insect that Georges Didi-Huberman describes whose body perfectly resembles twigs or leaves so as to incorporate rather than imitate its environment (Didi-Huberman 15–20). And as its etymology shows, the phasmid implies “phantasm” and “apparition” between being and nonbeing that can in a trice mutate into a dangerous beast, devouring us into the abyss that effaces all ontological boundaries. Likewise, the shamantiger, a human-animal that devoured Tong, is about to devour Keng’s body or at least eat his soul, lurking like a ghost-shadow in the dark.9 Now, the ontology of the animal takes on the hauntology of the ghost, and the threshold between the human and these ontological others appears all the more fatal because its transgression entails the complete surrender of the master’s position. But again, this risktaking visitation to the matrix of others would be the ecstatic price of dismantling rigidified humanist subjectivity. Keng enters the uncanny realm of immanent connectedness to the animal, the ghost, namely all virtual life, becoming imperceptible and clandestine like them. In short, becoming-animal exercises the ethical act of embracing the animal as gifted. Through its indifferent hospitality man does not so much become an animal as disintegrate into the virtual grounding of all actual beings. reinforcing subjectivity through becoming-other In light of this context, one could draw on Herzog whose films abound with animals: a cat witnessing to people like Derrida’s pet (Heart of Glass 1976), domestic animals resisting human mastery (Woyzeck 1979), decayed corpses of horses scattered in the desert (Fata Morgana 1971), monkeys besieging a quixotic hero’s broken raft (Aguirre, Wrath of God 1972), molecule-like rats inundating a vampire’s coffin and town (Nosferatu 1979) … Herzog’s politics of the animal, if any, certainly disturbs anthropocentrism (Sheehan). At this point, however, we should note that, rather than being liberating, these animals often represent the remnants of anti-nature, a dead end of mystical romanticism where the sublime adventure of surpassing humanity fails or faces death. In effect, the encounter with animals does not always and literally lead to radical molecular desubjectification, which is practically infeasible. We therefore need to review Deleuze’s anarchic becoming-animal in terms of the more or less actual potential to transform socially organized subjectivity through contact with animals. This contact occurs in liminal space where one’s life becomes “bare” in the first place, as in Apichatpong’s jungle – his Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) shows not a beast but a ghost in the jungle, a human phasmid that reincarnates the world’s memory of itself. The cave is another significant place where the animal and the ghost reside in the Apichatpong films; one may recall the cave-looking Zone in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979) too, where those who enter it enter their own unconscious reverie and desire. Slightly differently, Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010) deserves attention, a 3D documentary on the Chauvet caves of Southern France containing the oldest known pictorial creations of humankind. Painted 32,000 years ago, these first frescos bear evidence of primitives’ life surrounded by animals to watch, hunt, fight, tame, admire, play with, and so on. Notable are some of them depicting the transformation of human bodies into, or hybridization with, animals, which seemingly expresses more than species companionship. That is, what are represented in the cave – humankind’s first cultural space – are actually people’s bare life and their fantasy of animal life, with the boundary of culture and nature blurring. The initial desire for becoming-animal, if we still use this term, is imaginatively figured here, not disfiguring but refiguring humanity and thus prefiguring its reinforcement through animality in the 148 Downloaded by [Seung-hoon Jeong] at 05:06 25 June 2013 jeong form of a new species like the cyborg. Even if still unrealistic or futuristic, the upgrading reterritorialization of human subjectivity via non-human others has indeed been more palpably imagined and envisioned than its radical deterritorialization since the era of the caveman.10 It is therefore possible to take the opposite direction of visitation to nature as deindividuation, a direction in which humans can embody ontological others, now including the machine that takes the place of the animal in technological civilization. This turn may be less an antithetic reversion to anthropocentrism than a dialectic reaction to the environment in which, as Wolfe says, subjectivity could be distributed across species lines and thus reconfigured even into certain, unprecedented species. Let us briefly recollect Peter Greenaway’s fake documentary The Falls (1980) that presents ninetytwo victims of the Violent Unknown Event (VUE), which has caused immortality, disability, and ninety-two new peculiar languages. Among the victims whose surnames begin with the letters FALL are those who really “fall” from buildings