“In this episode we have the important job of finding out what Panpsychism is all about, and why the philosophical position is gaining more and more traction in philosophy, but even with physicists and other scientists. The idea that consciousness is the fundamental nature of the physical world is by no means a new one, and it does seem to resolve some of the problems of how consciously experiencing lifeforms could have evolved out of non-conscious non-living material. But most materialists balk at the idea and consider it absolutely bonkers, for reasons we’ll find out as we attempt to pay respect to the criticisms of the position too.”
I will restrain from commenting in depth – since I am neither a philosopher of mind nor able to summarize or disentangle all the various positions presented in this talk by Philip Goff.
So here are some small and very inconsequential personal observations about panpsychism. Talking about or even debating panpsychism was a no-no for a long time and scientific materialism (matter and material electromagnetic processes is all there is) is till the dominant view. Speculative philosophers lying outside the major traditions of philosophy (analytical and continental) such as Alfred North Whitehead and his “philosophy of the organism”- you might say occupy a lateral or transversal position in the history of philosophy since his process philosophy rhymes with a panpsychist or panexperientialist (everything has or is some form of experience) view of fundamental reality. It is also interesting that he did not espouse such a view early on, but gradually after his (and Bertrand Russell’s) groundbreaking work on Principia Mathematica lead him into trouble (Gödel’s incompleteness theorem), he gradually arrived at panpsychism as a way out of the bifurcation of nature that had split reality in separate realms, each endowmed with different degrees of reality. Isabelle Stengers in her opus – Thinking with WhiteheadA Free and Wild Creation of Concepts begs to differ – she’s more interested in how ANW dodges the psyche – and the de-psychologizing – noting that like William James je didn’t affirm that electrons “think like we do”, nor did attribute to the actual occasion a “psychology”, a “subjectivity” or “emotions”. Thus he avoids making human intelligence or psychic powers inevitable privileging human experience, something that happens in the case of a tract ny Russian cosmist Tsiolkovsky “Panpsychism, or Everything feels”.
Caught as we were between the dry certitudes of scientific materialism (matter is all there is) and dualism (separation of questions relating to mind from matter or mind stuff being different from mind/brain stuff), we never even got to entertain a third possibility that seemed too outlandish or too quixotic. This third possibility arose at a specific juncture – with William James being familiar with both new advances in physiology as well as the new (at the time) theory of natural selection and evolutionary descent with modification opened up new and extincting venues that reshaped philosophical questions. Closer to us science came to re-cognize (there is that word again) that there are other minds, and that a mind is not so exotic or such an unique appendage and a privilege. Minds arouse not out of non minds but gradual process. Rudimentary fuzzy, mind-like characteristics abound. This contrasted strongly with a view usually supported by X-Risk thinking circles, one betting on the rarity of human minds and consciousness. Reflexive thinking is according to such a view is an island in a desert of cosmic mindlessness. Panpsychism is a view of plenty – of minding and mindful abundance. This was the weakness of that line of argument.
Do not expect a light-bulb Aha! moment of conscious experience. A more gradualistic explanation derived from biology, especially natural history paleontology and ethology makes us see quorum sensing not very different from nervous cells communicating between themselves. So there’s Emergentist Panpsychism, but also Rusellian Monism (of which Goff might be a proponent if I got that right – not what matter does but what matter is) and panprotopsychist, or say Cosmopsychist or Micropsychist varieties. Let a hundred panpsychisms bloom!
Some sort of agency maybe subtends any form of sentience or responsiveness. In order for minds to be natural we have to adopt an evolutionary, gradual (without gaps or sudden jumps) appearance of consciousness. Clearly this chips at our privileged developed reflexive consciousness. It even leads to even a few apparent paradoxes, such as life as a phenomenon being not primary but ulterior. So mind first and life second. In this frame mind is being a question of degree not of kind! To make it clear, this is a bit more radical than just saying that plants or so-called lower organisms (such as crustaceans to bees) exhibit sentience, this is about even particles exhibiting some form of rudimentary experiential quantum. A lot of this feels a question of language, of finding the proper descriptive level of talking about quantitative (mass, speed, etc) and qualitative qualities (the notorious qualia).
I was always wondering how panpsychism stands in regard to historical materialism or Marxism, and if – General Intellect – can be made to fit with explanations of a more pervasive kind, that puts sapience in perspective and encourage us towards more-than-human intellectual adventures or even seeing our own social being as part of the world, not just an add-on. In fact in the former East Bloc context where scientific materialism was the rule, particularly in Socialist Romania in my own case, the ‘intelligence of matter’ briefly made headlines as psychologist and neurologistDumitru Constantin Dulcan published his book of essays Inteligenta Materiei (Intelligence of Matter, Editura Militara 1981). Even now it is really interesting to read the responses from various corners (including well-known mathematician Solomon Marcus). Still I wonder if there isn’t also a residue of mystical materialism a la Tsiolkovsky here.
