Not Genius Humans Writing Genius Inhumans: Descartes, Kant, Vinge, Jameson, Fisher and the Sci-Fi Outside.

"science-fiction writers are the ones who try to write specific stories about all that technology may do for us. More and more, these writers felt an opaque wall across the future. Once, they could put such fantasies millions of years in the future. Now they saw that their most diligent extrapolations resulted in the unknowable...Once, galactic empires might have seemed a Posthuman domain. Now, sadly, even interplanetary ones are" - Vernor Vinge, Technological Singularity 1993. 

There is a genre of movie that center on a hyper intelligent, inhuman, or superhuman protagonist. These are not aliens from a distant world, nor even subjects alienated by global capitalism - they are terrestrial aliens; aliens of this world but unlike it. They are unworldly. 

These characters have elevated reflexes, can anticipate and predict others' thoughts and strategize in advance, etc. 

In Limitless (2011) Bradley Cooper takes a designer drug that makes him fast and smart. 

In Lucy (2014) Scar-Jo accidentally takes a designer drug that makes her fast and smart.

In Hitman Agent 47 (2015) Rupert Friend is not taking designer drugs but is himself a designer drug - a designer baby to be precise; a killer genetically engineered and pumped full of drugs and propaganda at birth to make him a android-like murder. His sister, played by Hannah Ware, is like this too - except more smarter.  

In Terminator: Dark Fate (2019) there are two characters; they are not 'android-like'  but are cyborgs or androids themselves; one a bad guy terminator, one techno-modified heroine.*

*[as an aside - perhaps indicative of cultural trends in media: in 2011, the super-inhuman character is a male, in 2014 a woman, in 2015 and 2019 a man and women - the archetype is complexifying...]

All these characters are supposed to be really smart, and the film goes to great lengths to try and convince the viewer these characters are really smart - the thing is these characters keep doing dumb, boring things. To the viewer they behave in mundane, predictable ways. Cooper, Johansen, Friend, Ware, and the terminator and anti-terminator ultimately just shoot people and maneuver slightly more tactically, efficiently than their opponents. 

What this illustrates are the Kantian epistemological and imaginary limits of the human and its attempt to radically think and radically create outside of one's self; the human attempt to create the inhuman; an attempt, and ultimate failure.

In other words, people who aren't themselves inhuman super intelligent beings cannot conceptualize what it is like to be as such. Thus, the end product in these films is a normal person's normal ideas of a nonnormal person's nonnormal ideas. These character's supposed hyper-superior thought and behavior are merely recycled and rearranged milquetoast thought and behavior. 

Descartes, in his iconic Meditations on First Philosophy, writes

"...the visions that come in sleep are like paintings: they must have been made as copies of real things; so at least these general kinds of things – eyes, head, hands and the body as a whole – must be real and not imaginary. For even when painters try to depict sirens and satyrs with the most extraordinary bodies, they simply jumble up the limbs of different kinds of real animals, rather than inventing natures that are entirely new. If they do succeed in thinking up something completely fictitious and unreal – not remotely like anything ever seen before – at least the colours used in the picture must be real. Similarly, although these general kinds of things – eyes, head, hands and so on – could be imaginary, there is no denying that certain even simpler and more universal kinds of things are real. These are the elements out of which we make all our mental images of things – the true and also the false ones." 

We can't think or create new categories. These hyper-supreme characters are like Descartes's animals - recycle from old, boring parts. And the psyche has a limited primordial grid or series of categories from which it filters and assembles the outside. 

Jung, pulling from the likes of Descartes and Kant, refers to this as an archetype which he defines as the way an instinct - or an inorganic geological physical force territorialized and cybneretically birthed into a physiological force within a body (not unlike the Golem myth where mud turns into a creature with some magic...); a deep outside trapped as deep inside. - manifests as a primordial image, or narrative structure. As Fisher points out dealing with similar concepts, Outsideness rips gaps in the fabric of the real which are assembled together with fictions. 

