Date: Tue, 3 Feb 2004 20:26:07 -0800 (PST)
From: "J.M. Adams" <ringfingers-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: [postanarchism] Green Anarchy, Reggio, Baudrillard, Foucault and Naqoyqatsi


The new issue of Green Anarchy features a short piece
on Godfrey Reggio's film Naqoyqatsi which has just
been released on VHS/DVD. I just watched it and found
many ideas that he brings up as being very closely
paralleled in the thought of Paul Virilio, Jean
Baudrillard and Michel Foucault. In fact, Reggio cites
Baudrillard in the following statement and in the
essay below this one, the writer draws connections to
Foucault - also, I strongly recommend the film!

***

Naqoyqatsi director Godfrey Reggio on the world in
which we live:

By any measure, we live in an extraordinary and
extreme time. Language can no longer describe the
world in which we live. With antique ideas and old
formulas, we continue to describe a world that is no
longer present. In this loss of language, the word
gives way to the image as the 'language' of exchange,
in which critical thought disappears to a diabolic
regime of conformity - the hyper-real, the omnipresent
image. Language, real place gives way to numerical
code, the real virtual; metaphor to metamorphosis;
body to disembodiment; natural to supernatural; many
to one. Mystery disappears, replaced by the illusion
of certainty in technological perfection. 

Technology, acceleration do not affect our way of
living - they are, in effect, our new and
comprehensive host of life, the environment of living
itself. It is not the effect of technology on the
environment, culture, economy, religion, etc., but
rather that all these categories exist in technology.
In this sense technology is new nature. The living
environment, old nature, is replaced by a manufactured
milieu, an engineered host - synthetic nature. In a
real sense, we are off planet, dwelling on a lunar
surface of stone, cement, asphalt, glass, steel and
plastics, engulfed in the atmosphere of
electromagnetic vibrations - the soothing lullaby of
the machine. The common notion tells us that
technology is neutral, that we can use it for either
good or bad. From the p.o.v. of NAQOYQATSI, we do not
use technology, we live technology; technology is our
way of life. Being sensate entities, we become our
environment - we become what we see, what we hear,
what we eat, what we smell, what we touch. Where doubt
is prohibited, we become, without question, the
environment we live in. With our origins based in the
natural order, should this context radically change
(as I am suggesting), the mysterious nature of the
human being shall also radically change - a change
that will reflect the transformation of nature itself,
at a turning point or vanishing point. Natural
diversity becomes a burnt offering, sacrificed to the
infinite appetite of technological homogenization. 

So forget science fiction. We now live the fiction of
science. We are now, not in some remote future,
cyborgs. We are at one with our environment - we are
technology. In this wonderland, freedom becomes the
pursuit of our technological happiness. Our standard
of living is predicated on commodity consumption, as
the shibboleth of the new religion is 'pray for more'.
In vehicles of ecstasy, with cinematic engines of
inertia at audiovisual speed, trans-port and tele-port
blend into one. The beginning becomes the end. The
port disappears in the speed of light. The nanosecond
(one billionth of an 'old second'), technological
speed, transforms reality as it creates an ecstatic
phenomena of compelling and unparalleled intensity. By
human measure, charismatic technique portends the
miraculous, as it engenders the condition of 'exit
velocity' - a condition that blurs human perceptions,
shatters all meanings, drains all content and breaks
our bonds to earth. All locations are subsumed into
the startling terra firma of the image, a demonic
conformity that is the genesis of massman. In the
shadow of the mass, all previous definitions crumble.
The 'time' and 'space' of history exit to an
homogenized zone of no return. In this supernatural
implosion of g-force, human moorings give way, sending
Homo sapiens out-of-orbit into the void of
technological space. The accompanying loss of original
habitat and our subsequent relocation into accelerated
space, throws nature into catastrophe, as it engenders
traumatic stress syndrome as the now normal condition
of post-human existence. Technique, while promising
comfort and happiness, means power, means control,
means conformity, means destiny. Technology creates a
condition of war that is at once universal and unseen.
The explosive tempo of technology is war; the
untellable violence of relocation in technology is
war. All of us are refugees driven from our human
state. 

As the completion of the Qatsi trilogy, NAQOYQATSI
offers a cinematic concert to experience the
allurement, seduction and sanctioned terror of
ordinary daily living - a world at war beyond the
battlefield, a conflagration between old and new
nature - total war. The vision of NAQOYQATSI is a
world made in the image and likeness of the new
divine, the computer - a world where unity is held in
the vice of technological homogenization, the
globalized world of techno-fascism, the age of
civilized violence. 