and Icarus-style homemade wings, a prosthetic device for becoming-animal. Such symptoms of man’s metamorphosis into bird recall the hubristic ambition of flying, suggesting the VUE as a modern Babel myth about the end of civilization (the title also invokes fallout).11 Despite the apocalyptic scenarios it introduces, however, The Falls is not a Stanley Kubrick-style black comedy or a dystopian science fiction. The VUE, the attack of the Real, brings about a somewhat jovial disorder of all human systems and causes new hybrid changes to human bodies. That is, the apocalypse was perhaps the VUE itself, time was already out of joint, and what the film shows is a post-apocalyptic new world that reassembles subjectifying apparatuses by producing diverse languages, changes of sex, identity, and skin, physical deformities, and even a dog’s becoming-bird. Such a collective schizophrenia partakes of Deleuze and Guattari’s revolutionary disorganization of the entire solidified actuality, but multiple modes and actions of becoming-animal do 149 not destroy the organic form of life. Rather, humanity is mutated in mimetic ways of becoming different organisms, which lets us imagine new potentials of retooling our being, often in conjunction with technology.12 The spectrum of this organic change and its implication is, however, wide. If becomingother in The Falls is radical but comical, thus somewhat lightly treated, it is seriously staged as a fictive yet painful process in Black Swan (Darren Arnofsky 2010), for instance. The story is simple: Nina is a perfect ballerina for the White Swan with innocence and grace, but Lily is better for the Black Swan with guile and sensuality. They compete to be the heroine of Swan Lake who must play both the roles, while this rivalry expands into a twisted friendship that provokes Nina to discover and explore her dark side of violence and sexuality. Obviously we see a variation of the Jekyll & Hyde motif in an Oedipal/Electra triangle: Nina’s unconscious desire repressed under her mother-superego’s suffocating control explodes through her uncanny double Lily and her artistic director who is a seductive father figure; yet her inner Black Swan’s power becomes so uncontrollable that it finally engulfs her White Swan ego, destroying her body. What attracts us to this perverted family drama with its typical black-and-white Hollywood moral is Nina’s extreme desire to imitate the Black Swan, the desire for an artistic ideal that is originally impossible to realize but virtually immanent in her unconscious. The finale visualizes all realistic details in which she embodies the character in the form of becoming-animal; her body transforms into a black swan as if this animal inside her casts off its superficial human skin. But this process turns out to be hallucinatory, as the audience in the diegetic space only sees Nina’s perfect performance without bodily change. In other words, the Real of becoming-animal appears only in the form of fantasy, and its discrepancy from reality indicates the unbridgeable fissure of subjectivity in itself. This immanent fissure would open the subject’s primordial “body without organs,” what Deleuze and Guattari term the molecular matrix of any potential organism Downloaded by [Seung-hoon Jeong] at 05:06 25 June 2013 animal and technology prior to being organized, yet what the film shows is not this unrepresentable body but Nina as split into two identifiable bodies, human and animal. The fantasy is then all the more painful as it perfectly mimics the organic form of a single animal, betraying the failure of becoming-animal in reality. This animal mimesis deserves more examination. It is iconic in that Nina resembles the Black Swan and this animal is not real but fictive, so the cinematic depiction of her bodily transformation is basically a digital version of the caveman’s painting of animal– human hybrids; the animal icon is a simulacrum produced by the cutting-edge computer technology. However, it looks indexical as well in that Nina’s body not only becomes visually similar to a swan in appearance but also physically incorporates the animal’s color, shape, skin – the causal traces of her actual connection to material animality – into the iconic simulation. What matters more than the film’s visual representation of the swan is Nina’s tactile presentation of it, the bodily performativity of becoming-animal which may be all the more dangerous than Treadwell’s adventure because of the lack of distance between Nina’s and the swan’s bodies. This sensational corporeality makes her becoming-other as risky as wanted, and ultimately more passive than active. Her self-centered desire for the swan turns into (and out to be) the other-centered desire that forces her to become it out of her control; she is swept by monstrosity inside her that is more than she is. This dialectics of active and passive is salient in David Cronenberg’s work, whose films have provocatively incorporated the machine along with the animal into the human body. Videodrome (1983) now looks like a precursor to Black Swan: on the border between reality