“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Sunday, July 25, 2010

Dreams as Objects / Objects as Dreams

If one were to add Solaris (the Russian version) to The Matrix the result would probably be a hell of a mess. Or it might be Inception, the must-see movie of the summer. Of course one doesn't want to get involved in plot spoilers (and I believe this post doesn't).

It's also a film noir version of Cronenberg's Existenz, which in some ways is a less successful version of Videodrome. Personally I have a huge affection for noir and in the spirit of thinking that movies are philosophy by another means, I've thought some about how noir is the aesthetic mode of dark ecology. It certainly feels like a noir plot to realize that you are implicated in an emergency that is of your own making. I preferred Inception to Existenz, perhaps because I don't get out too much, but maybe also because the noir framework made the film more thoughtful, less of an assault, and less nihilistic. (I believe there is something rather than nothing, to be sure—and in any case, nihilism is a form of belief that CLAIMS not to be, which makes me suspicious.)

In any case, Inception is an OO movie, folks. Dreams are objects, no? And in Levi's wonderful adaptation of Varela and Luhmann, they're operationally closed. You can't know what someone is dreaming about, you can only know that they're dreaming.

Inception wraps dreams in dreams in dreams like Graham Harman's thesis that objects are wrapped in objects wrapped in objects...

Graham also talks about objects that are having no outer relations as sleeping (e.g. Prince of Networks, 214). This movie got me wondering—are objects actually dreaming? This is not much more than a poeticism at present.

But it got me thinking about how objects in dreams have their own withdrawal, their own operational closure. This is precisely how Freud describes dreams: their images are rebuses made out of other objects. Like a bee plus a leaf spells belief...

Inside a dream, correlationism might mean what Levi calls Malkovichism: thinking that everything in the dream is about me, me, me. Where “me” is actually a projection onto the objects in the dream. (This is a major theme in Inception.)

Waking up from the dream involves some kind of “kick,” a stimulus from outside that ruptures the operational closure of the dream. It's then that you realize that you're dreaming and the whole thing collapses.

There's another possibility, which is explored in the movie: lucid dreaming, alias realizing that you're in a dream. This realization would be like waking up in the dream as such. (For some reason I've had this experience reasonably frequently.) This would be the equivalent of dissolving what I've called beautiful soul syndrome (BS!). (A theme not unconnected with ecological thinking, as I've discussed in various places.) In beautiful soul syndrome, you are trapped in the reality-effect of your own projections. The way to dissolve it is not to fight it but to become responsible for it. Evil, Hegel argues, is the GAZE that sees the world as an evil object.

There seems to be a strong distinction between Malkovichism and lucid dreaming. In Malkovichism, one is oppressed by one's own ego as an evil object. In lucid dreaming, one realizes that the objects in the dream are not all about “me,” they are just objects in a dream, which is also an object...

What dissolves in the experience of lucid dreaming are precisely correlationalist phenomena that one thinks are attributes of objects as such, like solidity, time as a linear succession of instants, “matter” versus “mind” and so on.

Seeing life as a dream, then, would not necessarily mean seeing reality as a solipsistic VR experience or idealist event in one's head. It might be just the opposite—allowing objects to be rather than seeing them as mirrors of “me.”

I'm very, very interested in all this as I'm writing an essay on Buddhism and OOO for Levi right now. These thoughts are just sketches really. And I haven't done anything with the (at present) poeticism that objects dream. Maybe this is what Levi means by the virtuality of objects?


No comments: