Category: Cultural Studies

Love in the Time of Swarms

by James R. Daniel

What sort of a life has new technology given us? To abide by the gospel of the digital age, it’s an ecstatic one. In recent years, a litany of tech advocates from Silicon Valley CEOs to futurists like Ray Kurtzweil have framed technological advancement, particularly in the area of digital communication, as the patron of the good life. As Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt told Berkeley graduates in 2012, “connectivity can revolutionize every aspect of society — politically, socially, economically.”

A similar question, albeit with a profoundly different answer, has oriented the prolific career of Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han. In over twenty books, Han, a professor at Universität der Künste Berlin, has considered how capitalist accelerations and digital technology have undermined global society. In his most renowned work, The Burnout Society [Müdigkeitsgesellschaft] (2015, first published in German in 2010), Han details the existential fatigue resulting from the rise of the entrepreneurial self. Contemporary society, he claims, exhausts us, having stripped away all accoutrements save the drive to succeed. In The Transparency Society [Transparenzgesellschaft] (2015 [2012]), he argues that the vanishing privacy of the digital age, touted by the tech scene as a boon for social cohesion, furthers neoliberalism’s project of surveillance and control. These critiques, while they may track familiar lines in their analysis of the faulty logics at the heart of our technologically dependent culture—Bernard Stiegler and Maurizio Lazzarato are similarly inclined—offer one of the most cutting responses to Silicon Valley’s cyber-utopianism and the cult of neoliberal self-actualization.

Sketch of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon (1791), public domain (source: Wikimedia Commons)

In two recently translated books, In the Swarm: Digital Prospects [Im Schwarm: Ansichten des Digitalen] (2017 [2013])and The Agony of Eros [Agonie des Eros] (2017 [2012]), Han turns his eye to the digital terrain of contemporary social relations. The former surveys the crisis of the commons and the technologically mediated loss of political subjectivity, theorizing the swarm as the key social actor on the global stage. The latter takes up technology’s devastation of the romantic relationship, suggesting that our reliance on the digital inhibits true intimacy. While entirely distinct works, both share a critique of digital capitalism’s betrayal of the human subject and theorize how a loss of the negative (in thought and in human relations) undermines contemporary life. Accordingly, against the increasingly common assertion that digital innovation offers us a way out of the isolation, poverty, and subjugation that defines late capitalism, Han maintains that technology has only buried us deeper.

In the Swarm is chiefly concerned with the question of collective subjectivity in the age of digital communication. In Han’s view, the Internet’s isolation of individuals has led to the emergence of a political unit without intersubjectivity or the capacity for substantive political engagement. More mob than assemblage, the swarm is a body that “lacks the soul or spirit of the masses” (10), a collective that subsumes rather than expresses individuality. Wielding a single weapon, the “shitstorm” (3), swarms unleash digital waves of destruction obliterating norms of governance and discourse across the Internet. Lacking the discipline of organized political collectives, Han regards swarms as ultimately ineffectual, haphazardly attacking individual victims rather than organizing against worthier sites of neoliberal authority (12). 

This disparaging view of the potential for contemporary political organizing crucially positions itself against post-Marxist theorists far more sanguine about agency in the context of late capitalism. Han explicitly contrasts his model of the swarm with Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, and Paolo Virno’s concept of the multitude, “an aggregate of singularities communicating with each other over networks and acting collectively” (12). For Han, this mode of collective deterritorialization responds to an outdated Marxist model of class society based upon the proletariat’s subjugation by the ruling class (13). On Han’s account, the contemporary subject is self-subjugating, an isolated and disconnected figure unable to find collectivity with other similarly disconnected subjects (13). Such a position underscores the singularity of Han’s critique as it negates the cautious optimism of leading critical theorists on dissent—Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s rhizome is implied here as are theorizations of dissent by Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek. Against the prevailing tendency among critical theorists to locate the potential for new forms of political agency to emerge from networked relations, Han understands the network itself as maintaining political quietism.