Nuff said – panspychism (as Goff will prove!) has become again salonfähig as the Germans say it. You can talk about panpsychism not only athistory of consciousness humanities departments, but also at laboratories and in a scientific context and I swear nobody will call you a nutcase, plain gaga or a fringy lunatic slightly sickish new-age or animist type. That odor that Nagel was calling “the faintly sickening odor of something put together in the metaphysical laboratory”s is apparently gone. Perfect Proof to that is a considerable number of new videos, talks, debates, podcasts on YT and TW. What to choose? Well, I would go for the most passionate and ardent supporters – such as Philip Goff from the University of Durham. Important to add that there is also non-cognitivist position or rather a discognitivist position that try to decenter the brain or the central nervous system in order to get panpsyschism right and not try to priviledge (again) conscious experience or human cognition (for this check Steven Shaviro’s extraordinary book of essays). I think that such fine distinguishing lines (was what separates sentience from sapience? or what have substrate independence and simulation theory have to do with each other?). Another way to see this is by reading Science Fiction – and acknowledging that some of the most incredible ideas about sapient aliens and shipminds help us to think about consciousness too. The ‘Tentacle of Empathy’ seems to be everywhere these days. It also might be that ALL explanations of consciousness might sound crazy one way or another – this is the crazyist position of philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel.
Maybe this is the moment to observe that in the case of Tsiolkovsky, a ln avowed panpsychist akd pioneer of space travel. For me though, he’s basically a kind of militant ‘pansapientist’ monism – using a theory of the psyche (rational, intentional, reflexive, etc) that depreciates or dismisses other modes of thought as inferior. Recognizing that the world feels might not mean automatically that we’re more responsive or tuned to it. Stengers in her inspiring book Thinking with Whitehead from 2002 – in particular Entrée en Métaphysique Chapter explains why this is not the path taken by Whitehead (Tsiolkovsky is not mentioned but contrasting the two helps a lot). Tsiolkovsky recognizes that the universe is alive and feeling, but this not an opening for other ways of becoming or opening up the question to what os it like to he an atom, a body, a tissue etc. It leaves not much room for other modes of thought. We might call this a psychic or cognitive terraforming of the universe, something very close to the X Risk incentive to protect & spread human intelligence in the Cosmos and make sure it will use and unmake every other mind that doesn’t conform to the maximal potential for joyfulness. This gives rise to a sort of ultra-sapient chain of being with atomic adventures inside various organismic (a body, tissues, stones etc see below), and in each one (except if it inside the human) the full potential gets never achieved. Locked up in the unconsciousness and deep unthinking sleep of other lesser modes, they just await the consciousness light-bulb to raise them up to the level of human experience so that their limited notion of past and future can expand. This is what i understand from this fragment:
“In terms of mathematics, the entire universe is alive, but the power of its sensitivity is manifested in all its brilliance only among the higher animals. All atoms of matter feel in keeping with the environment. Finding itself in highly organized beings, atoms life their life and feel their pleasure and pain. If they find themselves in the inorganic world, they sleep, as it were, immersed in a deep state of unconsciousness, in nothingness.Even in a single animal, as they wander around its body, the atoms live the life now of the brain, now of the bones, hair, nails, epithelium, and so on. Meaning that atoms now think, now live like atoms imprisoned in stone, water, or air. Now they sleep, with no awareness of time; now they live for the moment, like the lower beings; now they are aware of the past and paint a picture of the future. The more organized the being, the farther this notion of future and past extends.”― Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Panpsychism
spacetime coordinates: centuries in the future after robots of Panga gained self-awareness laid down their tools, and wandered, en masse into the wilderness, never to be seen again. They faded into myth and urban legend.
There should always be room for works that inspire a glimmer of hope in dark times and also philosophical works that work out an important distance from the usual collapsology that radically compresses everything into an endless present.
That said, there is nothing more obnoxious than the constant appeals to some overrated kind of ‘hope’ as a panacea for all the world’s troublesor the on the thing that saves the day. The recent Star Wars movies have been constantly bombarding everything with ‘keeping up the hope’ and keeping hopeful no matter what. The inverse of suffering under this imposed hopefulness (Laurent Berlant’s ‘cruel optimism’) is also allowing the thought that things might go awfully wrong. Being hopeless is almost like a double blow – it stigmatizes and blames those that do not jump or do not give full support in the name of cause (any cause) plus they get labeled as hopeless themselves. Your no hope is responsible for your own ensuing failures – according to a logic that also blames the poor for being poor. Relentless and required hope animates much of ‘positive thinking’ mind over matter dualism in the US. Initially, a very important movement of the 19th and 20th century that was associated with many other good ideas actionist, a motivational credo (without the toxic baggage of today) is meant self-improvment, self-determination, the example, propaganda of the deed, women’s rights, the self-education of workers clubs into the new natural sciences and a new body and new health consciousness and imminent liberation. Some of these visions also came pre-packaged with fears of a ‘degenerationist’ Western imaginary that somehow railed under the ills of civilisation and the fear of assertive others, mostly of non-white, non-European, formerly subjugated or colonial. This belief in a hopeful, more humane world was not reserved or limited to the Western world in any sense. The voluntaristic strain of the 20th c took many forms and we could even include the mid- century Maoist momentum during the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution. A history that is not over. Even if some of the Maoist excess took the form of a so-called war on nature – with disastrous effects, while it persecuted and killed many and while have horrific experiences – even in its failures it mediated a a re-calibrated China, it was historically shaped its aversions, debates and future gradual te ‘opening’ towards.
