Our Spaceship Earth and the Inevitable Apocalypticism of the Anthropocene

 The term “Anthropocene,” as Sloterdijk states, carries an urgent moral-political message under the guise of scientific neutrality, as it points at humanity as the responsible agent for the habitation and management of the planet. It tells us that humanity is no longer seamlessly integrated with the planet. As the Anthropocene has a responsible agent, it bears the content of an accusation. Sloterdijk contemplates on it via an imagery of a judicial setting: as “When we speak of an ‘Anthropocene,’ … we are taking part in a court case –in a preliminary hearing before the main trial, to be more precise– in which, as a first step, the accused’s culpability is supposed to be settled … This preliminary hearing is concerned with the question of whether it makes any sense at all to try the offender in question, given that the latter is not of age.”[1] The accused is not of age, and in some respects, it is insignificant, even weightless. Referencing Stanislaw Lem on the ineffectiveness and insignificance of humanity in terms of biomass, Sloterdijk questions “the point of putting on trial a species that pales in comparison to the material dimensions of the Gaia-system, the hydrosphere.”[2] Of course, the answer is that humanity’s biomass is not the sole determinant of its impact, and a weightless humanity can impact its environment in significant ways. “If humanity is supposed to be put on trial, this is mainly because it epitomizes a meta-biological agency that is able to exert quite a bit more influence on the environment, by virtue of its capacity for action, than we would assume on the basis of its relative physical weightlessness.”[3]

The agent “humanity” implies all human beings as the collective that is responsible for the destructive consequences of the Anthropocene. However, within the context of the radical technological advancements of the modern age, “humanity” refers to the European civilization and the technocratic elite.[4] Sloterdijk writes that starting from the 17^th and 18^th centuries, the European technocratic elite, with the use of coal and petroleum in machinery, transformed the global scene, and the discovery and technical mastery of electricity led to “a new universal” in terms of energy. As such, “The collective that is characterized these days by expressions such as ‘humanity’ mainly consists of agents who within less than a century have acquired technologies developed in Europe. When Crutzen speaks of an ‘Anthropocene,’ this is a gesture of Dutch courtesy – or avoidance of conflict. In fact, talk of a ‘Eurocene’ or a technocene initiated by Europeans would be more fitting.”[5] (Thus, Sloterdijk adds another suggestion to the list of alternative names for the Anthropocene, such as Plantationocene, Capitalocene, Anthrobscene, Misanthropocene, and Chthulucene).

For Sloterdijk, the concept of “Anthropocene” reflects the 19th-century epistemological obsession of contemporary geology of historicizing and organizing historical fields into eons, ages, or epochs.[6] The emergence and proliferation of the concept of the Anthropocene is linked with the triumph of historicism, which itself is linked to the idea of evolution. Behind the triumph of historicism, Sloterdijk particularly elaborates on Marx and Engels, who viewed human history as a special case of natural history as humans must secure their own existence through production –the history of relations of production is a continuation of natural history in a different form. The Marxist image of the world (the operation of relations of production shaping and determining the stages of society’s evolution from hunter-gatherers to slave-holding societies, feudalism, capitalism, and finally to communism) has replaced older doctrines in terms of the segmentation of the ages of the world. In this context, with the Anthropocene, which belongs to another pragmatic theory on the ages of the world, the responsibility of “weightless” humanity is revealed as an ethico-political project in which humanity must go through a test of transforming “emission” into a “mission”:

The concept of ‘emission’ helps us to recognize that the kind of influence we are concerned with here has until now taken place in the mode of a ‘side effect’ – otherwise, we would be talking about a ‘mission’ or a ‘project.’ The ‘e’ in ‘emission’ reveals the involuntary character of the anthropogenic impact on the exo-human dimension. Thus, the concept of the ‘Anthropocene’ includes nothing less than the task of testing out whether the agency of ‘humanity’ is capable of transforming something ejected into a project or of transforming an emission into a mission.[7]

A central component of Sloterdijk’s account is concerned with the temporal/historical character of the anthropocenic standpoint, which he links with the apocalyptic logic: since “effective histories can only be organized from their end points backwards, the anthropocenic standpoint amounts to a narrative with a stark moral choice.”[8] In the past, this narrative was dominantly in the form of apocalyptic literature in the West, as the apocalyptic approach evaluates the world from its end and is a cosmic moral procedure of sorting good (worthy of survival) from evil (not worthy of survival).[9] Sloterdijk writes,

