Date: Sun, 07 Dec 1997 17:00:41 -0500
From: Jacob Robertson <jacrob-AT-mindspring.com>
Subject: the-institutional-alienation-via-becoming-mOther-of-a-war-machine


Douglas wrote,

Yes, I agree. It was a very interresting film. I had gone to see in fact
the latest Kitano film and arrived too late. So I saw Alien instead. I was
in fact quite suprised by Jeunet's film. Obviously, the question for us, is
more of that surrounding "becoming", le devenir. Remember Deleuze
Guattari's insistance of "alliance" as opposed to that of "filiation" or
affinity. The following description fits quite nicely into the cosmology of
Jeunet's #8<>alien:

"Enfin, devenir n'est pas une évolution, du moins une évolution par
descendance et filiation. Le devenir ne produit rien par filiation, toute
filiation serait imaginaire. Le devenir est toujours d'un autre ordre que
celui de la filiation. Il est de l'alliance. Si l'évolution comporte de
véritables devenir, c'est dans le vaste domaine des _symbioses_ qui met en
jeu des êtres d'échelles et de règnes tout à fait différents, sans aucune
filiation possible. Il y a un bloc de devenir qui prend la guêpe et
l'orchidée, mais dont aucune guêpe-orchidée ne peut descendre. Il y a un
bloc de devenir qui saisit le chat et le babouin, et dont un virus C opère
l'alliance. Il y a un bloc de devenir entre des racines jeunes et certains
micro-organismes, les matière organiques synthétisées dans les feuilles
opérant l'alliance (rhizosphère). Si le néo-évolutionnisme a affirmé son
originalité, c'est en partie par rapport à ces phénomènes où l'évolution ne
va pas d'un moins différencié à un plus différencié, et cesse d'être une
évolution filiative héréditaire pour devenir plutôt communicative ou
contagieuse. Nous préférions alors appeler "involution" cette forme
d'évolution qui se fait entre hétérogènes, à condition que l'on ne confonde
surtout pas l'involution avec une régression..." (Mille Plateaux,
p.291-292).

 I had seen City of Lost Children and I took it to be a kind of reconstruction of
the fairy tale genre.  I was speculating that what brought Jeunet to doing an
Aliens sequel were the possibilities for playing with the visuals in settings and
environments.  Scott and Cameron I think on one level were truly trying to create
these tableaux via the cinematography.   And if Jeunet was attracted to the idea
of playing with these backdrops, like the biomechanic environs of the alien hive,
or the ultra heavy gear, high tech world of a future human society, then I can see
how (as you said) "his" film is going on in the margins, in say, the background,
behind the presence of Hollywood's characters.  Not that Jeunet's presence was
being overshadowed by any means of course.
    But I was also intrigued by your take that:
whereas Cameron's film taught Ripley
to become a military mother, Jeunet's film shows Ripley's mother image
becoming something itself foreign, other, unknown to herself.
 But what's interesting is that u can get two different readings based on how you
read that alienation via becoming-mother (of the Other).  In a more feminist
minded reading, you can say that that same alienation is a result of patriarchal
regulatory practices enabled by disciplines of science and technology.  She is
forced to bear the child or organism that the patriarchal institutions such as the
military State or perhaps even some technocracy (keeping in mind the DNA cloning)
wants her to produce: a literal war machine if we can consider the alien that.
She is to produce bioweapons for the State just as the queen alien produces
warriors for the hive.  But in a different reading, borrowing from D-G's
vocabulary, her relationship would be, as you stressed, not filial in any way but
by an "alliance." I would have to agree with you fully here, what links lifeforms,
etc. together are alliances- for example, the pheromonal "alliance" between Ripley
and the aliens.
    More to the point though, the beauty of Deleuze's wasp-orchid is that it
represents an annihilation of borders between current Selves and would-be Others.
Like the body of the wasp and of the orchid, the mutual deterritorializations and
territorializations that occurs in Aliens:Ressurection are across the demarcation
of conceived bodies, domains, and/or habitats.  To borrow something that Aaron put
well, "through the mixing of human and alien DNA, the human genome
reterritorializes the alien genome" when the Queen alien develops a new human
birth cycle from Ripley's DNA.  But the thing with this reading is that it
replaces the flows in nature that produce alliances or involutions with the agency
of the institution and its machines/tools (i.e. DNA splicing/cloning).   Does that
change anything as far as d-g are concerned?   Is this just Jeunet indulging
himself by changing the roles of Scott's parasite-host scheme of the alien in the
1st movie, the invasiveness of the implanted alien embryo reversed by a genetic
sabotage of human DNA?  (I feel like that could better be attributed to what seems
like a motif for Jeunet: reconstructing a classic trope, this time that of science
gone awry, fouled experiments, meddling with nature etc. -but only if you agree
with me that The City of Lost Children was also a reconstruction of a fairy tale
genre.  Moreover I don't think if anyone asked I could really go into the nature
of these reconstructions, I haven't really seen much of his work.  But I'd say
they are slightly dystopic in a way.)
    I guess the concept I want to explore more (and hopefully in doing so, take
the discussion in a new direction, perhaps back into the text of A Thousand
Plateaus) is how during becomings participants will "pass through animality."
Could we explore more these terms animality and the anomalous element that allows
passage through it?  (hey John Landau, maybe this could be a start for those
clarifications you suggested with the deleuzeguattarionary.)  Is animality simply
the perception of something alive other than the self or, an animated object
perplexing the subject? At the same time, is "animality" a problem, an irritant to
the persistance of fascist states, like an obstacle to paranoiac states of
anthropomorphic centrism? (I would categorize consensual notions of "rascisms"
under this, if anyone is wondering)  In this way would we consider it one of the
conditions for a line of flight?