and hallucination, Max, a mediaholic man, literally penetrates a woman’s vulva-like mouth on TV, but this phallocentric aggression is none other than the submission to the screenbody that seduces and sucks the spectator, replacing visual distance with tactile proximity. In analyzing this film, Steven Shaviro argues that the passion for the image is not far from radical passivity, “a forced, ecstatic abjection, a form of captivation” (Shaviro 49).13 This process entails the sensation of touch as grounding self-transformation. The hero changes into a “video-activated body,” becoming ever more biotechnologically transgressive. The slit on his belly becomes a slot for videocassettes, a link between surface (skin, retina, image screen) and volume (convoluted thick entrails), and a vaginal orifice indicating his feminization, as “interfaces between biology and technology run amok” (142–44). The embodied desire for radical tactility ultimately turns his hand into a techno-fleshed pistol, whose trigger he pulls on himself at the end. That is, he destroys the tactile body that blocks him from completely joining the other on TV and its virtual world of videodrome; like Nina, he is stuck between actual and virtual bodies. One could say that his intensive experience of the other on screen reaches the impossibility of becoming the other within the possibility of becoming a mechanical interface to the videodrome; thus, becoming-other is possible only as becoming-interface, which implies becoming-abject in society. Despite the dystopian mood of the film, this technological bare life ends up forever floating as an immaterial ghost image in the videodrome as if Max were liberated from his gendered, socialized mortality. The final manifesto “Death to videodrome; long live the new flesh!” sounds like this: Death to the interface; long live the techno-body! We now need hauntology of technology. In short, there is a double ambivalence: the subject’s apparent aggressivity towards the screen-body entails his passive transformation into an interface, and this becoming-interface entails both abjection and liberation as well as regression and transgression. This ambivalence concerns bio-ontology at large in Cronenberg’s films such as Scanners (1981), The Fly (1986), and Dead Ringers (1988), wherein the human body embodies parasite alterity in forms of other minds or even the non-human. Becoming-other, biological or technological, is nothing other than this becoming-parasite that puts the subject in the double bind between self and other. Radically dispossessed and 150 Downloaded by [Seung-hoon Jeong] at 05:06 25 June 2013 jeong decentered, subjectivity remains all the more vulnerable and constrained so that its “schizophrenic dislocation” involves “bizarre distortions and topographical transformations of physical, corporeal, and social space” (Shaviro 117). In a broader history, the evolution of this body transformation on screen could be traced this way, following Shaviro’s cue: (1) Buster Keaton’s body combined with machines represents early capitalist mechanism, practical materialism, subversive Dadaism; (2) Jerry Lewis’s body reflects late capitalist simulation, multiple and pulverized mass media images; (3) Cronenberg’s body reembodies the late capitalist technology of disembodied information and algorithm by morphing into hybrid, corporeal interfaciality, dismantling old dichotomies of mind/matter, male/female, and human/ inhuman to show the unshowable monstrous ambivalence between fascination and disgust. The Cartesian–Hegelian epistemology that interrupts immediate embodiment based on the opposition between active subject and passive object now gives way to a fatal phenomenology of embodiment: dangerous passivity is open to “a Bataillean ecstasy of expenditure, of automutilation and self-abandonment – neither Imaginary plenitude nor Symbolic articulation, but the blinding intoxication of contact with the Real” (54). The question is then: can there be any positive contact with others that reinforces subjectivity in the actual rather than renouncing it? How can one productively transform oneself through otherness while not being entrapped in schizophrenic fantasy, the failure of becoming-other or impasse of the Real? Going back to Haraway, we should recall her “Cyborg Manifesto” that declares we are all theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism (Haraway, “Cyborg Manifesto” 150). Her usage of the futuristic buzzword “cyborg” is metaphorical in an attempt to challenge naturalism and essentialism so that feminists can break away from Oedipal narratives and Christian origin myths like Genesis. She thus sounds somewhat Deleuzian, but more important appears to be the multiple implication of cyborgism: it means the human–machine hybrid, 151 moreover the fusion of both fiction and lived reality, but first and foremost a cybernetic organism, that is, a(ny) self-making organic life as an autopoietic system of feedback through other organisms in the environment. In this sense an animal, a machine, just like a man, is all more or less cyborgian (cybernetics has combined