Everything thus suggests conceiving of the ‘Anthropocene’ as a term that is only meaningful within the framework of apocalyptic logic. Apocalypticism signifies evidence from the end. Since, as a collective, we cannot be all the way to the end yet but always have to somehow carry on for a while longer, and human intelligence cannot definitively review its own history. It can only try different versions out in diverse forms of anticipation – a fact testified to by an illustrious series of simulations, sacred and profane, from the Egyptian Book of the Dead to the first report of the Club of Rome.[10]

The indispensable apocalyptic logic highlights the mythological character of the narratives we form on the Anthropocene, as the specific temporality of human beings drops its shadow over the stories we produce. In terms of humanity’s relation to nature, Sloterdijk views the Heideggerian insight of conceiving being as time as essentially correct but missing a significant aspect: We notice time when its flow is disrupted.[11] For Sloterdijk, we see this disruption as a delay in the basic form of tragedy, and in current times, humanity must deal with constant delays with regard to our environmental policies. But modern humans, as Sloterdijk emphasizes, notice time as time mostly through accelerations: “Accelerating as fast as possible on one’s trajectory is what drives apocalypse as a temporo-logical form.”[12] The “logic of self-reinforcing sphere of activity that feeds back upon itself” determines the modern era: Humanity has witnessed the emergence of devastating circuli virtuosi, but certain important events led to the circulus virtuous emerge in the modern era, their effects leading to a new perception of time.[13] Sloterdijk specifies six self-reinforcing circular and interwoven processes that have emerged until now: fine arts, banking, engineering, the state, scientific research, and law.[14] The formulation of the concept of Anthropocene inevitably follows the apocalyptic logic because it indicates that the cosmic insouciance that was the basis for historical forms of human being-in-the-world has come to an end. In conventional terms, we could describe ‘the human place in the cosmos’ – to recall Scheler’s treatise – as a kind of scenery-ontology: on this view, the human being, as a dramatic animal, performs before the massif of nature that can never be anything other than a placid background for human operations. Such scenic ontological thought remained predominant for quite a while, even after the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, although nature-as-background is nowadays construed as an integral storehouse of resources and as a universal landfill.[15]

The apocalyptic framework reveals the binary of foreground-background or stage-play ontology of the old ecology. As Sloterdijk states, in the 19^th century, the traditional scenery-ontology was starting to be supplanted by an ecological logic, and the scenery-ontology, the old divide of foreground and background, the old ecology of stage and play have lost their ground.

What currently creates epochs is the revenge of the former background on the depicted figures and frameworks: the background has emerged from its inconspicuousness and quit its assigned position as the supplier of self-evident things. The old ecology of stage and play is out of joint. It is now no longer possible to place ruthlessly risky cultural figures on endlessly resilient natural slides. The slide itself demands that its previously overlooked improbability be entered into the figures it carries and considered in them. It might even seem that nature took revenge on history by having its own fragility suddenly surpass the riskiness of the historical structure. Thus, the due de-dramatization of history gives a prelude to the rediscovery of a dramatic nature. If humanity were to awaken from its historical narcissism, it would discover that it no longer has a mission other than to make the concern of an overly finite nature its own.[16]

Nature as the “supplier of self-evident things” belongs to the Cartesian/modernist anthropocentric imaginary. Sloterdijk views historicity as a fragility, as it means mortality for civilizations.[17] The Anthropocene reveals how the old stage/background Nature discarded its assumed role and demonstrated its excess fragility, calling for the recognition of its limits. This view resonates with the feminist new materialist maxim, “There is no outside Nature.” Or, following Donna Haraway, we are always already within nature cultures (within what has been viewed as “stage” (nature) and “play” (history/culture).  There is no exit from the stage or play, no absolute exteriority. For Karen Barad, “There are only ‘acts of nature.’” For Vicki Kirby, who revised Derrida’s “No outside of text” as “No outside nature”, this is not privileging nature because “there is no outside, no remainder that is not already involved and evolving as text.”[18] As there is no outside, we as humans are viewed as ethical modalities. The idea of being inside forever reveals our responsibility to take care of the “inside,” highlighting the dimension of our accountability: “Taking account entails being accountable, for all ac/countings are from within, not without. There is no pure external position, only agential separability, differences within, différance.”[19]