It is essential that many important critics and theoreticians of capital – such as Ernst Bloch have carefully elaborated all their lives around concepts of utopia, of the not-yet-here, of the unfinished, the still-to-be-achieved emancipatory reality. This is because in some fundamental way – in the major works of Marx and Engels there is no detailed description (other than classless society). Some of the most important theoreticians of science fiction (Frederic Jameson and Darko Suvin) always returned to Utopia in their theorizations of this genre, and how that is bound to a liveable and better world. Others have taken other paths (such a as Guy Lardreau which I am currently reading).
One should consider Becky Chamber and the hopepunk subgenre as an interesting and important addition to this continuing dialogue that builds on an already existing utopian corpus, one that is not just about technophile visions and ‘rapture of the nerds‘ (as Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross put it). At the same time as good friend Otaku Bogdan told me – there is Kogonada’s film After Yang (adapted from a story by A Weinstein) about technobeings and cloning, and and its subtle way of embedding ‘beauty’ everywhere and even a hint of techno-fascism. In complete contrast with how Terminator movies imagined our future, the fact is that today’s techno-capitalism does not show its horrific face but is bending, mutating oppression with a streamlined smooth ‘smart’ wireless coating. At the same time – in spite of this eternal present IKEA anti-utopia (it can never get better than this), one should understand that every age and every culture on the planet had its dreams of a better world, and that includes the world of plenty in Neolithic peasant utopias, or the religious schismatic and urban philosophical utopias and eventually the social utopias. So it is no wonder Becky Chamber dwelves with great care into the Zen tradition and particularly the highly developed and ritualized tea ceremony as this also speaks to a certain way about today’s cracked and fragile world (she is also a lover of all sorts of teas from what I understand and this is reflected in her books). I also appreciate the fact that she published her work with no DRM restrictions.
South Korean nature documentary directed by Seung-woo Son
“With 4K UHD quality, EBS Docuprime ‘Green Animal’ is a documentary of plants’ life stories by looking for wonderful plants on the Earth by visiting five major oceans and six major continents for about two years. It shows nature’s beautiful scenes with a secret of primal, and illuminates plants that were discounted as static existences with a new point of view. It follows plants’ lives with the actor Sung-hwa Jung’s narration.
As plants cannot move, they couldn’t choose good land by themselves. The program reveals plants’ dynamic movements and strategies for survival and their unimaginable life stories. It lively describes images of plants moving for survival by fair means or foul through interval filming, micrography, and electron microscope. With a high-speed camera, it also captured even a hundredth of a second movement created by plants.” (here is more about the documentary from the press conference launch)
Here is a French/ARTE version of it in three parts:
there is actually slime mold linking, growing and tracing the title of this book
I think Steven Shaviro should be something like one of the patron saints of timespacewarps and I will briefly state why here. Happy to be able to introduce him together with Darko Suvin over here.
I think, of all the various cultural theorists, whatever-hip-thinkers or walking talking encyclopedic humans out there – he is one of our most important purveyors relating to lived time, of how feeling relates to time, and is almost a creature (entity – to put in ANW terms) of time flow. He is a weird processualist, a tireless sci-fi enthusiast/reviewer and proponent of his own brand of speculative realism, a supporter of relational-panpsychist (or pan-experientalism), a critic and theoretician of music videos and post-cinematic affect and one of the most intellectually generous people I know of on the whole of Internet (most of his stuff is found for free online under digital form or on his blog). He interests go far afield, from the extremity of Maurice Blanchot, Kathy Acker, William Burroughs to third kind philosophical encounters btw Deleuze, Kant and Whitehead. He might be (in his own words) a “misanthrope”, “highly dissociative”, an unapologetic “kitsch Marxist”, living in ‘Motor City’ Detroit and teaching at Wayne State University, yet he is to be found on both E-flux discussing Accelerationist Aesthetics: Necessary Inefficiency in Times of Real Subsumption (2013) or Extrapolation, fabulation and speculation (as of October 2021) at Russian Moscow online courses. His numerous books have been instrumental imho in moving continental philosophy away from postmodernist/linguistic turn or deconstruction/ text-centered hermeneutic models towards the ontological or the very nature of reality, thus allowing for a widening reception of the so-called ‘speculative turn’. His huge and always nourishing reading list is open for everyone.
