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Project Mimique London
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Alphaville and the Inhuman Silence - Logic - Security - Prudence 1.0 Technology and rationalisation destroy the Idea of the survival of humanity from within[1] "The past represents its future, it advances in a straight line [...] yet it ends by coming full circle". Alpha 60, voice played by a man who had his larynx replaced by a voice box, the artilect at the heart of Jean-Luc Godard's 1965 dystopic masterpiece, Alphaville, holds the key to postmodern science fiction, "a desperate rehallucination of the past"[2], combined with a terror of the hyperreal. The cybernetic model mediated through traces of the everyday, an immanent tyranny haunted by Auschwitz. Here, the map engenders the territory, the artilect the quotidian; in Alphaville, Alpha 60 defines the parameters of life, work, speech and thought and ultimately war. More about "him" later on. In his essay Simulacra and Science Fiction, Jean Baudrillard suggests that a postmodern science fiction would put
Structuralist linguistics has it that there is no escape from language, and it is worth considering Godard's painstaking construction of this semantic dictatorship and its resistance.
2.0 A reserve beyond reason or technology
To love is to lose. It is a condition defined by the absence of the other, a language of solitude. Caution drags Natasha towards despair, anxiety, nausea, jealousy, rage, defined by the book he takes from his dying colleague, Henry Dickson (Akim Tamiroff), Paul Eluard's Capital of Pain. A world she is scarcely prepared for. Yet early on he proffers no emotion towards herself, and at the end of the film he makes a typically masculine demand for (empty) words of profound affection without return, an "impossible demand for unity".
Caution's response to Alpha 60's question "What did you feel as you passed through Galactic Space?" is from C17 philosopher Blaise Pascal (Darke, p 65). One might well fear finitude more. Alphaville operates on a closed construct. "Time has run out, the reign of finitude is upon us" Henri Lefebvre grumbles of post-Hegelian philosophers and the moderns. Lefebvre asserts the active nature, the violence, of space (no longer simply a medium) and defers to Nietzsche: "'Infinity is the original fact; what has to be explained is the source of the finite [...] In infinite time and in infinite space there are no terminal points.' Here thought is overcome by a kind of vertigo. Yet, he adds, 'though it has nothing to hold on to, humanity must somehow stand upright -- therein lies the immense task of the artist'" (1991, p 181). In Alphaville, one might say that the limits are themselves the stakes. The Lands Without are the 'not-there' of the plot, but the hinge on which it hangs, the defining absence. Alphaville is destroyed to protect the freer worlds. Little is known about the Lands Without (a place with "splendid galactic corridors" as Caution's guidebook relates!), save that their government sent a secret agent to assassinate or bring home (presumably for trial and execution) Professor Vonbraun (Howard Vernon), aka Leonard Nosferatu, Natasha's father and inventor of Alpha 60. It appears well known in Alphaville technocratic circles that Nosferatu (the reference to Murnau's vampire is obvious) is persona non grata in the Lands Without (banished in 1964), that Nosferatu has simply ceased to exist. The Lands Without are mediated through tourist catch phrases: Tokyorama, the Land of the Rising Sun; Florence, where the sky is as blue as the South Seas; Nueva York, probes Caution (which brings forth Natasha's trite rhyme: "Where the winter, Broadway, a glitter in a snow fur coat"). Pretty then, but hardly a libertarian paradise. Such issues are glossed over in the film. The ending is portrayed as an escape. Caution too functions as a reserve beyond reason or technology. There is a masculine proairetic powering the narrative, all focus is on Caution as man of action. Caution himself, with the studied blankness of Constantine's technique, functions predominantly as a sign, obscured for the contemporary UK audience, of the anti-hero of Peter Cheyney's novels, and the seven other Lemmy Caution films derived from them, beginning in 1952, hugely popular in France (Darke, p19). In these Constantine plays Caution as a French-speaking FBI agent. Professor Vonbraun addresses this potentiality of the sign directly when he turns to Caution and tells him "You will become worse than dead. You will become a legend". Caution replies in typical hard-boiled fashion "Yes, I'm afraid of death...but for a humble secret agent that's a fact of life, like whisky", then shoots Professor Vonbraun, precipitating the collapse of Alphaville.