biology with mechanics); the cyborg in SF is a technologically externalized form of this cybernetic mechanism immanent in the environment and shared by various organisms. Then one’s connection to this cybernetic network could be governed in order to build up oneself without being disorganized there. Nina in Black Swan could have been upgraded into a more powerful female subject – even as a femme fatale – through her becoming-animal without leading to death; through the use of CGI, her sensual transformation even looks like the birth of a sexy cyborg, evoking the female robot in Metropolis (Fritz Lang 1927). Most Hollywood films externalize such embodied hybridity in the simplistic negative form of separate antagonistic species, mainly updating the classical Frankenstein motifs: the human hubris of becoming a creator and the subsequent anxiety over technology. Suffice it to recall the war between the machine and the human in the Terminator series; in the place of the machine, the Planet of the Apes series positions an upgraded animal species. This type of dystopian global cinema obsessively depicts the dominance of ontological others in the wake of global catastrophes as the inevitable outcome of triumphant (biotechnological) modernization. By extension, finally, Avatar (James Cameron 2009), however, serves as a counterexample that envisions a technological future of nature with an animal cyborg introduced. In fact, this groundbreaking digital 3D science fiction with a clichéd narrative has been a target of postcolonial criticism: on a green planet called Pandora (evoking the mythical West), the blue humanoid Na’vi fight human invaders (just as American Indians resisted gold-rushing white colonizers), led by a white male hero outcast from his own race in order to save the ethnic Na’vi community while Downloaded by [Seung-hoon Jeong] at 05:06 25 June 2013 animal and technology getting (if not marrying) a beautiful local princess – Žižek, among others, blames the film’s multiculturalist stance for being invertedly racist (Žižek, “Return of the Natives”). However, such criticism repeats the aforementioned hermeneutic frame of reading allegory. What is missing is the film’s surface level on which we see not the reincarnation of the apache and cowboys but unprecedented amalgams of human and animal on the one side, and of human and machine on the other. The human and the Na’vi literally become part of mechanical- and animal-vehicle-weapons as more than external tools. The soldiers do not simply operate thirteen-foot-tall robots that they ride by means of buttons or joysticks; rather, their muscular action itself is amplified into the robot’s physical movement just as a child plays at being a windmill or train by moving its whole body. That is, they indexically embody the machine by performing what Walter Benjamin calls the “mimetic faculty”: not the visual or linguistic imitation that maintains a certain transcendent distance from the object, but the tactile incorporation that eclipses such abstraction (Benjamin). This sensational assimilation of the other is more organic between the Na’vi and the animal, as their bodies are so seamlessly coupled that the animal looks less like a useful prosthetic device than like an empowered human itself. In other words, the animal-vehicle is not the natural opposite of the machine-vehicle but its higher version with regard to the human’s embodiment of ontological otherness. Notably, the army’s control center is full of high-tech human–computer interfaces, malleable and multilayered digital screens that operate on the human digit’s touch and thus reduce the gap between the image and its viewer, who thus becomes a user, player, and conductor of digital interfaces.14 This tactile indication of information thereby enhances the embodiment of technological interfaces, resonating with contemporary spectatorship in haptic cinema, installation art, interactive games that rearticulate eye and hand, sight and touch, and vision and body. Computer interfaces have actually been increasingly incorporated into the body in this order: punch card, mouse, touchpad, touch screen, gesture sensing, voice recognition, and forthcoming Brain–Computer Interfaces that one can control through cerebral stimulation, as does Jake, the hero of Avatar. Input devices for the cybernetic feedback loop thus tend to come into the body. If material interfaces, including Jake’s coffin-like pod to plug in his avatar, are still external to the human body, interfaces are indeed internalized for the Na’vi. Their braided hair functions as an embodied interface: its terminus, or its “digit” if we want, consisting of sensitive tendrils are neural links able to mesh with other Na’vi and other sentient creatures as living interfaces such as flying dragons (which make a one-to-one bond with a Na’vi) and trees of souls (which also have biological USB-like links). The Na’vi’s sensori-motor capability is maximized, with no artificial mediation, when connected to this empowering fauna and flora. Pandora is a Bio-Internet on which embodied interfaces upload and download data-memories