In both his first and last book Fisher uses Fredric Jameson to discuss a similar process: science fiction cannot really conceptualize the future - future society, future tech, etc. - as it can't surpass the epistemic wall that cordons off the future in advance; the deep future can only be conceived in and by the tools of the present or near future. To return to the excerpt of Vinge from our introduction, this is because technology develops in nonlinear, unpredictable ways, and because the most interesting high tech stuff is way out there, authors and filmmakers cannot really imagine the future. 

Limits cannot be traversed and represented. Real 'limitless' or machine(ic) thought or behavior would be much smarter than boring gunplay - or much more intense, and extreme in its violence. The future, like the hypersupreme, will either be hyper intelligent, or ultraviolent (see the most recent Predator franchise installment which pits an autistic human against a violent alien predator, and the research that relates autism to the dark triad of personality traits...). A highly cinematic 9mm automatic...but without the Oedipal personal theater cinema...

As mentioned, in Fisher's first text Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction (1999)

"Gothic Materialism is interested in the ways in which what would appear ultramodern – the gleaming products of a technically sophisticated capitalism – end up being described in the ostensibly archaic terms familiar from Horror fction: zombies, demons...think of it as the continuation of a nonorganic line that is positively antagonistic to progressive temporality. As Iain Hamilton Grant puts it, 'the Terminator has been there before, distributing microchips to accelerate its advent and fuel the primitives’ fears...'

...the nonorganic line as occupied by Gothic Materialism is to be distinguished both from 'the supernatural' (the supposed province of Horror fction) and 'speculative technology' (the home of Science Fiction). For Gothic Materialism, the sublime still belongs to a human(ist) aesthetics of representation (precisely because it fixes what lies beyond representation as the unrepresentable). Gothic Materialism’s aesthetic theory, as we shall see below, derives not from...Kant..." (pg. 3, 14).

In his last text The Weird and the Eerie (2016), Fisher writes 

"the vampire and the werewolf...these creatures are merely empirically monstrous; their appearance recombines elements from the natural world as we already understand it" (pg. 15). 

They are supernatural, not weird. As opposed to the boring supernatural, the weird and eerie is rooted in the fragmented outer limits of the natural (or hypernatural) - the Lovecraftian outside (pg. 16-18, 20-21); an deep unknowable outside that is only glimpsed through the horror of a deep unknowable inside - the Freudian unconscious (which Guattari deems 'marchinic' and schizophrenic in nature) which lies beyond Kantian categories (pg. 22); A Jamesonian "nostalgia for the present" (48-50). 

This genre of movie that centers on a hyper-supreme unworldly character with elevated reflexes, who can anticipate and predict others' thoughts and strategize in advance, etc. - the 'limitless' or limit-surpassing characters fail to really bring in the outside and only suceed in illustrating the limitations of representational imagination and humanist narcissism; the failure of the human to conceptualize the machinic. 

It's not all failures though. Like in science, these failures are also an opportunity to precisely explore a positive project; to explore what a film of such nature would be. What would an exploration of the Outside look and feel like? A wash of intensities? Colors? 

One comes to mind...

Too Woke to Be Cancelled: No Imagination in the Land of Antipsychiatrical-Scientological Pop-Feminist Templexive Miserablism

“So don't sit back, kick back and watch the world get bushwhacked. News at ten, your neighborhood is under attack. Put away the crack before the crack put you away. You need to be there when your baby's old enough to relate. So don't delay, act now, supplies are running out. Allow if you're still alive, six to eight years to arrive. And if you follow, there may be a tomorrow. But if the offer is shun, you might as well be walkin' on the sun.” 

– Accelerationist Anthem 'Walkin’ on the Sun' by Smash Mouth

The future is cancelled– and now the past too

What do The Handmaids Tale and Madmen have in common?

