File spoon-archives/postanarchism.archive/postanarchism_2004/postanarchism.0408, message 31


Date: Fri, 27 Aug 2004 13:09:32 -0700 (PDT)
From: none none <heytravil_nomad-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: [postanarchism] TECHNOLOGY!!!!


here is a article i liked a interveiw with david
cronenberg on his veiws of technolgy,if you have seen
his films you know how he sees technology,and
memory.like videodrone and exzsistance,and dead
ringers,how "techne"and tool makeing and sexuality are
changeing so fast,take for example nanotechnology and
geneitic engeniring,in cronrbergs world technology is
not like issac asiimov,meatl structures walking around
but it all organic all technolgy becomes like flesh
like bone.his crituqe is very deep from his films,take
exsitance a movie about corporate bio game makers and
the angry realist who are kile primitivists are
fighting,but never in the fim do you see a machins you
only see bioengenered fish for food bioengenered
animal and human oparts that act better than
artificial intelegenge,any way i thought this artical
would be good for the list beacus aragorn brought up
he is in a technology disscussion, i decided to put
some art into it-the hatred of dionisis
I don't know what I was expecting exactly when I met
David Cronenberg, arguably the most bizarre, eccentric
and even grotesque auteur in North America.

A visionary and controversial director with a penchant
for ingenious, violent and sexual metaphors, he's been
responsible for a half dozen of the most admired (by
film aficionados) and abhorred (by many others) movies
of the last 20 year, including "Videodrome" (a violent
and sexualized allegory on thought control) "The Fly"
and "Dead Ringers" (considered the height of the art
house-horror hybrid), and hallucinogenic,
autobiographical adaptation of William S. Burroughs'
"Naked Lunch." In 1997 his adaptation of J.G.
Ballard's novel "Crash," about car-crash fetishists,
was shelved for several months by New Line Cinema
owner Ted Turner, who didn't want anything to do with
the twisted tale.

Was I meeting a human deviant? A demented genius with
"straight jacket" written all over him? I didn't know,
but for the first time in years, I was feeling
intimated about an interview.

Then I was lead into the conference room of San
Francisco's Prescott Hotel and shook hands with a
congenial, bespectacled fellow with salt-and-pepper
hair and a benevolent smile. It turns out, David
Cronenberg -- the envelope-pushing circus freak of
independent cinema -- is a cheerful, deep-thinking,
mild-mannered college professor type. Go figure that.

Today he's here to talk about "eXistenZ,"the first
film since "Videodrome" that he both wrote and
directed. A forward-looking, somewhat cautionary
vision of the future of virtual reality, the film
stars Jennifer Jason Leigh as the inventor of a
bio-engineered game, played by plugging a living game
pod directly into the central nervous system through a
fleshy umbilical cord inserted into an orifice carved
in the player's back.

In the near future created for "eXistenZ," anyone who
hasn't been jacked with one of these bioports is
considered a square in most circles. It takes place in
a world where the game and reality are disturbingly
intermingled. In Cronenberg's vision, technology and
the human organism have begun to merge -- something
the director considers inevitable.

"I see technology as being an extension of the human
body," he says. "It's inevitable that it should come
home to roost."

But before we discussed to his new movie, his fixation
with sexuality and the organic form, we talked about
Hollywood and why he's fed up with being perceived as
a horror director.

"I never thought I was doing the same thing as
directors like John Carpenter, George Romero, and
sometimes even Hitchcock, even though I've been
sometimes compared to those other guys. We're after
different game," Cronenberg says. "The filmmaking
process is a very personal one to me, I mean it really
is a personal kind of communication. It's not as
though its a study of fear or any of that stuff."

SPLICEDwire: Your films are more deeply psychological,
where many of those directors are often just trying to
make you jump out of your seat. 

David Cronenberg: True. Even Hitchcock liked to think
of himself as a puppeteer who was manipulating the
strings of his audience and making them jump. He liked
to think he had that kind of control. I don't think
that kind of control is possible beyond a very obvious
kind of physical twitch when something jumps out of
the corner of a frame. I also think the relationship I
have with my audience is a lot more complex than what
Hitchcock seemed to want his to be -- although I think
he had more going on under the surface as well.

But you can't control all of that. Anybody who comes
to the cinema is bringing they're whole sexual
history, their literary history, their movie literacy,
their culture, their language, their religion,
whatever they've got. I can't possibly manipulate all
of that, nor do I want to. I'm often surprised -- I
expect to be surprised -- by my audience's reactions
to things.

SPLICED: Do you consider any of your movies horror
movies? 