It must be noted that the production of NAQOYQATSI
employs the very medium that it questions. In doing
so, we embrace the contradiction of using technology
to question technology. Given the intention of the
film is to commune, to connect, we employ the franca
lingua of the technological order - what Baudrillard
terms 'the evil demon of images'. The image becomes
our location. We relocate onto the image, onto our
venerated familiar, the iconic, as we reshuffle the
deck to offer an iconoclastic experience in the form
of a film. Indeed, the subject of NAQOYQATSI is itself
the manufactured image, a horizonless digital
landscape, devoid of reality yet full of promise. The
tools that produced the film are themselves our
subject. 


If you will, 'take a walk on the wild side'. I have
used these several paragraphs to attempt, in words, to
describe the world in which we live, after having
asserted that our language no longer describes our
world. Contradictory? You bet. As with life itself,
things are not this or that, black or white, good or
evil. Experience suggests life is more complex, not
open to simple affirmations or condemnations - this
being the myopic role of politics, patriotism,
propaganda and advertisement. Critical thought must go
through the prism, through the hope, through the
courage, of this and that. Having said this, I have
created a film without words, not for lack of love of
the word, but rather for the love of the word. You
know the famous dictum, a picture is worth a thousand
words. I take this statement and stand it on its head,
in offering you a thousand pictures to suggest the
power of one word - NAQOYQATSI. Now let me turn the
tables; if a picture's worth a thousand words, without
a picture, can you describe the world we inhabit in
words? To rename our world is perhaps our most
important opportunity in life. The power of language,
the word, in a state of tragic humiliation, is our
anecdote to the conformity of the hyper-real image. To
take back our language, to name the world, is the
essence of freedom and, in this world, a dangerous
act. 

Godfrey Reggio

***

The Charge by Mike Pinsky

http://www.dvdverdict.com/reviews/naqoyqatsi.php

"Beneath the omissions, illusions, and lies that make
us believe in the necessities of nature or the
functional requirements of order, we are bound to
reencounter war: it is the cipher of peace."—Michel
Foucault, "Society Must Be Defended"

Opening Statement

There is something both mundane and magisterial about
Pieter Brueghel's meticulous painting of the Tower of
Babel. Its tiny figures mill about their business
seemingly oblivious to the looming disaster on the
horizon. Its heights are jagged and incomplete, and a
storm cloud shudders near its summit. The fact that it
is modeled on the Roman Colosseum should be lost on no
one: this is a world where bread and circuses keep us
distracted.

We move inside the painting, slowly. Ruins haunt us.
Our eyes move past abandoned buildings, tombs of a
civilization in decline. A plaintive cello weeps in
lament as we see cement bleached in the sun. The
deluge comes. Stars fall, clouds boil, and mountains
tear up from the earth. Ghastly faces sweep past.

This is life under the specter of war.
The Evidence

When Koyaanisqatsi debuted in 1983, its depiction of
nature in turmoil was so fresh and radical that it
spawned countless imitators. Of course, there were
plenty of documentaries on environmental themes in
circulation. But Koyaanisqatsi was not quite a
documentary, eschewing narration and other prosaic
devices for a more poetic montage (still quite
formally structured) set to a powerful score by Philip
Glass. Nevertheless, Reggio's film became the model
for a generation of exploratory filmmaking.

In 1988, the imitators expected Reggio to do it all
over again: more stately mountains and time-lapse
urban crowds, more musings on the pace of life in the
northern hemisphere. After all, they all understood
the message of Koyaanisqatsi to be quite simple:
western civilization and technology is bad; nature is
good. But Powaqqatsi expanded Reggio's vision to the
southern hemisphere, to cultures where technology must
exist in precarious balance with nature to survive.
And most shocking of all, Reggio makes us all
complicit in the consumption of the world. To state
that humans and nature are in opposition is to
oversimplify the problem: we are part of the world,
and our technology is part of the world as well. As
even Philip Glass' celebratory and percussive score
illustrates in Powaqqatsi, the human experience is all
we know.

This human experience is driven, more each day, by the
need to consume. Indeed, we have created an entire
ideology around consumption. We call it capitalism.
And America is damn good at it.