Hard to write a review on this one – because it is such a favorite. While I have just started reading his new 2021 Extreme Fabulations: Science Fictions of Life I realised I had to pay my due to this one. Here are a number of things that might make Discognition unavoidable reading for our times. Of course, you could just read Steven Shaviro’s short dense book as a direct shortcut to key ‘thought experiments’ in mind philosophy (hard problem of consciousness, Mary’s room or the knowledge argument, cognitive eliminativism etc) and the various philosophical responses to them (Churchland, Nagel, Churchland, Dennett, Brandom, Brembs, etc.) as well as Shaviro’s own. If you are interested in the original volume with a lot of the original essays that he uses as source materials feel free to check There’s Something about Mary: Essays on Phenomenal Consciousness and Frank Jackson’s Knowledge Argument. What makes Discognition completely different from most cognitive science & countless mind philosophy books is that he will make us enjoy mind philosophy as an exercise in science fiction (or paraliterature as Samuel “Chip” Delany calls it). And if we manage that, we will rather sooner (than later) realize that mind philosophers can hardly keep up with speculative fiction’s proclivity and SF’s daring adventures in matters of cognition, consciousness, affect, physicalism, subjectivity, reason, responsiveness, sentience etc. in imaginatively devising thought experiments that would be practically impossible as a program for cognitive sciences or within the preserve of cognitivist paradigm. Steven Shaviro makes no secret about his own pan-psychist leanings, or rather his pan-experientialism orientation (in line with both William James pragmatism or what Alfred North Whitehead metaphysics tried to probe), yet this position comes forth after giving due attention to many other perspectives or philosophical currents. Speculative realism and object-oriented ontology, as in his previous books The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism, remains a point of reference. The title “DISCOGNITION” is a great way by Steven Shaviro to try bend our cerebrated (yet dualist and disembodied) and vaunted capacities further and further, to be able to try and circumvent the heavy toll of constraining cognition as well as to switch tables on our faltering human exceptionalism. Cognitivism has been listing a growing list of human biases and fallacies, confirmed by research – all largely expanding on critical philosophy’s founding gestures: Kant’s categories and forms of thought. Yet the fundamental tenants of cognitivism (u could also call them metaphysical presuppositions) get more entrenched than ever. As ‘neurobullocks‘ has been infusing much of neuro pop from TV series to criminal psychology – or be it advertising and neuro -marketing, nowadays only neurodivergence manages to question the neuropolitical underpinnings of neuronormativity.
In the end, we have nothing to lose (he seems to tell us with every chapter) – but our embittered speciesism, a narrowing cognitivism-only path that allows only brains, higher functions of the human mind or consciousness to act like proper scientific models, exquisite literary presences or proper philosophic objects – at the dispense of everything else, with the risk of ignoring various instantiations of “what would be thinking like”: a machine, an artificial intelligence, a computer, a murderer, a slime mold, an alien etc. (a list that could be potentially endless). We are bound to central nervous systems, and yes, sapience is a wonderfully rare thing, yet this comes at a heavy price of ignoring the largest majority of our experience as well as other (for us largely speculative) modes of thought. Recent SF, carefully chosen examples by S. Shaviro – put consciousness in proportion and show how human thinking processes might be themselves just a narrow sliver – a wonderful but limited and limiting way to even define experience as such. He brings all these examples to roost and many others – including Ted Chiang’s The Lifecycle of Software Objects or Peter Watts Blindsight or R Scott Bakker’s Neuropath. To his merit, Shaviro always emphasizes that he is neither a philosopher nor a science fiction writer – though to my knowledge, he is uniquely poised to enjoy doing what he does and never make the authors and thinkers he reads cry (as Deleuze said). He is one of those very rare raconteurs that never disparages his material, offering an attentive mind and affective stance that takes science fiction and philosophical speculative bets very seriously, pushing them to their ultimate ends. He is never tone-deaf, never forcing himself on the medium but letting it speak loudly and clearly. His close-reading discipline works almost as a direct how-to example in helping delineate difficult questions posed by the authors themselves. He redefines and refines complex relations and attempts making difficult distinctions by contrasting philosophy with science fiction or with science proper. There are always differences as well as deep resonances here, and there is always the potentiality of mutual learning from each other:
Fictions and fabulations are often contrasted, or opposed, to scientific methods of understanding the world. But in fact, there are powerful resonances between them; they are both processes of speculative extrapolation. In other words, constructing and testing scientific hypotheses is not entirely different from constructing fictions and fabulations, and then testing to see whether they work or not, and what consequences follow from them. For science is far more than just a passive process of discovery, or a compiling of facts that are simply “out there.” Rather, science must actively approach things and processes in the world. This is the reason for making hypotheses. Science needs to solicit and elicit phenomena that would not disclose themselves to us otherwise. It must somehow compel these phenomena to respond to our questions, by giving us full and consistent answers. All this is necessary, precisely because things in the world are not cut to our measure. They have no reason to conform to our presuppositions, or to fit into any categories that we seek to impose.