electrochemically, as the roots of the trees communicate with each other like the synapses between neurons. A “global village” is fully fleshed out in this natural network whose mechanism resonates with the historical shift from modern mechanics to postmodern biotechnology (Rosenfeld). In this background Jake’s shift from the human-machine to human-animal side suggests that animality is not prior or inferior to technology but rather posterior or superior. Pandora reflects not so much the nostalgic past of pure nature as a lost paradise but an idealized future of planetary intelligence with embodied interfaces towards which current human civilization is oriented. The sacred Hometree called the Unobtanium might be not merely a post-oil energy source or primitive shamanistic center but literally and figuratively a power “plant” that generates the network of rhizomatically interconnected interfaces.15 Jake’s adventure would be no other than changing his network to a more evolved one. He lives a biological bare life as 152 Downloaded by [Seung-hoon Jeong] at 05:06 25 June 2013 jeong a result of his paraplegia, and even becomes socially bare after “betraying his own race,” which suspends his political subjectivity as a human soldier. But the Na’vi accept him with hospitality, and he himself becomes a gift to a Na’vi woman and her entire community. Since the Na’vi are not indifferent animals but emotional humans, this gifting in positive reciprocity finally leads to Jake’s restoration of political subjectivity through his resurrection as a more upgraded human, a member of the Na’vi community. The “virtual reality” interface to his avatar disappears behind the embodied interface of a real Na’vi that he becomes. The dilemma is life’s total dependence on the network without which it cannot be sustained. Individual subjectivity is guaranteed only through deindividuation into monadic agencies acting on, and reacting to, interfaces. From another perspective, an individual is a parasite to the host network site, even when he or she uses prosthetic interfaces from it. Rather than a war between good nature and evil civilization, Avatar might show the process by which this vast host fights, defeats, and repels humans as an army of antagonistic parasites like virulent viruses or terrorists. Here, we see the verso of Pandora even though Eywa, “the earth Mother,” is the metaphysical Soul that colors this eco-utopia with harmonious wholeness and spiritual plenitude. Anti-nature within nature now takes the form of global complexity immanent in the very networked system itself. Because of the global connection, even small, local damage to the network affects all its parasite-members like a global catastrophe, just as all animals rush to help the endangered Na’vi, receiving the Jake-avatar’s SOS at the end. In other words, this last-minute rescue results less from animals’ companionship with the Na’vi than from the nature-network’s self-regulation and self-protection to maintain its homeostasis. The double side of networking is that the more connected we are, the more contaminated we may be; the more subjective we are, the more subject to others we can be; and the more holistic the network is, the more holes for terrorists it might have. If it is true that networks create 153 terrorism (Galloway and Thacker), Avatar seems to reflect this reality in the near-future global frame of eco-ethical networking and posthuman bio-informatics. Pandora is not unobtainable, but already immanent on our planet. zooesis and technesis We have gone through a series of contemporary films broadly in two directions so far. First, it is more fundamentally ethical to accept (or visit) the animal not as a vulnerable other but as a hospitable gift, and thereby open human subjectivity to liberation in the natural environment. Second, on the contrary, human subjectivity can be reconfigured and reinforced through contact with ontological others, including the machine in the technological environment. Dangerous anti-nature beyond anthropocentrism in the former takes the form of terroristic catastrophe immanent in the networked system of the latter. Ontological otherness resides in such an environment as challenging and transforming our being. In this context, we will need to go through both zooesis – by which Una Chaudhuri means the discourse on the animal – and technesis – Mark Hansen’s term for the discourse on technology – in general in their combination, so as to better map and address the global cinema of ontological others. Inspired by Alice Jardin’s critique of gynesis, a reduction of woman in the service of phallogocentric theory, Chaudhuri criticizes the way the animal is viewed in zooesis and proposes artistic ecology beyond anthropocentrism (Chaudhuri and Enelow). More complexly, Hansen argues that even postmodern technesis reduces the radical externality and concrete materiality of technology to a mere material support for instrumentality, textuality, subject constitution, or social organization (Hansen).16 Like the animal, technology is subversive to traditional thought, yet its exteriority