Cronenberg: No. I don't. "The Fly" was, technically, a
horror sci-fi film, and this is technically a sci-fi
film. But to me that's not a creative category. That's
a marketing problem or possibly a critical problem, a
journalistic preoccupation. But it doesn't function on
a creative level.

It doesn't mean anything. Each movie generates its own
little biosphere and has its only little ecology and
its climate, and you're attune to that more than
anything else. So when people say "is there anything
you wouldn't show on film?" or "would you draw back?"
I say, if I do it's only because of that biosphere.
What is appropriate? What works within the ecology of
that movie? So in one movie sex and blood would be
very up front, like in "Crash" because it's sort of
the subject of the movie. But in another movie, like
"The Dead Zone," it would not be appropriate. It would
be disproportionate.

There's no sex really in "eXistenZ," except
metaphorically. There was an opportunity to have sex
scenes, and we were all willing to do that. But as the
film evolved, we thought it would be wrong. It would
take away from the metaphorical sex, which is all this
plugging in and that sort of stuff. That's more
interesting. It has more resonance than if you
suddenly saw a real, naked sex scene in the middle of
all that. It would unbalance all that -- almost
invalidate it. So if you wait, the movie gradually
tells you what it wants to be, and you have to sort of
go on with it.

SPLICED: There seem to be connections between
"Videodrome," which you also wrote and directed, and
"eXistenZ." The way you're plugging in a
pre-programmed videotape or a game into your body. Was
"Videodrome" on your mind? 

Cronenberg: No. You have to remember I haven't seen it
in 15 years. You might well have seen it more recently
than I have. It is true this is the first script I've
written since "Videodrome," so I'm sure that connects
somewhere. But when you're writing a script -- for me
anyway -- you have to sort of create an enforced
innocence. You have to divest yourself of worrying
about a lot of stuff like what movies are hot, what
movies are not hot, what the budget of this movie
might be. You have to stop worrying about what people
might expect from you because of the last thing you
did...you have to stop worrying about your other
movies. I mean, I just know they're all going to be
interconnected. People have asked me to do a sequel to
"Scanners," or they've asked, very recently, to do a
remake of "Shivers." And that would feel like a
horrible place to put myself. I wouldn't want to go
back there.

SPLICED: Have you ever considered doing a big budget,
schlocky studio film? Has anyone has pitched you
anything like that? 

Cronenberg: Oh, heavens yes! Recently?"The Truman
Show" and "Aliens 4," and in the early days things
like "Witness" and "Top Gun." Oh, and "Flashdance."
Dawn Steele, for some reason, kept bugging me to do
"Flashdance"! And I kept saying "No." and "You won't
thank me! I would destroy this!" So, yes, I do get
offered stuff. And, like, "Alien 4" is tempting for a
minute because they're begging me to do it, and I
think to work with Sigorney Weaver and Winona Ryder
would be great fun, and so on.

SPLICED:...and it has some of the same kinds of
themes, body themes, that you often work with... 

Cronenberg: Yeah, because the original "Alien" took
stuff from "Shivers." It was obvious that happened. I
know how it happened, too, but we won't get into that.

The problem with doing a schlocky or big budget studio
film is that it wouldn't actually be fun for me. It
wouldn't be exciting. My rule of thumb is this: You're
six months into it, you've got six months to go. It's
February. It's winter. It's dark. Am I suicidal, or am
I really excited and happy? And the answer with those
projects would be, "I'm suicidal."

SPLICED: You originally wrote "eXistenZ" three years
ago. I imagine you had to make changes to update the
technology, since such things change so rapidly. 

Cronenberg: That didn't change. The technology I sort
of side-step in this movie. It's the metaphor. It's
the drama and the meaning of it and all of that which
is interesting to me.

We don't have any computers in this movie. It's a
different technology. I'm certainly aware that the big
chip makers have all done heavy, heavy research into
using protein molecules as a basis of their chips, and
protein molecules are the basis of organic life. I
read an article recently about experiments done to try
to use DNA strands as electrical wiring.

Since I see technology as being an extension of the
human body, it's inevitable that it should come home
to roost. It just makes sense. I mean, I literally
show that in the movie with the pod plugged into
central nervous system.

Technology is us. There is no separation. It's a pure
expression of human creative will. It doesn't exist
anywhere else in the universe. I'm rather sure of
that. But we'll see if the spaceships come. And if it
is at times dangerous and threatening, it is because
we have within ourselves we have things within us that
are dangerous, self-destructive and threatening, and
this has expressed itself in various ways through out
technology.