They’re both ‘woke’ television programs that feature a powerful woman defying the odds and micropolitically resisting the uberpatriarchy from the inside of a hyper-alpha-male dominated leviathan; one is an ironic-critical reflection of a ‘dystopian’ past, the other a paranoiac-critical look towards a dystopian future - and considering the way nostalgia operates within cultural trends, we can easily imagine one lapsing into the other for eternity, like a TV programming montage fever dream.

This one message between the two shows is as morose as it is commonplace in humanist oriented political rhetoric – the past was really bad, and the future, in its similarity to the past, will be really worse unless we learn from (or stop repeating) the past, and you better start now or you’ll be ‘on the wrong side of history’ (which retroactively runs both ways these days).

Through depressing gestures such as these, the present is reduced to a kind of purgatory suspended between two absolute hells, a gesture which sets the scene for an elevated and manic obsession with the need to act swiftly and immediately as to make up for or prevent an already-always happening (or happened) doom –  climate change, drug epidemics, territorial and populist disputes along neighborhood lines, etc., all that was mentioned in the above Smash Mouth 90s hit. If we don’t act now by eradicating the ‘bad’ then it’s all over (serious Y2K vibes).

Against all the advice of reasonable historians and historiographers, these 'woke' shows aim to cancel the past by appealing to the categories of the present, and cancel the future by appealing to categories of the past (this is both good and bad - time get's all scrambled...).

Scientology, Pop-feminism, and Identification 

What is more interesting is that the woman character in both The Handmaids Tale and Madmen are played by actress Elisabeth Moss, a relatively devout, practicing scientologist. Why is someone who practices scientology - a cult that despite its stated positions is clearly antithetical to women, never mind feminism - playing a feminist themed character in two of the biggest television shows to air in the last two decades you ask? Coincidence? Innocuous, unrelated facts?

Unlikely. Based on not only scientology’s own teachings but also on the reports of their past members, scientologists are strongly encouraged if not outright required to join highly visible and profitable media projects – film, TV, charity, etc. - in order to have a platform to spread scientology and recruit new, high value members such as other celebrities and cultural influencers. Nothing new here, just the time tested marketing ploy where an interest group attracts a big name celebrity to endorse - implicitly or explicitly - whatever it is they are selling - ideas, objects, lifestyles, whatever - either through person to person interactions, or on a grand scale through media networks. 

It's important to note that this isn’t isolated to Moss. Laura Prepon who plays a significant character in Orange is the New Black, another clearly 'woke' television show centered on the struggles of woman prisoners, is also a scientologist. And out of the 23 episodes of Scream Queens – a show hailed as a feminist riff on the trend in horror movies for woman to be victims of violence  –almost half feature Kristie Alley, another scientologist (and to a lesser degree, Alanna Masterson who played a girl power type character on The Walking Dead).  But why these shows? And why these characters? Maybe directors tend to write feminist characters anyways, and some of the women cast as feminist characters just happen to be scientologist?

Perhaps, but let’s entertain another idea: If you were a big cult leader who needed to push your creepy agenda as to garner the support of cultural icons who could tip the scales in your world dominating favor where would you look first? I know I would look for what’s popular in the culture at large. Something that’s both rebellious but agreeable, malleable enough to reach various populations but rigid enough to maintain a core audience, and free of critique - or so inoculated against it - that if critiqued, the critique is likely to be discursively preconceived as archaic, conservative, immoral, unethical, sexist, etc. From the onset this rules out controversial or divisive things such as support of gun rights, police, and military, and niche (but still popular) past times such as sports or trades. We don’t see scientology appealing to Kurt Schilling, Chris Kyle (when he was around), or Mike Row. And after all, everyone goes to the movies, everyone has a TV, and not everyone keeps up with politics, sports, and trades. So, if I (as a creepy cult leader) am looking to spread ideas, why not coopt 'woke' culture like the pop-feminism of TV that’s likely to reach the avid fan and the casual watcher, the political and apolitical, alike?