I wanted to start with a critical quote by celebrated author and Sci-fi feminist Ursula K Le Guin as an entry point to something quite different: the new Chinese movie Monster Run taking risks. Indeed, we hear it more and more often: “Commodified fantasy takes no risks”.
a screen within a screen within a screen
21st century blockbusters tend to adhere piously to this dogma. Apart from instances of tokenism, it is less about world building new worlds, but only about propping up the old ones. Banking on previous successes is what big franchise do nowadays as a matter of good economic course. This stale creative output (i mean here mainly Marvel capitalist superheroines and superheroes) can be sure entertaining, yet incredibly predictable. And yes maybe they are not cinema and this for good reasons(and not especially becose M Scorsese sez so). I am not going to rehash old/new media-technologically significant histories of why the first half of XX c was ruled by cinema and why cinema gave way in the 1950s to TV in the US, or why 1970s Godfather gave way to the The Sopranos. The debates around post – continuity cinema from a few years ago, theoretically mapped by Steven Shaviro in his Post-Cinematic Affect have been stimulating to everyone, including me. What I’m trying follows up on those fruitful debates but also keeps an eye of fan studies and fandom in general. Cinema is not cinema anymore because it also commercially engulfed like a process of phagocytosis – all these previous non-artsy core fandoms, especially older comics/male-dominated geek cultures – that were already contested & blasted from within. Ursula K LeGuin is herself part of a generation of radical women writers (together with Octavia Butler, Joanna Russ & others) that actively & successfully challenged the most cherished ideals of Golden Age Sci-fi establishment in the 60s &70s & 80s that went hand in parallel with developments within comics. IMHO we are just entering a phase of truly global fandoms & one more diverse (artists, authors, publics, critics) than ever & completly bonkers in the best sense – one that the titans of media struggle to keep up with or try to ignore at their at their peril. Marvel nowadays exemplifies a sort of mise en abime mediatic spiral, the rush of older (retro) canons & fanon (full of contradictions & unsolvable antinomies) carried along and modulated by always mutating & rapidly changing technologies.
binging your way trough the time warp
New “structures of feeling” manifest as current meta- series reflect and build on our own binge status – #fullretromania churned by streaming giants (the Netflix Apple+ Disney + era) under Corona stress loockdown conditions. The soap opera TV series mass appeal success – gets to be lionized within the confines of streaming services such as Netflix. Importantly, and out of the Anglophone bubble – not everyone is Netflix & chill. There’s also in Eastern Europe (especially Romania satellite TV multi-channel bonanza) an acquired post 1989 TV taste & fandom of an older generation (those in their 60s or 70s and still quite gendered – say the generation of our moms) enjoying a whole array of Turkish dramas or Korean historical k-dramas. Otherwise no accident that some Marvel series and movies are self-reflexive, self ironic (postmodern cultural logic at work) chocke-full self-referential digital products. WandaVision is practically one single (and quite unsettling) uninterrupted history of home entertainment in a screen whitin a screen within a screen shot. To me they are like Nam Jun Paik art installations assembled for stay-at-home public in a serial form. Audience is akin to the special agent- (SHIELD-like?! NSA LOVINT?) pay-per-view binging and media analyzing to death 1950s 1960s 1970s US drama universes. The Marvel prosumers live within their screens and pay with their distracted & highly trained attention or continue tele- working uploading new YT replies or reaction videos about their favorite shows. For me it is not important to condamn binging or to relegate it to the addictive. Even if addictive it should still teach us something about our current status – of beings living trough very fast technological change, while almost doing the equivalent of a inter-planetary (or inter-galactic) trip. Binging feels almost like a trance state where nothing is portioned, where supposedly you get the whole season in one gulp. It is the media equivalent of constant guilty pleasures – basic ally what woman audiences have been been accused of all along. Binge and bulimic habits converge and a moralizing attitude akin to the moral panics of the 1980s has been internalized & casualized.