3.0 Relation to affect and order through a form that makes both possible. There is a tension between Caution and Natasha which is barely resolved by the time of their escape from the city, and their relationship is marked by mutual incomprehension. Caution has a sexist aggression ("Aren't you ever propositioned?" he asks her, "Has no-one ever fallen in love with you?""You don't want me to flirt with you?", in disbelief). At one point, leaving the hotel with Natasha, he pushes her against the wall, ("Just how big a fool do you take me for? Answer me!"), complaining, as if he had known her for some time, "Check, Princess! I can't make head or tail of what you're talking about. That's how it is. You never understand anything". Natasha seems to make him uneasy. He compares her to a pretty sphinx, and notes her "small pointed teeth", reminding him "of an old vampire film...the sort they used to show at cinema museums". For her part, Natasha meets him with a formal reserve tempered by her ingenue eyes. In a Greimasian structuralism, Natasha would also function as the false helper. When she returns, she is on a mission to betray him, yet he declares his love and hands her the Capital of Pain, the codebook to Alphaville's opposition, hoping that she will provide a clue. It seems Lemmy himself cannot decipher it, and assumes that it holds secret messages. The betrayal is a incongruous event in the film (although perhaps faithful to a typical James Bond scenario), yet delivered with impeccable comic timing. Alphaville's secret police arrest Caution, and order Natasha to disable him with Story 842.
"Sentiments adrift [...] I went towards you, endlessly towards the light". The film opens with a light flashing ominously, the districts of the North and the South are introduced with bright neon words, scientific formulas wink at the camera, windows and car headlamps glare during the linking sequences, and one frame features a concentric light sculpture. Light is what makes the film strange (critical to the Formalist schema) and again makes possible a relation for the audience between affect and the order of Alphaville. As Chris Darke points out (p56), light is at once part of the set, the mise-en-scène and the plot (that is, diegeticised). Sharp contrast revisits the harsh chiaroscuro of German silent cinema and American film noir, and allows Godard to introduce his theme "presence of the future" as well as evoke the sense of the uncanny that haunts films such as Dr. Mabuse and the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Darke, p57). The sharp contrast enhances the polarities at the heart of the structuralist system ruling Alphaville. Darke comments: "If Alphaville can be seen as one of Godard's exercises in mimetic film criticism -- that is criticism conducted in the language of the medium -- its object is, of course, cinema, and the light that is brought to bear on it is a light from cinema's past" (p55). Darke notes (p59) the use of the negative in the scenes as Alpha 60 self- destructs, as a quotation from Murnau's Nosferatu and Cocteau's Orphée, signifying an uncanny transition from one state of being to another. Light is also intrinsic to the morality of Alphaville, it is a means of deprivation. Caution asks: "Why does everyone look so miserable?" Natasha replies: "You ask too many questions. Because they lack electricity". 4.0 Affects involved in communication of a limit to order, in the context of the Kantian sublime. Inverting Jean-Francois Lyotard (1991), one might venture that in the determinations of the cinematic, the indeterminate, the 'it happens', is the film itself, the syntagms of shot and sequencing, the action as it appears on the screen. Unlike a painting, where such a sensation of event is not expressible, film glories in the moment. Narrative and editing are articulated strategically to produce the event - as turning point, denouement, moments of pathos and so forth. It is this articulation which secretes the sublime, which I would suggest is the dominant message of the film. This is nowhere more eloquently expressed than in Natasha's soliloquy composed from seemingly-random phrasing of Eluard's poetry, beautifully evocative of the inexpressible, evoking a limit to the city's all pervasive order. The soliloquy, and the conversation that precedes it, comprise an intensity of surrealist imagery which gives the scene the cast of a dream. For Edmund Burke, the sublime was a matter of intensification: of the conceptual and emotional capacity of the spectator, a contradictory pleasure (Lyotard, 1991, p100).