I contend that the maxim “No outside” is closely connected to Sloterdijk’s reworking of the imagery of the Spaceship Earth, as “Spaceship Earth does not have any exits, neither for emergencies nor for normal situations.”[20] Sloterdijk, referring to Buckminster Fuller’s Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1968), writes that Fuller’s imagery “consisted in the truly prodigious redefinition of our home planet: from this critical moment on, the good old-fashioned Earth may no longer be envisaged in terms of natural dimensions, but is rather to be conceived of as a colossal work of art. It was no longer a foundation but instead a construct; it was no longer a basis but instead a vessel.”[21] The fundamental implication of living in a spaceship Earth is that “its crew must in fact have a vital interest in the maintenance of livable relations within the interior of the vessel.”[22] For Fuller, the most important condition for humans to stay in spaceship Earth was that there was no operating manual, so the passengers were supposed to learn and understand how things were by themselves. In the past, humans made some ignorant mistakes, which the system was designed to bear for a remarkable amount of time. However, as the passengers start to understand their situation and seize control over their environment, the system does not indulge in ignorance as it did before.

Human being-in-the-world, of which twentieth-century philosophy spoke, is thus revealed as being on board a cosmic vessel that is susceptible to failure. Some time ago, I suggested the concept of ‘monogeism’ to characterize the human being’s appropriate cognitive relation to this vessel – a term that designates the minimum, as it were, of a non-ignorant contemporary relation to the paramount importance of the Earth. It likewise forms the axiom for a political ontology of nature.[23]

Thus, “No outside nature” means “No outside Spaceship Earth.” As such, Sloterdijk sees “the true conception of the conditio humana” as “life-and-death autodidacticism.”[24] As the passengers of the spaceship, we must use our own minds, make our own decisions, and essentially learn how to travel in space all on our own. In terms of our eco-political issues, Sloterdijk questions the timing of our “knowing” as it seems to always come too late. However, there is also “a prognostic intelligence that proves itself precisely in the gap between ‘late’ and ‘too late.’”[25] For Sloterdijk, until now, humanity has accepted the principle of learning from mistakes, but prognostic intelligence tells us that we must learn before making mistakes. In order to figure things out, the kinetic expressionism of the last century must be disposed of or radically modified. Sloterdijk defines kinetic expressionism as “modernity’s mode of existence, which was primarily made possible by the ready availability of fossil fuel.”[26] The availability of such materials led to the specific economic, political, and cultural climate and impacted our sense of identity, as well as our understanding of personal freedoms: “We can no longer imagine a freedom that does not always also include the freedom to rev our engines and accelerate, the freedom to move to the most distant destinations, the freedom to exaggerate, the freedom to waste, indeed, lastly, even the freedom to detonate explosives and destroy ourselves.”[27] Sloterdijk believes that we must fundamentally change our thinking as the expressionistic character of current lifestyles in affluent societies demonstrates that nature has not been and is not indifferent to human activities and that there are indeed limits to expression, emission, and the indulgence of ignorance. The 21^st century will go down in history as a carnival of redemptive vanities, at the end of which human beings will long for redemption from redemption and salvation from saviors. At the same time, it heralds an era of hypocrisy and the double standard. Nevertheless, beyond vanity, panic, and hypocritical rhetoric, this age will continually confront the question of whether to set up something like a stabilizing regime on board the spaceship Earth. It should be borne in mind that, from the outset, we must have modest expectations regarding the concept of stabilization. Cultural evolution knows no stable equilibrium. At best, it can segue from one livable state of disequilibrium to the next.[28]

Sloterdijk points out that the current struggle is essentially between expansionism and minimalism. There is a “gigantomachy” in which the idealistic party as a side argues for a new modesty and for reducing all kinetic expressionism to an eco-political minimum:  reduction instead of increase, minimization instead of maximization, and self-circumspection instead of self-liberation. For Sloterdijk, “it seems as though ecological puritanism might be the only reasonable morality on board the spaceship Earth … We realize that we are obligated to cultivate a modus vivendi that corresponds to the ecological-cosmopolitan insights of our civilization.”[29] However, he thinks that a global ethics of moderation is not realistic, due to the link between self-preservation and self-advancement. In affluent societies, people view their wealth as “the irrevocable spoils of conquest”[30] and they will not accept parameters of moderation or negative growth. The argument of modesty maintains these rich societies will ultimately have to accept the ecological facts that their consumption habits are not sustainable in the long run and that there is only one Earth. Sloterdijk finds this argument of the Earth as “an irreplaceable singularity” undeniable at first but questions the monadological interpretation of the Earth. There is the aspect of the technosphere, as such, we do not yet know what will happen “if the geosphere and biosphere are further developed by an intelligent technosphere and noosphere. It is not impossible a priori that such further developments will lead to effects that amount to a multiplication of the Earth … technology has not yet spoken its final word.”[31]