embracing the comics no risk formula
Hollywood embraced the comics majors formula AFTER independent comics artists (especially IMAGE comics) started their own publishing, changing and countering such formulaic franchise monoliths to start with. Comics Marvel or DC where pretty much over-extendeding themselves in a gamut of remakes of remakes BEFORE they ended onscreen. They were always banking on their wide distribution and wide readership by indulgin into canonic fan service, killing various titles ritually, constantly burying and resurrecting their stars, cashing in on the formulaic, extracting value from their pedigree pop iconicity. TimeWarner has been shrinking DC comics division – after it merger with Telecom+ Before this cinematic conglomerate – comics merger, there were re-issues and re-adaptions of previous 50-60 years of lesser or bigger successes – all ij tow with their widening readerships, stagnating sales and diversifying sub- audiences. Various pop cultural aspects were infinitely debatable & exciting with endless discussions even back then via letters from readers or during face 2 face atComic Cons etc Although Ursula’s insightful rant aims at heroic fantasy & space opera (mainly resuscitated by SW) tired tropes (culminating perhaps in ridiculous 1987 Masters of the Universe movie) , it still cuts across everything that is most despicable nowadays; entire media empires as an extension of global theme-parking. Now one single Marvel blockbuster makes as much box office money as the whole US comics industry. The gold is in the ownership and control over the characters – the milking of old & established caped hero brands. Cutting costs and pension plans has become a priority in comics industry, especially since blockbuster movies became so profitable. Yes, there is incredible reductionistic ‘toyfication’ going on – changing and reversing the flow of production chains, so that movies get made ONLY in order to sell more plastic merch and build even more experience economy parks.
world-building and world-playing
While this has been our lot since at least the 2000s, I would like to try and recover at least a certain uninteded effect of toyfiction. There is defintely a golden age of Chinese sci-fi going on – kehuan – uses original concepts, images, constructions, techniques sometimes derived from classical or ancient times to surprising effect. In view of Chinese 2020 Monster Run movie – all religions might have thus a bottom-up cosmological readiness, practicing their skill with various toy universes. Thinking this way makes a lot of ancient sacred artefacts – revered in their time, seem very much like sacred toys, and I am not saying this in order to belittle religious experience or draw attention on the ‘infantile’ aspects of religion or in order to draw ridicule at their attempt to world-build and world-play. Toys also have to do with models of the world, with the speculative capacity to model the universe. What is basically that essential Ptolemaic instrument – the armillary sphere, or what is that Antikythera mechanism but a long series of elaborate pre-electronic cosmic toys?!
toyfiction: lively automatons and religious toys
It is maybe useless to see toyfication and toy-fiction as anything but as further attempt to sanitize, to cutify, to subsume all creativity, to repackage innocence and ingenue aesthetics into further expansions of capital. But toys have lead us in other directions as well. Well, if we regard the first lively automatons as religious toys participating in a theo- robotic history, then they are all expressions of a certain restless (neo-vitalist?) mechanistic mystery play. More often than not there is the possibility that any cheap toy u buy might be poisoned or produced under inhuman forced labor (laogai) conditions and thus be the preferred vehicle & embodiment of the darkest toxic forces of capital. With that in mind, I consider Monster Run a new example of how toons and toys blend into religious mechanisms and Escherian geometrical puzzles – mystical complexes reinvented as weird playgrounds of Spirits, Demons, Monsters, Gods.
faux gold auratic glow of the bloody fun fair parks
Such a natural philosophy of toys would regard humankind itself as human toys of elemental forces(or humans as playthings of the Gods). I say this in order to reverse engineer their infantile consumerist function and cautiously map their preternatural cuteness across an unexpected both sacred&profane terrain. Aberrant toys, cheap copies, fake plastic artefakes, lucky cat faux gold do have an unsettling auratic glow even as they are mass produced and easily reproductible. They also end up on the same mall stall – the golden plastic toothpick box next to the electoplated orthodox incense burners (both made in China btw). In a thoroughly commodified fantasy world, of Spirited Away theme parks abandoned and new ones being built, heaps of plastic toys, puppet limbs on beaches and microplastic slowly filling our oceans, toys become harbingers of ‘numinous’ doom. On the more auspicious note – there is a link between ancient Chinese lucky cats, old sayings (recorded in The Miscellaneous Morsels from Youyang) about feline behavior and good omens that announce easy commerce or are supposed to ward off evil. Our 21 c plastic temples in contrast are left floating under more or less murky waters. Yet, they are more strange, more weird than your usual place of dedicated prayer. They are generally scary fun fair theme parks like party clubs mimicking Egyptian glitz or Las Vegas pyramids as sold and Made in and increasingly Created by China.