In other words, it is likely that Elizabeth Moss (Prepon and Alley too), as a good scientologist drone, is memeing scientology into feminism; using feminism as a cultural mechanism to broadcast scientology not unlike how Jim Jones – a cultist and self-proclaimed revolutionary Marxist -  used religion, something Marx, as the banality goes, called the opiate of the masses, as a mechanism to spread his own vulgar 'Marxism' and therefore his own cultist agenda.

Here’s how this kind of memetic contagion (see my old post on memes and cultural viruses) works via some bootleg Freud:

• 1:  Media consumer sees Madmen or Handmaiden’s Tale (ideally both);  consumer identifies with politically charged heroic or admirable character(s); 

• 2: consumer, conflating character’s values with actress’s values, Googles actress who plays character and now identifies with actress (fantasy is now transferred into reality); 

• 3: consumer, curious and wishing to nourish the identification as to increase the good feelings that come with identification, researches actress’s life (fantasy further into reality); 

• 4: consumer is now in contact with scientology and, acting on the mania of phantasmal identification or continuing to conflate the character with the actress and the actress’s beliefs with the consumer’s (and also conflate fantasy and reality), may consider, implicitly or explicitly, scientology’s tenets or values (psychoanalysts refer to these dynamics as transference, when fantasies, feelings, thoughts, and models of behavior associated or for one person are transferred by and through association to another).

We know this simply as 'being a fan' of an actor, performer, etc., purely based on their roles and without knowing anything personal about the actor to make any kind of judgment. 

If this sounds like an all too hasty and a little bit crazy rightwing conspiratorial use and abuse of sociological and psychological processes to attack pop-feminism and wokeness, then you are on the right track in thinking critically, but still may have missed that this kind of thinking is precisely what underlies 'leftwing Cancel Culture' and rightwing conspiracy (like Qanon) alike (my intent is not to play the culture war game here...). To illustrate, let’s take the above example – scientology corrupting our media consumers through association – and fill in its structure with different content:

• 1:  Media consumer sees worldwide Marvel film Guardians of the Galaxy; consumer identifies with cool heroic or admirable characters; 

• 2: consumer, now conflating character’s value – or in this case the euphoric feelings one gets from the film – with the actor’s values, or in this case  the director James Gunn’s, identifies with the ‘people’ behind the fantasy; 

• 3: consumer, curious and wishing to nourish the identification or obsession with superhero culture, researches the people who made the film possible such as James Gunn; 

• 4: the consumer is now in contact with some old controversial, provocative, and explicit Tweets from Gunn’s Twitter profile and a platform – so the theory goes – has now been given to these bad tweets by association with the popular film. Per this kind of thinking, if Guardians of the Galaxy is an international, multibillion dollar market object with high visibility, it drags with it into this level of significance the ‘nasty’ tweets of the director (hence the 'woke' metaphors of amplification, platform, voice, spotlight, etc.).  

'Woke' and 'cancel' culture (whatever these wishy-washy ideological buzzwords mean...) both work through identification and contagion (which isn't always of ill will, or inappropriate, but can be misapplied).

Scientology, Antipsychiatry, and Culture Wars

This kind of sloppy reduction – if A can sometimes correlate with C and if A can also sometimes correlate with D, then C must be also be correlated to D - is the ‘guilt by association’ phenomenon that 'Cancel Culture' operationalizes. If you have worked on a project a bad person has worked on you may be next on the chopping block (seen most recently in the Twittersphere in its extreme form when journalist Luke Turner blocked everyone and anyone, including accounts who have never heard of or interacted with the guy, associated with publisher Urbanomics  - if you’re reading this, it’s likely you’re blocked by him too). 

So if scientology is ‘problematic,’ to use the nomenclature, then why weren't Handmaid’s Tale and Madmen (not to mention Orange is the New Black and Scream Queens) all cancelled for being not-woke, i.e. associated with Scientology, a cult that by Cancel/Woke Culture’s own rules is harmful to women? This is not to say that the left hasn’t criticized The Handmaiden’s Tale. They have, but rather than calls for cancelations, they’ve engaged simply in low-stakes, left on left criticisms, claiming that that the show shirks away from real feminism or fails at intersectionality – criticisms that inoculate one from any real contact with a critical outside. And it’s also not enough to say that the 'woke' wouldn’t cancel themselves, as they have, after all, what could be more woke than canceling yourself? So, what about this particular case makes it resistance to self-cancelling? 