In the end, for Sloterdijk, the Anthropocene implies care for the cohabitation of all human and nonhuman agents and is a call to build “a network of simple and more advanced settings in which the agents of the current world will create their existence in the mode of co-immunity.”[32] Addressing the challenges posed by the Anthropocene requires a radical rethinking of human cultures, lifestyles, and economic systems, and the processes of moving away from kinetic expressionism and unlimited growth towards greater moderation and sustainability must be evaluated in unconventional perspectives for plausible change. Additionally, Sloterdijk underlines the need for a new politics for the Earth that can address the challenges posed by climate change and environmental degradation. This will require a fundamental transformation of human civilization and its relationship with the planet.

The Subject-Object Myth and the Metamorphic Zone

Latour echoes Sloterdijk’s engagement with the modern subject’s ontological and temporal constraints when he contemplates the cold scientific statement: “The maximum permissible CO2 limit was crossed just before 1990,” and questioning how we can “swallow the news that our very recent development has modified a state of affairs that is vastly older that the very existence of the human race … but we also have to absorb the disturbing fact that the drama has been completed and that the main revolutionary event is behind us since we have already crossed a few of the nine ‘planetary boundaries’ considered by some scientists as the ultimate barrier not to overstep!”[33] This predicament resonates with the inevitable apocalyptic logic conveyed in Sloterdijk’s account. We are not able to deal with the vast scale of events mentally or emotionally while simultaneously taking on agential responsibility for everything: “How can we simultaneously be part of such a long history, have such an important influence, and yet be so late in realizing what has happened and so utterly impotent in our attempts to fix it?”[34] For Latour, we are unable to simply read such scientific statements as objective facts and maintain our distance, as “There is no distant place anymore. And along with distance, objectivity is gone as well; or at least, an older notion of objectivity that was unable to take into account the active subject of history.”[35] The current issue concerns understanding the role of human agent “not only in the construction of facts but also in the very existence of the phenomena those facts are trying to document.”[36]

The problem of rethinking agency is deeply connected to Latour’s conception on the Earth as a full-fledged actor of what he calls “our common geostory.”[37] He emphasizes that the ways of telling our common geostory is the problem of philosophy, science and literature. Viewing the Earth or all nonhuman or more-than-human agents as full-fledged actors imply abandoning the view of human agency within the framework of the active subject-passive object binary. From a new materialist lens, human agency can be viewed as another mode of agency “receiving, storing, processing and emitting information.”[38] Humans and nonhumans engaging in these operations isomorphically reveal the non-exclusivity of human agency. In a similar vein, for Latour, “One of the main puzzles of Western history is not that ‘there are people who still believe in animism’, but the rather naive belief that many still have in a de-animated world of mere stuff; just at the moment when they themselves multiply the agencies with which they are more deeply entangled every day. The more we move in geostory, the more this belief seems difficult to understand.”[39] Latour does not understand the accusation of “anthropomorphism” (or attributing agency) often directed at novelists or scientists as well. He believes that every entity they deal with “are all born out of the same witches’ caldron because, literally, that is where all of the shape-changers reside.”[40]

This resonates with the agential realist account of Karen Barad, for whom agency is simply a “‘doing’ or ‘being’ in its intra-activity”[41] and “the ongoing reconfigurings of the world.”[42] All agencies, human and nonhuman, participate and intra-act within the material-discursive continuum, the spacetimemattering. In this framework, human or human agency is viewed as an ethical modality, as being accountable means acknowledging how and through which acts we leave “marks on bodies.”[43] A nonhierarchic understanding of agency is a matter of engaging with responsible “cutting practices” –“an ethico-onto-epistemological commitment to understand how different cuts matter.”[44] It is about engaging with responsible material-discursive practices that acknowledge and take into account the materiality of all beings.