Han’s other interlocutor in the text is Czech-born philosopher Vilém Flusser, a critic whose technological idealism parallels that of Silicon Valley. Throughout the book, Han consistently positions himself against Flusser’s techno-utopian position, locating peril where Flusser sees only possibility. Han opposes Flusser’s praise of the atrophy of the human body in the digital era, a condition that Flusser welcomes as the human being merges with technology and enters an age of leisure (32). For Han, atrophy represents the loss of the potential of resistance and the hegemony of labor: “the utopia of play leads to a dystopia of achievement and exploitation” (33). Against Flusser’s call for a new anthropology based on the digital world’s capacitation of invention and the merging of art and science, Han sees the establishment of solipsism and social isolation, calling digital networking “a narcissistic ego machine” (48). Regarding Flusser’s prediction of technology’s role in establishing a more democratic politics, Han portends the decline of discourse and the substitution of consumerism for politics: “Consumers buy what they wish, following personal inclination. Like is their motto. They are not citizens” (69).

Cumulatively, the work can be understood as a renovation of Michael Foucault’s critique of biopolitics, neoliberalism, and disciplinary society. While Foucault’s project concludes with the emergence of these forces, Han follows them into their flourishing. Against the explicit disciplinary of Bentham’s Panopticon, with its imposed isolation, Han regards the Internet as offering the false promise of liberation. As he argues, consumerism, social media, and smart devices have sold discipline in the guise of agency and affluence. “Digital technology” he writes, “has perfected Bentham’s Panopticon” (75). Further extending Foucault’s critique, Han asserts that power is now exerted not through biopolitics but “psychopolitics” (78), power that intervenes in “psychological processes themselves” (78). For Han, psychopolitics have closed the circle instantiated with the birth of the biopolitical, governing our “unconscious logic” (80) and entirely mediating our approach to reality as well as our embodied practices.

The Agony of Eros, whose introduction is penned by Alain Badiou, investigates the narcissism of romantic relationships in the digital era. For Han, lost is our capacity to see the Other as Other. Instead, the false freedom of the entrepreneurial self immerses the contemporary subject in the capitalist drives of “debt and default” (11), transforming the negativity of sex to the positivity of achievement. As Han writes, “When otherness is stripped from the Other, one cannot love—one can only consume” (12). On his account, such a substitution represents an inherent betrayal of the loving relation by the engine of capitalism as “Otherness admits no bookkeeping” (16).

A crucial outcome of this loss of otherness, for Han, is the attendant rise of “bare life” (21), what Giorgio Agamben has theorized as life exposed to political violence. In Han’s assessment, as we flee from negativity in all its various forms (sex and death), we indulge a cultish devotion to both health and work (19). Hence, we instantiate our physical existence and deny the potentiating encounter with otherness that eros provides (20). Contemporary global society, with its “Work Hard, Play Hard” lifestyle typified by increasingly long workweeks and cult-like group exercise culture precisely exemplifies such resistance to otherness. As Han argues, this denial perpetuates an attenuated half-life in which we subsist, “too dead to live, and too alive to die” (26). 

As in Han’s other critiques, the text constructs the digital as accessory to the eradication of otherness in contemporary culture.  On his account, pornography, and its digital proliferation, profanes eros by submitting it to a calculus of positivity (29). Pornography, in other words, by revealing what is meant to be done behind closed doors, removes all mystery from the sexual act by displaying it in lurid detail. Following Agamben’s analysis of profanation, Han argues that as concealment and occlusion are crucial for the erotic encounter, the revelatory nature of pornography as exhibition precludes eroticism (32). “Capitalism,” he further notes, “is aggravating the pornographication of society by making everything a commodity and putting it on display” (32). Han likewise credits the tendency of the digital world to display with annihilating our capacity to draw upon our interior resources of imagination and fantasy. As he argues, “faced with the sheer volume of hypervisible images, we can no longer shut our eyes” (40). For Han, digital culture’s capacity to realize and display the fantastic obviates the need for invention and accordingly turns the productive work of the imagination into the passive work of consumption.

Like in his critique of In the Swarm, The Agony of Eros similarly credits capitalism, the digital, and the reign of positivity with political impuissance. In Han’s assessment, the substitution of the purely sexual desire (epithumia) for passion (thumos) precludes mass political subjectivity (44). Just as digital connectivity paradoxically precludes the establishment of meaningful political collectives, Han similarly suggests that the pornographic impedes intimacy. Insofar as the intensities of neoliberalism and the digital draw us away from others and into ourselves, the exchange of the pornographic for eros, Han claims, robs us of our capacity for political resistance (45). Even more disastrously, Han suggests that esteeming the visible for the unseen ultimately privileges quantifiable, data-driven thinking at the expense of philosophical inquiry. As philosophy engages in inquiry of occluded depths, it is, at heart, an engagement with and a desire otherness. As Han writes, “Eros infuses thinking with a desire for the atopic Other” (53).