(Modern technology is) more than an interface. We ARE
it. We've absorbed it into our bodies. Our bodies, I
think, are bio-chemically so different from the bodies
of people like 1,000 years ago that I don't even think
we could mate with them. I think we might even be, in
other words, a different species, we're so different.

(This) technology, we absorb it, it weaves in and out
of us, so it's not really an interface in the same way
people think about a screen or a face. It's a lot more
intimate than that.

SPLICED: Is that why in many of your films there's
some type of orifice through which a person is
connecting? 

Cronenberg: Yeah. I mean, technology wants to be in
our bodies, because it sort of came out of our bodies.
In a crude way, that's what I'm thinking. It wants to
come home and that is its home. First of all, in the
obvious ways -- the eyes with binoculars, the ears
with the telephone -- technology had to be an
advancement of powers we knew we had. Then it gets
more elaborate and more distant from us. More
abstract. But it still all emanates from us. It's us.

SPLICED: And it's a theme in almost all of your
movies. 

Cronenberg: It's more than a theme. To me it's kind of
like a living presence, an understanding, that is
behind all of the movies.

SPLICED: How does the idea of the technological
meshing of man and machine, how does that connect to
the reoccurring theme of sexuality? 

Cronenberg: Well, I think, with "Crash" it was getting
very focused on the idea that we are re-inventing sex.
We are at a major epoch in human history, which is
that we don't need sex to recreate the race. You can
have babies without sex. This is the first time in
human history that has been true, and it means, for
example, we could do some extraordinary things.

It's becoming disconnected from what it was initially,
just in the same way we've taken control of our
evolution. We are no longer subject to the laws of
survival of the fittest in the gross physical way that
Darwin articulated. Even though we're not quite aware
of it, we don't know how to deal with it, we are
messing around with our evolution at the genetic
level.

So, I think, in the same way, sex is up for grabs, for
reinvention. There have always been elements of
politics, fashion, pleasure, art, in sexuality. But
now those things are, in a weird way, almost the
primary part of sexuality. So why not say, OK, how
about some new sexual organs? They don't have to
reproduce. They don't have to do all that complex
chromosome splitting and stuff that goes with real
reproduction, so why not have direct access to your
nervous system and create new orifices that do god
knows what?

In a way, you're seeing new sex, neo-sex, in this
movie. Or do you even want to call it sex? It's
obviously inducing some kind of pleasure the way sex
does, but what is it?

I think that is happening. You see a lot of body
modification. In the same way, we've never accepted
the environment as it was given to us, we've never
accepted the human body, either. We've always been
messing with it to the full extent of whatever the
technology at the time would allow us to do. But then
there's also the other element of body modification
that are not medical. It's social, it's political,
it's sexual, it's cosmetic, it's fashion. Just what
people will do now -- with scarring, tattooing,
piercing and all that, and performance art as well --
it would have been unthinkable, at least as mainstream
as it is now, not very long ago.

SPLICED: To what do you credit your fascination with
organic form and the mutation of the human body? 

Cronenberg: I got bored. That was traumatic.

I think it really has more to do with the perception
and an understanding than the whole idea that it's
something that happened to you in your childhood. I'm
just observing the world. I was born into it, like you
were, and then I found out there were some really
disturbing aspects to being alive, like the fact that
you weren't going to be alive forever -- that bothered
me.

Do you remember when you found out you wouldn't live
forever? People don't talk about this, but everybody
had to go through it because you're not born with that
knowledge. That's the basis of all existentialist
thought, which, of course, is an underpinning of this
movie. It's not called "eXistenZ" for nothing.

For me, the first fact of human existence is the human
body. But if you embrace the reality of the human
body, you embrace mortality, and that is a very
difficult thing for anything to do because the
self-conscious mind cannot imagine non-existence. It's
impossible to do.

So not only can you not imagine dying, you can't
really imagine existence before you were born. So, I
think, for example, that's one of the reasons people
believe so strongly in reincarnation. They kind of
assume that somehow they were there. You can't imagine
things going on without you. That's just the nature of
our self-consciousness.

So I observed these kinds of things as a kid and then
I'm gradually expressing this and talking to myself
through my movies about all of this stuff. Then I'm
really inviting the audience to have that conversation
with me. You're seeing me develop, not only as a
filmmaker if you've seen my earlier films, but you're
seeing me kind of learn how to be a human, how my
philosophy has evolved.

So that's why I think, for example, this movie cannot
be like "Videodrome." All the other connections aside
-- that was what, 17 years ago? -- I'm different now.

SPLICED: So all of your movies together are like a
biography. 