new elasticity of time & space in the 21st century
Monster Run could be one such backdoor entry, a portal towards the 21st c inter-dimensional thinking & feeling. Onr that id still at odds with 20th c notions & certitudes. Thinking about the MULTIVERSE or about PARALLEL DIMENSIONS, PORTALS – has become pretty common, even maybe a signature of 21 c century spatial and temporal restructuring under both unbridled speculative daredo & as insidious algo-capitalistic means of reproduction. While most non-essential dream-workers work from home(ones that David Graeber hoped to wake up from their productivity slumber) bouncing off the four walls (and sometimes singing from their balconies). These dream workers are also exposed to time warps and bouts of binge-induced non-locality. We are always elsewhere, on The Expanse riding together with the Rocinante crew or chased by mutant monsters on K-drama hallways or deep inside a game level. This restructuring usually arrives via Sci-fi tropes but is also felt as the accretion of a condensed all embracing atmosphere precipitating from our daily experiences under lockdown. Binging on series, YT or TikTopk videos, or reading various lenghty novels is not just a time filler – it also explains something universal about sentient beings. Either cyborg or human they might be spending their long pod-status onboard life under lockdown crunching trough and enjoying media. This has been one of the universal constants of COVID time – something that would feel familiar to (Martha Wells’s) MURDERBOT onboard the long stays in between the landing stations. We are not alone even when alone or most solipsistic, but surrounded by various invented, imaginary creatures, attachments and life support systems as well as very material cloud computing infrastructures burning a lot of fuels that keep us glued to the ultra-HD streaming. We are closely interdependently enjoying various cultural serialisms at a time of general distress. This basic mediatic serialism (with healthy interruptions) during COVID pandemic staycation exhibits a new chewy elasticity of time spent mostly inside closed, built environments. An elastic time best expressed by the Indonesian notion of rubber time jam karet (check interview with Riar Rizaldi by bv film critic Łukasz Mańkowski ), one also taken up by Irina Gheorghe in one of her lecture- performances in Yogyakarta.
homemade creepiness and animatronic mystery plays
What would such a sacrificial rite (sacrificing childhood dreams, naivete, plain fun etc) look nowadays? Toys (animatronic ones especially) offer bloody movable spectacles – empty (abandoned) creepy temples where few make it out to tell the gory tale. Under their healthy, family-oriented innocence, what lies beneath amounts to a splatter grand-guignolesque childhood spectacle where a ham-acting Nicholas Cage plays along. Material toys do take part in a larger creep that includes a longer trail of various creepy digital objects. In fact this homemade creepiness is key nowadays. From creepypasta to YT toons – we unwind a disturbing children’s world gamified, exploited and uploaded by automated editing toolz that push non curated content under ur nose to ur toddler. These creepy hard-to-follow (for adults) content loops have been explored in the essays of James Bridle and their follow-up of rules and manic content filtering.
Chinese Boxes and Matryoshka universes
To go back to Monster Run in spite of what critics have been calling a mess and “salad script” -you can just mainly watch it for fun (if you find a good subbed copy of it). On one level it is just a very fresh Cantonese Taoist Ghostbuster story. My interest was the setting of this monster hunt conflict between worlds that wanders between sino-futurist city cyperpunkish back alleys, CGI interiors etc New Chinese construction sites (including the Belt & Road Initiative). They are the current inter-dimensional nexus hiding in plain sight but also offering the comfort of tiny houses or private otaku room interiors that offer respite from very brutal outer worlds. In this movie backgrounds are morphing, being constantly remade almost in a Minecraft way and with a view (for me) for neglected aspects of the Chinese 21 c miracle – (as opposed to the NY skyline of Nolan’s Inception kaleidoscope let’s say). Of course there is a lot of shamanistic goings on, gate-keeping, sliding and hiding in-btw worlds and worlds that are nested inside worlds like Chinese boxes or Matryoshka universes.
convenience store gate-keeping & monster rampage
The convenience store is integral to this border crossing. It is the place where the young Jing Mo (Jessie Li), the movie’s heroine and future inter-dimensional gatekeeper works. She works at the convenience stores at a dead ends job(a typical experience of pre-Corona youth no?) after being diagnosed, medicated and separated from her mom (who seems to be her only living relative). She is transformed into a patient because she sees invisible entities that influence and affect our world in very material ways. She also gets paid to dress up as a furry – in a monster costume that looks very similar to the real monsters in the movie. She has to try hard and ignore otherworldly creatures (monsters), beings that are oblivious to everybody else but her in the beginning. Later on she finds out that she is part of a group that have made a living out of hunting monsters that wreak havoc to our world. Monster do stick to her, and she attracts some gigantic hairy creatures (akin to kinda cute Yeti’s) that seem to freeze their victims (but not kill them). This convenience store is almost a mythical place in itself. Very colored, overly full of all sorts of specific Asian packaged products, bright stalls with products that get chaotically thrown around and misplaced after consecutive monster romps.