While both texts are exquisitely theorized, the determinative role Han ascribes to negativity may strike some as reductive. For Han, it is the loss of the negative that is ultimately at the heart of the crisis of eros and our digitally mediated isolation. Badiou notably questions this assessment of negativity in his introduction to The Agony of Eros, writing, “Must absolute negativity be mustered to counter the crass positivity of repetitive, self-serving gratification?” (xi). To extend Badiou’s question, why is a return to a negative dialectic (and it would certainly be a return) a means out of our contemporary bind? Putting aside the question of whether such a return would be possible, how would a rediscovery of the negative not ultimately be regressive?

Han is certainly careful to avoid any trace of nostalgia in his condemnation of positivity, yet by locating the contemporary crisis in an imbalance of positivity wrought by the digital, his analysis seems to tempt it. Here, Han encounters the thorniest problematic of digital criticism, namely the question of how to condemn digital supremacy without implicitly appealing to technophobia. In part, Han’s response lies in the structure of his critique of negativity. As Han critiques the overabundance of the positive without offering a solution or political program, he presents a negative, non-affirmationist response to the crisis of positivity. Because an explicit tactical response or a political program would indulge a pornographic tendency to display what is to be occluded, internal, and cognitive, Han demurs. Such silence following his critique, accordingly, should not necessarily be viewed as indecision but rather as an invitation for the reader to engage the negative on their own. However, Han’s silence additionally emphasizes the supremacy of the digital and the inherent difficulty of theorizing other possibilities. Effectively, Han’s silence also intimates that digital capitalism is hegemonic precisely because it brokers no alternative. 

Byung-Chul Han,
In the Swarm: Digital Prospects
Translated by Erik Butler
Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2017
ISBN: 9780262533362
104 pages, Paperback, US$ 13.95

Byung-Chul Han,
The Agony of Eros
Translated by Erik Butler
Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2017
ISBN: 9780262339230
88 pages, Paperback, US$ 12.95

James Rushing Daniel is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of writing at Philadelphia University.

World in a Bag

by Giovanna Colombetti

Have you ever paused to consider the role your handbag plays in your life? Or, if you don’t own one, in the lives of those who do? If you are a pragmatic type of person, chances are you think of the handbag as primarily a container for toting useful items around. I certainly did—until, that is, I came across Le sac: Un petit monde d’amour (literally, “The handbag: A small world of love”) and realized just how naïve this assumption is. As one of the women quoted in the book says: “if you examine a woman’s handbag, you can almost understand her, define her, define who she is and what she has gone through in her life” (p. 129, my translation). Whether or not you agree with this statement, I am sure that reading Le sac will change how you think of and look at the handbag.

Hermès Kelly bag. (Photo by BrandMerchandise; source: Wikimedia Commons; used under CC-BY-SA 3.0 License)

The author of this engaging book, Jean-Claude Kauffman, is a prolific French sociologist, essayist and novelist who has written more than 20 books over 30 years, many of which have been translated into several languages (see www.jckaufmann.fr). Some works that have appeared in English are Dirty linen: Couples and their laundry (1998), The single woman & the fairytale prince (2008), The meaning of cooking (2010) and Love online (2012). As these titles indicate, Kaufmann is primarily interested in relationships, women, and ordinary activities. In Le sac he discusses the handbag as an object of everyday use, and develops a variety of considerations related especially to how people manipulate this item to fabricate their identity.

The book is a joy to read, with plenty of intelligent, sensitive and playful reflections. Kaufmann composed it by drawing primarily on personal narrations from 75 members of the public, collected by posting a survey on (the French edition of) Psychologies Magazine. Other sources include blogs and email exchanges with the respondents. Le sac is divided into snappy chapters that discuss disparate but related topics, such as the various contents of the handbag, the difference between the act of filling and that of emptying the handbag, the functions and uses of larger and smaller handbags, the difference between women’s and men’s handbags, and the various roles the handbag plays at different stages of one’s life.