is relativized (i.e., the technology of writing; the actualized form of the Real or Virtual) through the ontogenetic mechanism of différance, becoming, etc. What Hansen pursues is, then, the absolute exteriority of Downloaded by [Seung-hoon Jeong] at 05:06 25 June 2013 animal and technology technology that conditions our “noncognitive and nondiscursive affective bodily life” as embodied in Benjamin’s practice of mimetic faculty (21–30).17 Reserving further discussion for a later chance, let me just point out that zooesis and technesis will continue to be updated in a dialectic struggle to overcome their own limits. For, simply, we cannot help reframe our ontological others in the symbolic discourse. But we also have the image beside language, especially the cinematic image that never stops the movement of confronting us with the outside of any linguistic frame. It deserves noting here that cinema is in essence the amalgam of animality and technology: first, still images are animated, their mobility underlies the foundational “movement-image” that keeps opening narrative space in Deleuze’s term, and its genre format is called animation; second, this motion is produced by the cinematic apparatus, stored in the archive of images, which forges and remains an artificial intelligence of the world. It is no coincidence that the zoopraxicope, a pre-cinematic device for displaying motion pictures, created the illusion of animals running inside rotating glass disks, and its inventor Eadweard Muybridge’s photographic work on animal locomotion set the history of the moving image in motion. Since its inception, cinema has indeed functioned as an imaginary zoo for animals reentering vision and a scientific laboratory for futures coming in motion. And as aforementioned, the ontological nature of the cinematic image is ontologically other than the living or dead: animate but insubstantial, visual but intangible, spectacular but unreal. Before there is ghost film, film itself is a ghost.18 A final note should be about the human’s ontological hybridity as a futuristic but immanent a-venir of the inevitable evolution of biotechnics and interface culture. Animality and technology no longer form a naı̈ve dichotomy of nature vs. civilization but connect with each other in ways of making more visible the posthuman condition of life. It unfolds in a cinematic “zone” that now goes global, an illusory clearing for bare life within the globalized world. This zone thus exists like an eco-ontological heterotopia, to use Michel Foucault’s term, whose identity is not anchored in our society but exists only in the exceptional state of temporary potential to depoliticize or repoliticize any humanistic politics. Movie going is a visitation to this zone of ontological others where we are ultimately invited to revisit our own being in the world. notes 1 The common sense that nature is followed by culture is reversed here, but this reversion does not imply the anthropocentric hierarchy that culture is superior to nature. Recollect Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of this hierarchy: culture is a differed-differing nature just as speech is another writing that is différée and différante; ultimately, différance underlies any conceptual opposition which thereby turns out to be the “theoretical fiction” (Derrida, Marges de la philosophie 18–25). Our view of reality including nature and culture is itself a constructed fiction, an ideological fantasy whose anthropocentricism is hardly recognized, yet always immanent in our daily life. 2 As Una Chaudhuri and Marina Zurkow say, beloved animals in our pet culture are coddled and pampered at home, shown off and admired in the street, invited to intimate places, given catchy names and special diets, and thus normalized in civic and domestic space. By contrast, when not belonging with humans, animals are made to disappear, are eradicated, excluded, or forgotten. 3 Antonia Levi examines “the werewolf in the crested Kimono” in comparison with its Western counterpart, looking at other Japanese anime/ manga works too: Phoenix: the Sun (Tezuka Osamu 1986), Wolf’s Rain (Nobumoto Keiko 2005), InuYasha (Takahashi Rumiko 2004), etc. 4 Adrian Johnston consults Lacan’s several seminars of the 1970s, which must have influenced Žižek’s idea on nature even when he does not refer to Lacan (Žižek, “Nature and its Discontents”). Below, we will ask whether the Lacan– Žižek line doesn’t still conceptualize the Real of nature only in view of the symbolic and thus 154 jeong cultural frame, but for now I take their schema as a channel to the other side of “our” nature. Downloaded by [Seung-hoon Jeong] at 05:06 25 June 2013 5 These interpretations were common in the 1970s–1980s when film theory first and foremost borrowed structuralist semiotics and classical psychoanalysis centering on Freud’s Oedipal triangle and early Lacan’s mirror stage (Rose; Bergstrom; Bellour). 6 She draws on a broad sense of American pragmatist tradition, including such scholars and scientists as Gregory Bateson, Jane Goodall, Marc Bekoff, Babara Smuts, and Lynn Margulis. Obviously, animal studies in this theoretical background repeats and updates the old dichotomy of Continental and analytic philosophy. 