The phrasing in the soliloquy is marked by its simplicity, its simple inversions, its use of plain words in unusual combinations. Lyotard also touches on the writings of Boileau, the translator of Longinus, a Greek teacher of rhetoric and author of the treatise On the Sublime (C1/C3AD). Here the sublime is concealed beneath words, perhaps the extreme simplicity of a turn of phrase at a moment when one might expect bravura, or in silence (ibid, p94). A thought parallel to the subliminal. The soliloquy is iconic as a figure of the rhetorical sublime. And throughout Caution's engagement with authority he deploys artful quotation (out of context) with a tip to minimal economy of form, hints of the sublime concealed within the dialogue.
The sublime is an emotion which seizes one, a shock, an event that makes for the sensation. For Kant, in the sublime, pleasure is mixed with pain, pleasure comes from that pain. There is a "dislocation of the faculties", a cleavage in the subject, producing the tension that characterises the sublime, as the faculty of presentation fails to provide a representation corresponding to the Idea of reason. A "double pleasure" emerges as the imagination strives to figure, confronted with the paucity of images (ibid, p98) (or as here perhaps the contradictory syntax). Lyotard asserts that there is a trace of the avant-garde in the Kantian aesthetic of the sublime. Kant pointed in a direction towards minimalism and abstraction (Lyotard is thinking here of painting). Both space and time are unrepresentable in their magnitudes, they are pure Ideas. One might, however, invite them with negative presentation (ibid). By this Kant evokes a figural paradox, the Mosaic law forbidding the casting of graven images. Godard himself refuses that sine qua non of popular cinema, sex, as component of the pivotal love/betrayal scene. Lyotard presents us with a conundrum. The avant-garde task he says, remains that of "undoing our presumption of the mind with respect to time. The sublime feeling is the name of this privation" (ibid, p 107). In our current times, he says, "[a] confusion [...] becomes possible, between what is of interest to information and the director, and what is the question of the avant-gardes, between what happens -- the new -- and the Is it happening? the now" (ibid, p 106), the sublime of the postmodern moment. In Alphaville, Godard, with his continuous technological present tense, critiques the cult of the new with the event of Natasha's soliloquy. This is the sublime question, the task of the film. 5.0 Limit of the human, thought according to the absolute. In the Postmodern Condition (1984), Lyotard posits a game between science and chance. Dice, he notes, are compatible with the calculation of system probabilities (dice were used in the construction of this essay). Bridge requires cunning, and is not computable. It is Caution's cunning -- his obscure riddle ("Something which never changes, day or night"), his allusion to power, perhaps or to the eternal -- which preoccupies Alpha 60's circuits to the extent that Caution can escape and hunt down Professor Vonbraun. Lyotard asserts that perfect control is a system weakness. Alpha 60, the limit and logical end of the human, is thus acutely vulnerable. Lyotard conjectures that with the hegemony of computers comes a certain kind of logic, a certain language. Much of the discourse of Alpha 60 is bricolage Jorge Luis Borges, taken from his essay A New Refutation of Time. The opening pronouncement is an extract from Borges' Form of a Legend[3]. A new theme emerges in the state analogy, the power of (here, formalist) literature against the subversive potential of (surrealist) poetry. Borges' words lend Alpha 60 a pathos, notably in the voice-overs to the scenes of self-destruction. The sublime is not lost on this artificial intellect, who suffers terror at the irreversibility of time, joy and wrenching pain at the condition of being time:
Cheekily, one might invoke Proust. Lyotard suggests (1984, p80) that Proust alludes to the unpresentable, what is elided is "the identity of consciousness, a victim to the excess of time". An assertion that aptly fits the condition of citizens of Alphaville. A Nietzschean subtext is manifest as the death of man is postponed and Natasha forgets the word 'love'. "To speak is to fight, in the sense of playing, and speech acts fall within the domain of a general agonistics" (ibid, p 10). Thus Lyotard characterises his understanding of the term 'language game', or genre of discourse. Language games are incommensurable (for example, in the film, logic is confronted with incompatibility, variations on singularity and subvention of two-value orientation, which undermine it), yet an observable social bond is composed of such moves in a conversation which obeys the rules of the genre. For Lyotard, "knowledge of language games as such and the decision to assume responsibility for their rules and effects" (ibid, 66) is another goal within the system. The most significant effect of language games "is precisely what validates the adoption of rules -- the quest for paralogy" (ibid) or illogical reasoning. Alpha 60 synthesises poetry in case it come in useful for later on, that is, for system performance. Caution has to destroy Alpha 60 or find himself, and his linguistic strategies, caught within its totalising plan. One must not forget the bureaucratisation of the statement, the prohibition of phrases (associative and conceptual engineering) and privileged classes of statement (e.g. the phatic repetition) that characterises Alpha 60s technique of rule. Alpha 60 deals in denotative statements, and thus proves his scientific status. This is counterposed to the 'truth' of Lemmy Caution's narration.