I am not a sociologist, so I am not in a position to assess the contribution of this book to the sociological debate on artefacts and to other themes briefly touched upon, such as secrets, gender, and consumerism. In fact, I think it would be inappropriate to subject the book to a too-analytical scrutiny, given that it is not an academic book; it is directed rather at a general well-educated public, and as such is intentionally light and playful, avoiding jargon and technical theoretical reflections. So I will leave hair-splitting analyses and criticisms aside, and rather explain why, in spite of this lightness, as an academic I found the book not only very pleasant to read and entertaining, but also stimulating and inspiring for my own research.

The author of this engaging book, Jean-Claude Kauffman, is a prolific French sociologist, essayist and novelist who has written more than 20 books over 30 years, many of which have been translated into several languages (see www.jckaufmann.fr). Some works that have appeared in English are Dirty linen: Couples and their laundry (1998), The single woman & the fairytale prince (2008), The meaning of cooking (2010) and Love online (2012). As these titles indicate, Kaufmann is primarily interested in relationships, women, and ordinary activities. In Le sac he discusses the handbag as an object of everyday use, and develops a variety of considerations related especially to how people manipulate this item to fabricate their identity.

Model with Louis Vuitton handbag at the New York Fashion week (Photo by David Shankbone; released under Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 License; source: Wikimedia Commons)

The book is a joy to read, with plenty of intelligent, sensitive and playful reflections. Kaufmann composed it by drawing primarily on personal narrations from 75 members of the public, collected by posting a survey on (the French edition of) Psychologies Magazine. Other sources include blogs and email exchanges with the respondents. Le sac is divided into snappy chapters that discuss disparate but related topics, such as the various contents of the handbag, the difference between the act of filling and that of emptying the handbag, the functions and uses of larger and smaller handbags, the difference between women’s and men’s handbags, and the various roles the handbag plays at different stages of one’s life. I am not a sociologist, so I am not in a position to assess the contribution of this book to the sociological debate on artefacts and to other themes briefly touched upon, such as secrets, gender, and consumerism. In fact, I think it would be inappropriate to subject the book to a too-analytical scrutiny, given that it is not an academic book; it is directed rather at a general well-educated public, and as such is intentionally light and playful, avoiding jargon and technical theoretical reflections. So I will leave hair-splitting analyses and criticisms aside, and rather explain why, in spite of this lightness, as an academic I found the book not only very pleasant to read and entertaining, but also stimulating and inspiring for my own research.

I am a philosopher of emotion and cognition, and I stumbled upon this book while looking for works discussing how we relate affectively to our material surroundings. More specifically, I wanted to find evidence of how people manipulate and relate to objects in order to support and structure their affective life. Kaufmann’s book proved to be very informative. As he puts it, “there are all the emotions of the world in a handbag” (p. 8, my translation) and his account indeed reveals many different ways in which the handbag plays an affectively salient role in our lives. As Kaufmann does not provide a systematic account of this aspect of his work, let me do so for him.

I spotted at least seven different affective roles/meanings of the handbag, going from its interior to its exterior:

(1) The contents of the handbag appear to have a variety of affective functions. A central one is to rekindle personally significant memories, and to this aim people carry all sorts of things: pictures of loved ones, journals, old cinema tickets, lovers’ poems, and more. Sometimes the handbag itself, when inherited from a loved one for example, is a cherished memento.

(2) Other contents influence one’s sense of what one can do, for example by making one feel safer, as in the case of personal alarms or small weapons.

(3) Then comes the affective quality of the action of putting things inside the handbag, and of taking them out, which Kaufmann insightfully and quite comically describes as diametrically opposed: whereas the former comes with a sense of ease and comfort, and has a markedly pleasant character, the latter can be frustrating and exasperating as one ends up finding anything but what one is looking for.

(4) The act of organizing the handbag for the day is itself often accompanied by affective feelings too, as some people enjoy planning and imaginatively structuring their actions and the parts they will play in various situations.

(5) Moving outward, to the handbag’s looks and feels, we find that many people cherish the physical contact with their handbag, the sense of reassurance that comes from touching, carrying and even smelling it, or the uplifting character of its colours and the sheer aesthetic pleasure of looking at it. As Kaufmann discusses in one dedicated chapter, several people recall buying a handbag after falling in “love at first sight” with its appearance.