The short answer is that pop-feminism is too woke to be cancelled. After all – and this is the closet we can get to a ‘control variable’ - they cancelled Danny Masterson, brother of earlier mentioned Alanna Masterson of The Walking Dead, for sexual assault allegations related to his scientologism. And the point is not that he shouldn’t have been cancelled – who gives a shit about Danny, I don't know any details about the case, but I'm sure he probably committed the crime! – the point is that the pop-feminism of the media, even if clearly associated with unwokeness, makes for an entity more resistance to cancellation than any other 'entity.'

In an unconscious utilitarian gesture so characteristic of the modern humanist political agenda, the imagined good derived from Woke-Cancel Culture outweighs whatever bad would or could come from its possible associations to or appropriation by the unwoke. The longer answer is that the overlap here between scientology and feminism is precisely the point of collision – or near-schizophrenic narrative collapse - between Woke Culture and Cancel Culture which are so often tandem and unified in their approach to cultural objects. That is, Woke Culture and Cancel Culture are two parts of the same machine that work towards performing the same function, they are connected but disjunctive: The woke are not cancelled; the cancelled are not woke; the woke do the cancelling; the cancelled do not do the wokeing; the cancelled may become woke; the woke may not become cancelled in that if the woke were to be cancelled they would incorporate and ‘own’ their cancelling and use it as evidence of their wokeness.

That is, Scientology is an object that is enigmatic to the rhythmic mechanistic thrust of ‘Woke -> Cancel -> Woke -> Can…etc.’ This is because Woke-Cancel Culture is not only not inconsistent with Scientology, but almost complicit with it, and therefore ultimately impotent against it. Why? Scientology predicates itself on both moral and legal law - both of which it games almost flawlessly to its own benefit - the same bipedal approach as Woke-Cancel culture. It does everything by the books and plays the role of good guy who’s critical of the ills of society. For example, Scientology, suspicious of the bad intentioned nature and hegemonic position of psychological and psychiatric explanatory models, while also appealing to its own psychological and psychiatric methods and models, perfectly mirrors the anti-psychiatry movement – a movement closely allied with feminism and proto-wokeism -  of late 50s to mid-80s Europe which also, like scientology, engaged in psychological and psychiatric treatment while maintaining a critical distance to hegemonic norms. And to this effect, it’s no surprise that Elisabeth Moss plays famous Scottish anti-psychiatrist and Acid Marxist R.D. Laing’s wife in the film Mad to Be Normal, AND a supporting character in High-Rise, a film centered on a medical professional aptly named Dr. Robert Laing, clearly a reference to R.D. Laing, who lives in a skyscraper that is a too-on-the-nose metaphor for classist society. In short, Woke-Cancel culture can’t cancel that which already claims to itself be more woke and in charge of the cancelling – Woke-Cancel Culture and Scientology are friendly competitors, not enemies. 

I end with this – as I mentioned earlier, I have no interest in the culture war, nor in defining or exploring 'woke' or 'cancel' culture. These are buzzwords that capture the reactions that tired and stale ideological camps have towards each other, and I have no wish to reify them.

With that said, there is something going on here that is hard to articulate, so I end with a meme;

Broke: Cancel-Woke Culture, in being similar to what it critiques, is hypocritical.

Woke: Hypocrisy is itself a polemic of Cancel-Woke Culture (whatever that is...) that overemphasizes cognitive processes and misunderstands desire, and furthermore, Cancel-Woke Culture (which I have no definition for...), like Scientology, is a cult that operates like a religion and because of this cannot generate the critical distance required to develop the appropriate tools to combat that which it both hates and simultaneously identifies with.