Thus, Latour’s view of agency can be understood within the framework of the new materialist framework to which he belongs and which problematizes the constituent subject-object divide of the modernist tradition. Being a ‘subject’ is not to act in front of a background but “to share agency with other subjects that have also lost their autonomy. It is because we are now confronted with those subjects –or rather quasi-subjects– that we have to shift away from dreams of mastery as well as from the threat of being fully naturalized.”[45] Thus, in the Latourian relational framework, “Gaia is another subject altogether –maybe also a different sovereign.”[46] Latour’s account echoes Sloterdijk’s, particularly in terms of the problematization of nature as passive and human as active (the old ecology of stage and play), as he observes an ironic twist in the subject-object poles of our traditional understanding: Human societies ironically have become “the dumb object” whereas nature has taken the role of the active subject.

The co-existence of agents is obfuscated by the scientific worldview, which led to the material world in which the agency of all the entities has been made to vanish: Latour calls this “a zombie atmosphere” in which “nothing happens anymore since the agent is supposed to be ‘simply caused’ by its predecessor. All the action has been put in the antecedent … The consequent could just as well not be there at all … their eventfulness has disappeared.”[47] But storytelling is common for human and nonhuman, rather than being a property of human language –it is a result of being thrown in a “fully articulated and active”[48] world. Latour believes that we must form a common geo-story with the Gaia. The idea is not succession or causality but rather relationality and (a Harawayian) making-with or sympoiesis.

Latour proposes an approach that embraces a common source of agency: a metamorphic zone “where we are able to detect actants before they become actors; where ‘metaphors’ precede the two sets of connotations that will be connected; where ‘metamorphosis’ is taken as a phenomenon that is antecedent to all the shapes that will be given to agents.”[49] Detecting this metamorphic zone is crucial politically as well, as what is needed in politics is “a common world that has to be progressively composed.”[50] What we should compose cannot be divided into animate (having agency) and inanimate (not having agency) or else, such a process of composition is made impossible. The old divide of nature and culture is problematic, as well as the efforts to combine or reconcile the two as distinct domains. As with other new materialist thinkers, Latour rather maintains the idea of a nature-culture or material-semiotic continuum.

The point of living in the epoch of the Anthropocene is that all agents share the same shape-changing destiny. A destiny that cannot be followed, documented, told, and represented by using any of the older traits associated with subjectivity or objectivity. Far from trying to “reconcile” or “combine” nature and society, the task, the crucial political task, is, on the contrary, to distribute agency as far and in as differentiated a way as possible — until that is, we have thoroughly lost any relation between those two concepts of object and subject that are of no interest any more except patrimonial.[51]

With the return to the metamorphic zone, the Earthbound will “articulate their speech in a way that will be compatible with the articulation of Gaia.”[52] According to Latour, there should be a new way of creating global geopolitics that does not involve expanding politics towards nature or naturalizing the human sphere. Thus, we need to distribute agency more radically, widely, and far away and traverse the worn-out binaries of subject-object and nature-culture. What he means is our political theory, and ecological thought must be open to addressing the intricate interactions of human and nonhuman actants, of people and things, of animate and inanimate entities alike, by recognizing their mutual dependence and relationality.

In both Sloterdijk’s and Latour’s accounts, the Anthropocene is viewed as a shift from a view of nature as an objective backdrop to human activities to the recognition that human actions are now profoundly shaping the Earth’s systems. Anthropocene implies a new moral and political responsibility for humanity to relate with the Earth. In Sloterdijk’s account, the Anthropocene is understood within an apocalyptic framework, evaluating the world from the end, bringing both the potential for catastrophic outcomes and for redemptive possibilities. Addressing the challenges of the Anthropocene requires a radical rethinking of our traditional onto-epistemological frameworks as well as our cultural and economic systems -like the issue and implications of breaking from the modus operandi of kinetic expressionism and unlimited growth towards greater moderation and sustainability. Latour focuses on agency in the context of the Anthropocene, arguing that traditional binaries and dichotomies of subject-object, nature-society, and animate-inanimate are no longer sustainable or tenable in this new era. Like Sloterdijk, he maintains that the Earth must be viewed as an active agent that is being transformed by human actions rather than an objective backdrop. The more we engage with the geostory of the Earth and with the interconnected agents that compose it, the more we see the dysfunction of our old views and systems. Latour proposes a different ontological approach, a common source of agency which he calls a “metamorphic zone,” arguing that we must distribute agency as far and in as differentiated ways as possible. This shift in perspective is necessary to understand and re-evaluate the complex challenges posed by the Anthropocene.