P.S. Merci pour me donnant la reference a Mille Plateaux en francaise, Douglas.
Il n'y a pas trop beaucoup des millieus pour practicer mon francais aux
Etats-Unis, especiallement avec Deleuze et Guattari.  C'etait une challenge!

Aaron is it?
    I feel for you, having just accomplished a B.A. last spring myself.  I'm
taking a "break" from the academic world as a highschool English teacher right
now.  But I'd rather attribute the heat I also feel on the list to my own silly
paranoias about phantom intellectual elitisms.  Your comparison to Starship
Troopers was interesting; it was something I hadn't even thought of.  I recall
that film was scathingly denounced in a Salon (descent e-zine) review as something
like a nauseating cross between 90210-style fratboy hazing and that First World
"denial of colonization" that was mentioned.  I can see some of that too.  For
example, I thought the futuristic Buenos Aires setting of the movie came off like
present-day Fox television representations of Beverly Hills glamor.  I also recall
Hollywood managed to sanitize this version of Beunos Aires of any real Latino
cultural dressing.
    But returning to the aliens, you wrote:
It is as
if through the mixing of human and alien DNA, the human genome
reterritorializes the alien genome and closes off its lines of flight and
ability to deterrorialize (the reason the corporation was so infactuated with
it in the first place, the alien was the war machine incorporated and the
struggle through the films is similiar to the state trying and failing to tame
and harness the energy and deterrorializing capacities of the war machines).
    So are you saying that the alien physiology is a war machine, in the
"effective" sense?  Or perhaps it is a by-product of a becoming war-like, via it's
synthetic origins?  (in the first book, written from the movie, the alien was
believed to literally be genetically engineered by a "superior" alien race as a
genocidal bio-weapon, hence the fossil remains in the chair inside the alien ship
in the 1st movie).  It's easy to see its body is literally war-like.  But the mess
I've now written myself into I think reveals the overcodings that are starting to
spill out of this discussion- for example, unusually hefty concepts like the
institutional alienation via the becoming mOther to a war machine.

Anyway, this discussion is incredible!  Thanx for the responses, they were great.