Cronenberg: Well, they should be. They're almost like
chapters in an ongoing book.

 




 
 




 
--- kursad <kursad-AT-postanarki.net> wrote:

> Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2002.11.11
> Howie, Gillian, Deleuze and Spinoza: An Aura of
> Expressionism, Palgrave, 2002, 238pp, $68.00 (hbk),
> ISBN 0333634675. 
> 
> Reviewed by: Todd May 
> Clemson University 
> 
> Ostensibly, Deleuze and Spinoza is a critical
> reading of Deleuze's interpretation of Spinoza in
> his book Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza.
> Deleuze published two books on Spinoza, but this
> one, although published two years earlier than
> Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, constitutes Deleuze's
> central work on Spinoza. Deleuze and Spinoza
> attempts to show that Deleuze's interpretation of
> Spinoza cannot save the latter from a number of
> problems that have become associated with Spinoza's
> ontology and the ethical and political views he
> built upon it.
> The aim of this critique, however, does not concern
> Spinoza as much as it concerns Deleuze. Howie
> contends that in Expressionism in Philosophy,
> Deleuze offers not simply an interpretation of
> Deleuze but a major statement of his own philosophy,
> a philosophy that, except in certain details, is of
> a piece with Spinoza's. On this view, Deleuze's
> philosophy stands or falls with his defense of
> Spinoza. If Deleuze's Spinoza is wanting in
> coherence or plausibility, then so is Deleuze. The
> critique, then, aims past Spinoza to Deleuze
> himself. It is as though Expressionism in Philosophy
> contains Deleuze's philosophy in germ or in summary,
> and thus its faults will spread themselves across
> the entirety of Deleuze's corpus.
> Moreover, although the book spends little time
> defending this (or the previous) claim, inasmuch as
> Deleuze is a representative of postmodernism in
> general, the failures of Expressionism in Philosophy
> are failures of postmodernism. "The postmodern," she
> writes, "new ageist thirst for satisfaction, for the
> experience of uncoded or unlimited intensity;
> indeed, for fulfillment, is quenched on the
> philosophy of Gaia, of univocal Being, the One, the
> Whole." (p. 9)
> I will look at these conclusions, especially the one
> concerning the place of Expressionism in Philosophy
> in Deleuze's corpus, in a bit. First, I would like
> to summarize the problems Howie finds with the
> Deleuze/Spinoza she finds in the text. Near the end
> of the book (p. 202), she lists a number of problems
> for which, according to Yovel, Hegel takes Spinoza
> to task. Her own critique largely follows these.
> First, Deleuze/Spinoza does not give us an adequate
> defense of the idea of a single substance. He has
> not even defended the idea that there is any
> substance at all behind the modes or attributes.
> Second, he does not have an adequate defense of the
> existence of finite modes. Third, the parallelism
> between the attributes of Thought and Extension is
> incoherent. Fourth, Deleuze/Spinoza's epistemology
> is unconvincing. Fifth, the ethical naturalism
> derived from the ontology amounts to no more than an
> acceptance of the determined path of the universe.
> Sixth, all of this issues out onto an untenable
> individualism. In short, Deleuze/Spinoza's
> philosophy combines an ontology that wavers between
> implausibility and incoherence in the service of an
> ethics of resignation and a politics of
> individualism.
> It should be emphasized here that these criticisms
> are not simply stated. They are defended in detail
> both by reference to the appropriate texts in
> Spinoza and Deleuze and by considering a variety of
> defenses that could be made of Deleuze/Spinoza's
> position, showing why in the end these defenses are
> unconvincing.
> It would be beyond the scope of this review to
> rehearse the arguments for Howie's criticisms.
> However, as she notes, most of them converge on a
> single problem, which she sites after her reference
> to Yovel's discussion of Hegel's Spinoza. "It should
> be clear that these criticisms of Spinoza are true
> of Deleuze and each can be traced back to the
> problematic relationship of Thought and Extension."
> (p. 202). Indeed, the text seems to take this
> problematic relationship as a centerpiece for
> criticism. For instance, part of the difficulty of
> the parallelism is that whatever happens in Thought
> must also happen (although not in the same way) in
> Extension and vice versa, without the one happening
> causing the other happening. One can see the
> difficulties here. How will this parallelism allow
> us to give an account of the "aboutness" of mental
> states? In what ways does the causality between
> states of Extension reflect a causality between
> states of Thought?
> These difficulties will be familiar to those who
> have immersed themselves in the study of Spinoza. If
> the argument of Deleuze and Spinoza were solely
> this, it would be a book about a book about Spinoza,
> showing how ultimately there are problems with