Bibliography

Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.

Barad, Karen. “Nature’s Queer Performativity,” Kvinder, Køn & Forskning, (1–2), 2012, https://doi.org/10.7146/kkf.v0i1–2.28067

Latour, Bruno. “Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene,” New Literary History, Vol. 45, No. 1, (Winter 2014). DOI: 10.1353/nlh.2014.0003

Kirby, Vicki. “Matter out of Place: ‘New Materialism’ in Review,” What if Culture was Nature all Along?, edited by Vicki Kirby, Edinburgh University Press, 2017.

Sloterdijk, Peter. Infinite Mobilization, Towards a Critique of Political Kinetics, translated by Sandra Berjan, Polity Press, 2020.

Sloterdijk, Peter. What Happened in the Twentieth Century?, translated by Christopher Turner, Polity Press, 2018.

Watkin, Christopher. Michel Serres, Figures of Thought, Edinburgh University Press, 2020.

[1] Peter Sloterdijk, What Happened in the Twentieth Century?, trans. Christopher Turner (Polity Press, 2018), 8.

[2] Ibid., 9.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid., 10.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid., 12.

[7] Ibid, 14.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid., 15.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid., 16.

[15] Ibid., 21.

[16] Sloterdijk, Infinite Mobilization, Towards a Critique of Political Kinetics, trans. Sandra Berjan (Polity Press, 2020), 143-144.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Vicki Kirby, “Matter out of Place: ‘New Materialism’ in Review,” What if Culture was Nature all Along?, ed. Vicki Kirby (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), p. ix.

[19] Karen Barad, “Nature’s Queer Performativity”, Kvinder, Køn & Forskning, (1-2), 2012, 47, https://doi.org/10.7146/kkf.v0i1-2.28067

[20] Sloterdijk, What Happened in the 20th Century?, 25.

[21] Ibid., 24.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Ibid., 25.

[24] Ibid., 26.

[25] Ibid.

[26] Ibid., 27.

[27] Ibid.

[28] Ibid., 32.

[29] Ibid., 35.

[30] Ibid., 36.

[31] Ibid., 38.

[32] Ibid., 43.

[33] Bruno Latour, “Agency in the Anthropocene,” New Literary History, Vol. 45, No. 1 (Winter 2014), Johns Hopkins University Press, https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2014.0003, 1.

[34] Ibid., 2.

[35] Ibid.

[36] Ibid.

[37] Ibid., 3.

[38] Christopher Watkin, Michel Serres, Figures of Thought (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), 314.

[39] Latour, Agency, 8.

[40] Ibid., 13.

[41] Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Duke University Press, 2007), 178.

[42] Ibid., 141.

[43] Barad, “Nature’s Queer Performativity,” 47.

[44] Ibid., 46.

[45] Latour, Agency, 5.

[46] Ibid., 6.

[47] Ibid., 14.

[48] Ibid.

[49] Ibid., 15.

[50] Ibid., 16.

[51] Ibid., 17.

[52] Ibid.

The post From being in the world to being onboard: Sloterdijk and Latour on the Anthropocene appeared first on The Miskatonian.

In 2022, Polia & Blastema: A Cosmic Opera premiered at the Opera Philadelphia’s Opera-on-Film Festival on September 30, 2022. I was lucky enough to attend an opening night with Merhige and his crew in the audience. After the movie, everyone was invited to dinner, and I got to ask Merhige a few personal questions about his films. Merhige is a private person who refutes any popular opinion about what anyone sees on film. Some have suggested it has something to do with lesbians or homosexuality (far from it). Eugene Thacker thought his films “would allow everything to dissolve – human into the non-human, body into the environment, image into emulsions of gelatin, crystal, and camphor.”1 Begotten alone influenced the noise genre of “Power electronics” and gave a voice to the “aesthetics of violence.”

But Merhige personally told me a story about cave art (to paraphrase),

“When you see the array of hands in Argentina, they were trying to communicate something together. It won’t make sense the first time. Although we feel a sense of anxiety in that medium beyond words. That is something film can be beyond the novel.”

This idea is clearly expressed in his 2006 film Din of Celestial Birds. If the act of creation could be expressed without words, what would it look like? When you project the film on the wall without any context or sound, what could be heard? Merhige works with black and white film to signify origin and that the artifact we are watching isn’t theater at all but a piece of a film from a different universe.