7 In a full review of the film, I pointed out this unnoticed paradox which also resonates with Herzog’s ambivalent attitude to Treadwell, attraction and distanciation (Jeong and Andrew). 8 At the end of his essay on Herzog’s antiphusis, Benjamin Noys expresses a certain anxiety about the dehistoricization of this nature into mysticism, and argues: “To begin to restore a politics of nature involves the restoration of a signifier, and what Herzog provides are the images that call for the re-inscription of the signifier of nature” (Noys 50). But this need for the Symbolic would be only regressively abstract unless it rather goes beyond the very political frame of reducing the impenetrability of anti-nature to simply ahistorical mysticism. 9 An interesting literary reference: at the end of Henry James’s short story “The Beast in the Jungle,” an uncanny bestial face bursts out of such darkness towards the hero as if it figures his hidden past, his unconscious memory. If the animal is a physical other of the human body, the ghost is a psychological other of the human spirit like one’s repressed double. The animal appears in space and nature; the ghost returns through time and memory. 10 Notably, Herzog’s 3D image that maximizes the “indexical” nature of the cinema – the image as the physical proof of real objects – looks both excessive and insufficient. For what it captures in enhanced spatial illusion is the cave’s 2D wall with painted “icons” of fictive animal-humans, and not their actual 3D entity. A similar dimensional shift from 3D indexicality to 2D iconicity (3D in 155 the sense of normal cinematic illusory space without using stereoscopic technology) is also found in Tropical Malady, just after Keng encounters the tiger: a low-angle panning of the 3D actual forest connects with a horizontal tracking shot of the 2D painted forest depicting the legend of a tiger stretching out its long tongue to a praying man as if to try to devour him. The point is that becoming-animal is in any event still virtual, only iconically imagined, while always inspiring the human (to create “virtual reality” in which it is possible). 11 Such eschatological concerns provoke nonsensical conspiracy theories on the event. For example, one of the victims “Obsian Fallicut had a theory that the VUE was an expensive elaborate hoax perpetuated by A.J. Hitchcock to give some credibility to the unsettling and unsatisfactory ending of his film, The Birds.” 12 I somewhere else took an emphatically Deleuzian perspective on this film (Jeong 183–84), but now slightly modify the view. It must be noted in passing that Greenaway has also created a cinematic zoo with diverse animals screened, as seen in A Zed & Two Noughts (1986; which means “zoo”), among others, though we do not have space for their analyses here. 13 Vivian Sobchack also discusses the double meaning of passion, “passive suffering” and “active devotion,” embodied by both Jesus Christ and Videodrome. On the level of prereflective and passive material, “passive suffering” engages us with “response-ability,” and “active devotion” with “sense-ability”; on the level of reflective and active consciousness, these correspond to the ethical and aesthetical concepts of “responsibility” and “sensibility” (Sobchack 288–90). Returning to our reformulation of ethics, we could say that the ethics of responsibility for the vulnerable other is less fundamental than the ethics of responsiveness to the hospitable other. 14 Not only such cutting-edge interfaces but also characters’ operation of them are a cinematic spectacle and an attractive show in recent SF films including Minority Report (Steven Spielberg 2002) Déjà vu (Tony Scot 2006), and Iron Man 2 (Jon Favreau 2010). 15 Ken Hillis points out that the green network of global Pandora has been envisioned through such models as World Brain (H.G. Wells), electronic animal and technology noosphere (Teilhard de Chardin), Hive Mind (Kevin Kelly), electronic hyperbody (Pierre Lévy), etc. Why not Google? Downloaded by [Seung-hoon Jeong] at 05:06 25 June 2013 16 That is: instrumentality (Heidegger’s Zuhandenheit (handiness) concerns the usefulness of the tool), textuality (Derrida’s différance operates the text as machine), subject constitution (Lacan’s objet a often appears in mass media as technological effect), and social organization (Deleuze’s agencement means the assemblage of a social machine). 17 This critique seems arguable. Hansen (over) interprets the “text” and “mass media” as the clue to the “machine reduction of technology,” though his quotes from Derrida and Lacan do not even contain the word “technology.” He also reduces any ontogenesis to his model of technesis, when one may ask how his notion of material technology could be produced if not mechanically. 18 Akira Lippit points out that psychoanalysis, X-rays, and cinema all emerged in 1895, opening the interiority of the mind, the body, and the world respectively. 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