When Godfrey Reggio began his "Qatsi" trilogy back in
the 1980s, looking to escape traditional narrative
language with an experiment in pure film, his attempts
to encapsulate the complex relationships between
humanity and nature, between art and commerce, seemed
almost prophetic. After all, it was only the beginning
of the "virtual age," in which the oversaturation of
media had finally collapsed the distinction between
language and the "real." Philosophers like Jean
Baudrillard lamented the loss of the material world,
and then the smart ones wondered if we were only
fooling ourselves if we thought we could ever
understand the world without language anyway. Even
Reggio's choice of names for his films were a tease:
he picked Hopi words not because he felt some kinship
to native cultures, but because his producers insisted
that the films would not be marketable without names,
so he picked words that sounded alien, almost musical.
We are trapped in a world of symbols and simulations.
And we made it ourselves. And worse, we need it to
form communities and survive if our notion of living
in a state of pure being may only be another string of
words masking a philosophical illusion.

If Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi only suggested the
difficult trap of language (and as I have already
discussed these films here at the Verdict, I will not
spend time dealing with them here), Naqoyqatsi
embraces our technologically-mediated world with
exquisite rage. This is the landscape of the virtual.
We have seen its like once before, in the
hallucinatory warp of 2001: A Space Odyssey's
Monolith, reflected in the blank eyes of its human
observer as he travels toward his apotheosis. Stanley
Kubrick's experiment in pure film image now makes
perfect sense: Kubrick saw the technosphere, the
virtual, in its most abstract form. Now Reggio sculpts
it into a world with its own culture and architecture
and throws us headlong inside it. We have seen some of
this world in his earlier films, but Reggio is not
content to rehash the same metaphors he used before.
Yes, we have seen the wrecked cars and the factories
belching smoke and the blur of speedy automobiles
crowding highways. Reggio has already shown us these
things from a distance. To watch from above, the
camera standing back like an impartial observer, is to
ignore the fact that we created these things. We are
immersed in these experiences and never above them.

So Naqoyqatsi takes the more radical approach. Nearly
every shot in the film is digitally manipulated,
colored or warped or morphed into something else. We
never see the world free from the grip of technology,
just as Powaqqatsi always showed technology deployed
in the hands of humans. We are immersed in a world of
digital noise, and the film never lifts its eyes up
from the lines of data, marching like lines of
soldiers, that crowd our field of view.

The prevailing visual motif in the film is turbulence.
Images of chaotic systems abound. Wisps of smoke
transform into waving flags. Flags transform into
swirls of currency. Crowds warp into images of
militarism, then into the floor of the stock market.
This is what Reggio really means by "Life As War," the
translation of the film's Hopi title. War is an
ordered system struggling against chaos. In a short
piece entitled "Society Must Be Defended," philosopher
Michel Foucault considers the possibility that we
might examine war "as a primary and fundamental state
of things in relation to which all the phenomena of
social domination, differentiation, and
hierarchization are considered as secondary." In other
words, is war natural to the human state of affairs,
with all other institutions in the modern world
modeled on this? Foucault suggests that in war, no
subject is alone, but all exist in tension, with no
universal truth dominant among combatants. Truth only
serves an ideological function, to create a rallying
point for the people. In war, chance or chaos, "the
web of petty circumstances," upsets all systems of
order. "Fury must account for harmonies," he remarks,
as if order is only formed out of emotional need, a
shouting into the void of nature.

Godfrey Reggio's fury is palpable. Humanity has become
cyborg in his vision, and our cyborg bodies are
resisting us. A house is built, only to be destroyed;
oil pumps from the Earth, only to be set aflame. All
art, all beauty, melts together into the face of a
single girl crying in pain.

Reggio reminds us again and again in the film that we
are capable of using technology to build a world, to
reconstruct beautiful bodies, but images of perfect
bodies enhanced by science are always balanced with
the reminder that the cost of those creations is high.
The "natural" world in Naqoyqatsi is rendered alien,
as green giraffes run against orange skies, or cities
burn like irradiated wastelands on some strange
planet. The faces of famous people—Abraham Lincoln,
George Bush—mix with news footage like the clever
opening graphics of some cable talk show.

Part of this confusion, this melting together of
simulacra, Reggio credits to the media and its use of
technology to distance us from the world through image
manipulation, whether though the news or advertising
or Hollywood (ultimately the same thing). But the
media and its attempts to turn ideology into a
marketing tool might be merely another symptom of the
larger problem. The virtual in Naqoyqatsi is always an
attempt to tame the turbulence of nature simply by
replacing it. Reggio shows images of water and
swimmers, then shifts to cloning and CAT scans:
medicine supplants the body. Commercials and digital
information segue into "logos" from the world's
religions: spirituality can only be expressed through
the techniques of advertising.