His mainstream film Shadow of the Vampire is a story about how we can’t trust film. The original Nosferatu in 1922 was made with real footage, and Count Orlok is not Max Schreck “acting” a fictional role. All of it is potentially real without the historical backdrop. In Merhige’s interpretation, Max Schreck is a real vampire, and the darkest conspiracy of all was believing that Nosferatu was a harmless picture play. We start to learn that the origin of film is more powerful than the imagination we bring with us.

Polia & Blastema is that 40-minute head spin. There is no plot, no actors, or no traditional devices found in theater. It’s pure collage art. The type of art film in the tradition of Stan Brakhage where colors and hand-painted imagery are confused between dancers in costumes and CGI that mocks the monsters of H.P. Lovecraft. The soundtrack is hypnotic and eerie. While not as gruesome as Begotten, Polia & Blastema hits the audience and gravitates you towards an inward meditation of anxiety. Once the film stops, you wake up from a nightmare. Humanity does not exist in this work of art. Merhige has created something of an anti-film.

It’s hard to explain what I saw. I love a film that does not follow the cliche of what it’s supposed to do. In the same way, I love a “novel” that tries to be anything but it. You can’t dance while you see Merzbow perform live. But you can rock your head and thrash as if it were metal. Watching Polia & Blastema makes me feel the film is attacking me. There is no denying that a majority of Merhige fans come from industrial and noise music backgrounds. While Merhige denies this influence, the catering towards Eugene Thacker’s trendy pessimism of a “world without us” makes me think otherwise.

The academic talk of a problematic “Anthropocene” is concerning. Philosophers like Timothy Morton believe that the age of humanity is problematic in that we should respect the rights of “non-humankind” and erase ourselves for a transhumanist future. Thacker talking about a “world without us” also implies that humanity is evil, that we have to get rid of “human supremacy” like it’s “white supremacy.” I wish I were making this up, but this is casual talk among late Gen-X American philosophers.

All this talk of negativity, guilt, and shame does not advocate an enlightened way of living but promotes the kind of shallow and pretentious self-destructive punk rock attitude of the noise musician and his urge to hate without reason. They soon latch onto the work of Merhige and justify the violent imagery as a reason behind their subculture. I get the moody appeal of Philip Best and his publishing house “Amphetamine Sulphate.” Yet this is a far cry from industrial music and its aesthetics of a bygone era. This popularity contest that Xerox “zines” of serial killers and pornography show us some kind of truth is absurd. I can see how Merhige plays a tightrope balancing act between this audience and serious connoisseurs who enjoy the film as art.

I talked with some of Merhige’s crew about concerns for Thacker’s irrational antinatalism. They seemed confused about what I was addressing, and one said I should “say it in his face.” …I would love to! But Thacker did not show up for the opening night. Rather, I talked to a fan from Oakland all the way and talked to him about how Ryan Trecartin seems to be both a fad and an elite smugness and commenter on Y2K culture. He got what I was saying, at least. A composer for Merhige followed me on Twitter and, days later, unfollowed me because of my politically incorrect opinions. I talked to him about Dennis Cooper and how his transgressions of childhood trauma relate to the blackness of Merhige’s film. Of course, not everyone is going to relate to that.

Merhige’s mother was also there. They talked a bit about the failure of Suspect Zero and how the producers wanted the film to be something that wasn’t in his vision. I enjoyed the aesthetics in that film the same way I enjoyed The Blair Witch Project. The horror relies solely on the viewer and what is perceived through a filter. However, suspect Zero makes allusions to the Weimar Republic and Viennese Actionism. The Blair Witch Project is found footage, as is, without any doubt that it’s fake. Both play on film having power over the viewer.

Begotten has influenced a generation of viewers who demand the A24 avant-garde over the normal, but Merhige remains the same. His resume speaks for itself and reaches beyond his first film. Polia & Blastema is a spiritual successor to Begotten, albeit with its pretty moments and drunken movements. Merhige is a hidden treasure in the American avant-garde canon. He made the right choice to focus on future film productions that could illustrate his interest in horror theater. I highly recommend the film, even if it is a pretty galactic slideshow and cosmic pour painting. What is thought-provoking isn’t the horror aspect but the audacity to express pain found in cave paintings. Art is something that moves us as much as we want to move it.

1. Thacker, Eugene (2015). “Chapter 3: Meditations on the Gothic”. Tentacles Longer Than Night. Horror of Philosophy. Zero Books.

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