maximalist space, armilary spheres and Egyptomania
Another scene is set in the backside of a street vendor’s shop called uncle Ping. In fact this very amiable street vendor is a mythical creature; a shape-shifting half-lion half human. He could be part of a long series of wondrous antique shop owners or your favorite from the nearest China Town. I also saw him like one of the Ming dynasty scientist. He could also remind us of the Zicawei portrait of the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci maybe because of the armillary sphere (no mother Mary thouh). There are all sorts of exotic artefacts in this liminal space, from Armillary spheres to incense burners. Egypt also plays a role too, although it is again almost a theme park show of Egyptian antiquity. Of course ancient Egypt was part of Imperial Orientalism and of course it became such an important iconic treasure trove to be ripped off by incipient European secret societies and even masonic iconography. Maybe indeed the Mummy’s curse was of course a memetic artefact of such British Imperial fears and hubris after pillaging most extra-European cultures, a process of appropriation that went unimpeded till recently. But this ‘hodgepodge’ is almost like an contemporary alchemist’s room, an unusually crowded, non- Ikea furniture space. No room for Marie Kondo, this is a non- minimalist maximalist environment akin to the setting of a Korean female shaman ceremonial or the dense arrangement of a Chinese pharmacist shop. Young Jing Mo is the next in line shamanic traveler & inter dimensional gatekeeper and the true battle of the movie pits her against an older, more power hungry (?!) matriarchal (shaman) generation.
There is also an incredible chase that feels like constantly folding space inside the lower lever of a construction site or parking lot. I really liked how the construction boom (cement) molded space is somehow itself folding and refolding into new temporal configurations as the monster hunters car tries to loose some pretty pesky nemesis. Importantly – folding paper is key in Monster Run.
folding space-time while folding paper
Somehow this topological art of the foldable translates perfectly into portal openings and folding space-time. Paper was invented in China and the main non-human character of the movie is Paper the sidekick of 2000s HK heathrob Shawn Yue – literally an animated spell (a piece of written paper that has taken a life of its own). The Chinese craft of paper sculpture is directly linked to the after-life and nether world. There are elaborate paper copies of golden ingots, paper money, paper humans, paper houses (even paper VHS or paper cars) also included figures of paper gods that were made (and sold) all over the Chinese diaspora, including Taiwan and Singapore. All these paper objects were intended to be ritually burned and thus mainly de-materialize HERE and re-materialize THERE in the great beyond. They are intended for the after-life and the ancestors cult. Recently this art form – as most of our paper products got replaced by (cheaper but much more noxious) petrochemical plastic replicas. Monster Run features some really nifty tricks involving recycled pop ephemera as idol posters, while -Paper- the Daoist side-kick appears to be made out of single use coffee cups or tetrapack packaging.
sentient flower portals
The novum of Monster Run is an inter-dimensional tunneling that is quite organic. I was totally surprised by this since it is not at all what inter-dimensional wormholes look like in usual Sci-fi settings or scientific illustrations. Monster Run spins these wormholes almost like the silk moth cocoon is spun. It almost fells like a soft funnel spider web without the poisonous arachnid chelicherae waiting for you. This inter-dimensional labyrinthine silky structure I dare say is quite different from other architectural mazes (as in The Maze Runner series for example) I have seen in movies, Sci-Fi books, science experiments (the famous maze solving slime molds!), comics or even speculative scientific renditions. This human-sized inter-dimensional spider web or silken cocoon blooms flowers portals at its ends. In fact these incredible moving gigantic peony(?!) flowers (see screenshot below) are the portals – like undulating, sentient fleshy sea anemones of sorts with moving, unfurling petals and feely touchy stamens. Peonies have been called “the longest-used flowers in Eastern culture” and they have such a diverse morphology ranging from your garden variety to 3 m deciduous shrubs! Last time we counted Paeoniaceae compounds it included 262 phytochemicals. What more do you expect of botanical alchemy? This amazing list include compounds that have shown antioxidant, antitumor, antipathogenic, immunomodulative, cardiovascular-system-protective activities and central-nervous-system activities (in vitro). Peonies are a cocktail of monoterpenoidglucosides, flavonoids, tannins, stilbenoids, triterpenoids, steroids, paeonols, and phenols. Monster Run CGI giant peonies are the first floral ‘sentient portals’ I have yet encountered in movies. Flowers of course are very important in Buddhism and Hinduism, and giant lotuses abound in Buddhist cosmology with a predilection for the floral as the seat of myriad Buddhas (such as the iconography of the Prabhūtaratna and Shakyamuni in the jeweled stupa wall painting from the Yulin Caves) or as spatial representations of various Buddhist realms. Hutzul minority in Ukraine & România also identified the lucky 4 leafed clover as a model of the universe. The various Lotus petals surrounding the central Pistil (mount Meru of Hinduism) are the various regions/cultural centers/worlds (Lokas). But you don’t need all these references – the CGI makes it something sui generis, aptly transporting us between computer game worlds and a backyard globalized reality. Anyways, the takeaway is that Monster Run, even without a big release is well worth watching even just for seeing these portals bloom!
TimeSpace Warps 