Of course, to anyone who has encountered theories of
postmodernism before, this critique of the cultural
logic of late-capitalism should come as no surprise.
Ironically, this only makes Godfrey Reggio on the
curve for a change instead of ahead of it. Certainly,
the intensity of his vision is far more thorough and
complex than every cyberpunk movie ever made rolled
together. But Naqoyqatsi is not quite as satisfying or
thematically forward-looking as the previous
installments in Reggio's trilogy. Perhaps Reggio just
seems so angry here, tearing into the material with
more desperation and abandon than before. He has every
right to be indignant though. The last decade of
American culture, indeed the last generation, has seen
increasingly aggressive deployment of imperialistic
doctrine and technological domination around the
world. There is a hopelessness to Naqoyqatsi that was
not nearly so pronounced as earlier, as if Reggio
realizes that there is no way back from this abyss. We
have gone headfirst into the virtual world, into the
next stage of cultural evolution. And like Kubrick's
Star Child, the only way we are coming back to Earth
is in a new form—with the world as our plaything.

To balance this cyborg manifesto of a film, Philip
Glass incorporates the warm tones of Yo-Yo Ma's cello
into a full orchestra. This is technology at its best:
the beauty of human music. The structure of Glass'
cello concerto is more conventional than his earlier
works, but this is fairly characteristic of his recent
forays into traditional orchestral music. While Glass
is still willing to experiment (after all, he has
written two symphonies based on David Bowie albums),
recently he seems to have entered more "respectable"
territory. The formality of his score however, as he
notes in the panel discussion included in the DVD
extras (discussed below), is intended to provide the
audience with some point of access into Reggio's
difficult visual structure. So even if the score might
not be as artistically risky as some of Glass' other
works, it succeeds in anchoring the film quite well.

Given the extensive digital manipulation throughout
the film, it is hard to say whether Miramax has
presented the film's transfer correctly. Sometimes the
colors seem a little overcranked, but that may be
Reggio's intention. Everything in Naqoyqatsi is
supposed to look unnatural, and in that sense, this
DVD looks exactly as it should. Extras are a mixed
bag, comparable to those on the MGM discs for
Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi. Producer Steven
Soderbergh and Reggio briefly comment on the ubiquity
of war in a minute-long introduction, with Soderbergh
seeming particularly defensive of the film. Philip
Glass and Yo-Yo Ma gush at each other in an interview
about their music, although they really do not say
much substantive about the score or how closely Glass
worked with Reggio on the film (compared to his input
on the previous installments).

Much more interesting is an hour-long panel discussion
with Reggio, Glass, and editor John Kane in which the
three talk in detail about the entire "Qatsi" trilogy.
Reggio admits that Naqoyqatsi is more abstract and
demanding than the first two films. "We relocated into
the virtual," he tries to explain, chatting about the
film's theme of "globalization" and detailing how the
footage was assembled and treated to "perfected
degradation." What a perfect phrase. If Naqoyqatsi is
about the Catch-22 of human civilization—how our very
attempts to tame the world through language and
technology in order to survive the chaos of the world
transform us into cyborgs who cannot escape a chaotic
destruction now of our own making, even as we polish
it with a digital shine—then we are indeed in a world
of perfected degradation. Enjoy it while it lasts.
Closing Statement

Naqoyqatsi challenges its audience to escape from the
grasp of the virtual world. And when it is over, we
congratulate ourselves on having stepped back into the
"real world," where we believe we can control the pace
at which technology, the golem we thought we created
to change the natural world, changes us.

Silly humans.

The Verdict

Naqoyqatsi puts the human race on trial and finds it
guilty. This court cannot comment on that verdict (as
it is out of our jurisdiction), but does find that
Godfrey Reggio and Philip Glass have once again
created an artistically adventurous and
philosophically complex film worthy of our attention.
Case dismissed.





===="“It does not matter how many people chose moral duty over the rationality of self-preservation - what does matter is that some did. Evil is not all-powerful. It can be resisted. The testimony of the few who did resist shatters the authority of the logic of self-preservation. It shows it for what it is in the end - a choice." 

- Zygmunt Bauman, 'Modernity and the Holocaust'

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