> Spinoza's philosophy that Deleuze's sympathetic
> interpretation cannot fix. As such, it is an
> interesting book.
> Howie, however, is emphatic that this is not the
> goal of the book. The book is not simply a critique
> of an interpretation of Spinoza; it is a critique of
> Deleuze. One strategy for making this critique stick
> would be to investigate the other works of Deleuze,
> particularly from Difference and Repetition forward,
> to show how the criticized elements of the Spinoza
> book are woven into the later philosophy. Howie,
> however, does not choose this tack. Instead she
> identifies Deleuze as a Spinozist tout court and
> thus holds that her critiques of Spinoza hold
> without emendation for Deleuze. In doing so, she
> does not shy away from the implications of her
> position. She holds, for instance, that "by
> stressing the immanence of God and his identity with
> the whole of reality, Deleuze distances himself from
> Nietzsche's atheism." (p. 192) Contrary to what
> appears in many of the later texts, then, Deleuze
> is, among other things, a theist of sorts.
> Is Deleuze's interpretation of Spinoza at the same
> time a statement of his own philosophy?
> Specifically, do the problems that plague Spinoza
> and that converge on the parallelism of attributes
> carry over without remainder into Deleuze's work? It
> is surely the case that Deleuze finds much to
> appreciate in Spinoza, especially with regards to
> the concepts of immanence, expression, and the
> univocity of Being. In his late text with Felix
> Guattari, What is Philosophy?, Deleuze goes so far
> as to call Spinoza the Christ of philosophers. But
> is Deleuze a Spinozist lock, stock, and barrel?
> I confess that I do not recognize the Deleuze Howie
> finds in Expressionism in Philosophy, and in
> particular I do not find an embrace of the
> problematic relationship of the attributes. In
> Difference and Repetition (tr. Paul Patton, Columbia
> University Press, 1994, p. 40), published the same
> year as Expressionism in Philosophy, Deleuze writes:
> Spinoza's substance appears independent of the
> modes, while the modes are dependent on
> substance.Substance must itself be said of the modes
> and only of the modes. Such a condition can be
> satisfied only at the price of a more general
> categorical reversal according to which being is
> said of becoming, identity of that which is
> different, the one of the multiple, etc.
> There are two points worth noting about this
> passage. First, it does not endorse Spinoza's view
> uncritically; second, it does not even refer to the
> attributes.
> That Deleuze retains Spinoza's idea of the univocity
> and immanence of being is beyond doubt. However, his
> own thought, as he begins to lay it out in
> Difference and Repetition, contains nothing of the
> attributes. If we look further along in Deleuze's
> corpus, we see the same silence on attributes in the
> later collaborations with Felix Guattari. Their
> reflections on Spinoza in . Thousand Plateaus have
> no equivalent concept of attributes, although
> substance and modes do make an appearance.
> In this area, Deleuze's thought is characterized not
> by the tripartite division into substance,
> attributes, and modes, but into the bipartite
> division into the virtual and the actual (a division
> Howie notes only in passing), where the former is
> akin to substance and the latter to modes. One might
> want to raise here the question Howie raises to
> Deleuze/Spinoza of how the unfolding of the virtual
> into the actual (immanent causality) allows for
> causal relations among elements of the actual
> (transitive causality). That is a fair question, one
> that goes to the relationship of Deleuze's ontology
> and science. Manuel de Landa's recent Intensive
> Science and Virtual Philosophy (Continuum, 2002)
> offers an account of that relationship, trying to
> show, among other things, how transversal causality
> would work in such an ontology. However, absent the
> commitment to attributes, the difficulty Deleuze
> faces is not the one Spinoza faces and that Howie
> would like to saddle Deleuze with.
> The example I have discussed here is only one
> indication that Expressionism in Philosophy is not a
> statement of Deleuze's philosophy but rather an
> attempt to read Spinoza as sympathetically as
> possible. Another one, I should note in passing, is
> that, unlike Spinoza, Deleuze is not committed to
> predeterminism or, as Howie terms it,
> "necessitarianism." His discussion of the dice throw
> in Nietzsche and Philosophy as well as his embrace
> of the scientific work of Jacques Monod and Ilya
> Prigogine demonstrate that chance plays a role in
> Deleuze's ontology that has no equivalent in
> Spinoza. In the end, then, it is impossible to offer
> an assessment of Deleuze's thought through this
> single work, or through any single work of Deleuze's
> (although admittedly certain texts, Difference and
> Repetition 
=== message truncated ==
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