Technocractic anxiety was a prominent theme in French science fiction after World War II. Bradford Lyau points to the Fleuve Noir 'Anticipation' novels, written between 1951 and 1960. Of the "eleven French authors who wrote books for this series, only two offer visions wholeheartedly approving of technocracy", he says (Science Fiction Studies, #49). Those that oppose such a system question technocratic priorities and the knowledge of a scientific elite, point to the revalorisation of religious belief, challenge the philosophical basis of technocracy, and highlight the pervasive inequality of technocratic societies, and the annihilation of individualism. George Slusser comments on the French magazine Fiction (six editions after 1953) which published "a literature that explore[d] alternate and parallel, rather than other, worlds; a literature that turn[ed] away from expansive paradigms to explore the inner world of the imagining organ -- the rational mind itself [...] [T]his SF is Cartesian and surrealist in nature. Which means that it seeks a logical cultivation of dream worlds. And should do so in hopes of preserving the privilege of the cogito in relation to a material universe otherwise defined by Pascal's two infinities" (ibid). Godard's vision remains true to this conception. I think, indicate both Alpha 60 and Caution, therefore, I am. That Godard applies such a truism to both man and machine at the same time throws such a conception into doubt. Project Mimique. February 2009. Footnotes 1. Delineation of the Inhuman, a homology developed by Jean- Francois Lyotard, is taken from James Williams' book, Lyotard and the Political, pp126-132. 2. Jean Baudrillard on Philip K. Dick's Simulacra. 3. Source: Wikipedia Bibliography Auge, M. (1995) Non-places, Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (London) Verso Barthes, R. (1978) A Lover's Discourse (London) Vintage Baudrillard, J. (1994) Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbour) University of Michigan Press Cirlot, J.E. (1962) A Dictionary of Symbols (London) Routledge Darke, C. (2005) Alphaville (London) I.B. Tauris Eluard, P. (1985) Capitale de la Douleur (Oxford) Blackwell Godard, J-L. (1965) Alphaville (transcript from video tape) www.lafn.org/~cymbala/alphavil.html Hawkes, T. (1977) Structuralism and Semiotics (London) Methuen Heath, S. (1978) 'Difference', in Screen, 19 3:51-112 Leech, G. (1974/1981) Semantics (London) Penguin Lefebvre, H. (1991) The Production of Space (Oxford) Blackwell Lyotard, J.F. (1984) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Manchester) MUP ------- (1991) The Inhuman (Cambridge) Polity Science Fiction Studies #49, 16 3, November 1989 (abstract) www.depauw.edu/SFs/abstracts/a49.htm Sim, S. (2001) Lyotard and the Inhuman (Duxford) Icon Tafuri, M. & F. Dal Co (1976) Modern Architecture/2 (London) Faber & Faber Williams, J. (2000) Lyotard and the Political (Abingdon) Routledge |
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