(6) Then there is the affective feeling of how the handbag looks on oneself, how it fits with one’s cloths and body shape, and how it helps define or redefine one’s image and style.

(7) And finally, the affective value of the handbag is also revealed in how other people regard it—as something profoundly personal, intimate, so much a part of one’s self that its contents can be explored only with the owner’s permission and, even then, with respect and consideration.

Who are the people whose narrations contributed to making this book so insightful? Unfortunately, we are not told where they are from—socially, culturally, geographically—and what they do in their lives. Many of them come across as strikingly perceptive and self-reflective, clearly cherishing the opportunity to reflect on their relation to their handbag (or, more often, handbags) and to further their self-understanding. Although Kaufmann does not provide statistics, it is apparent that the vast majority of his respondents were women. And indeed, as he notes, the handbag appears to be primarily, still, a woman’s object. His suggestion is that this is because of the lingering role of women as primary carers and providers-for-others—a plausible explanation I thought, further supported by the finding that the handbag tends to grow bigger or smaller in a woman’s different life stages: heavy and full of things when she is growing a family, less voluminous and lighter later in life, when she discovers a new freedom less encumbered by responsibilities.

Reading this playful book was a journey of self-discovery for me as well. Before reading it I was, I confess, entirely oblivious to the handbag. As I cycle most of the time, I mainly use a pannier, and generally try to carry as little as possible on me, preferring to keep my hands and shoulders free. My attitude, I now know, resembles in this respect that of (most) men, indicating perhaps a certain reluctance to take on the role of “carrier” of others’ needs. In fact, I do not even own a handbag—or rather, I should say, I did not even own a handbag when I first read this book… because I have in the meantime gotten myself one! Aware of its importance, I have chosen it carefully, making sure I like how it looks and feels. Predictably, however, I have thereby also joined the rows of those who spend hours rummaging in it to find things that inevitably slip in its deeper layers. More importantly, I do not look at the world in the same way anymore: I find myself observing people’s handbags on trains, social gatherings and conferences, and wondering what role this object plays in their lives. So, in my case at least, Le sac has successfully achieved one of his main aims: by foregrounding the ordinary, it has changed my way of looking at the world, making me more aware of the many meanings of our everyday things and actions. I think Kaufmann would be pleased.

Jean-Claude Kaufmann: Le sac. Un petit monde d’amour
Paris: JC Lattès
ISBN: 9782709635462
Paperback, 252 pages, EUR 17.80

Giovanna Colombetti is Associate Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Sociology, Philosophy, and Anthropology at the University of Exeter, UK, and the author of The Feeling Body: Affective Science Meets the Enactive Mind (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press 2014).

(c) 2015 The Berlin Review of Books

Entering the Zone

by Thorsten Botz-Bornstein

Serious essays on films are normally of an academic nature. Thus, it is no surprise that a philosophical film like Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979) has attracted the attention of several academic philosophers. My first thought when I heard of Dyer’s project was: how can a writer (not a philosopher or academic) write a whole book about a film? My next thought was: why Stalker and not Nostalghia? To be clear right at the beginning, I am one of those academic philosophers.

Dyer leaves no doubt that for him, Nostalghia is a sort of self-celebratory, pretentious kitsch movie that he has despised from his early youth on while Stalker was a revelation. Watching it for the first time in a godforsaken cinema in Gloucestershire in the 1980s, he realized that the film was bound to determine his entire future existence. Well, that is what Nostalghia was for me. Is that how some people become writers and others philosophers?

The answer is no. What matters is the difference between Gloucestershire and Westphalia. I am serious. Reading the book, I not only came to understand Dyer’s point about the difference between Stalker and Nostalghia, but – without doubt due to my keen philosophical spirit – I now understand it even better than Dyer understands it himself: Stalker is zen while Nostalghia is not. Stalker is Bach while Nostalghia is a Mozart opera. Stalker is a viola da gamba sonata while Nostalghia is similar to Händel’s mindless pom-pom, pom-pom bass.

Where do I get all this from? From another Brit, R.H. Blyth, who did with Zen Buddhism more or less what Dyer is doing with Stalker: expanding it. In his Twenty-Five Zen Essays from 1962 (originally the fifth volume of his Zen and Zen Classics), Blyth divides the whole world into manifestations of either zen or non-zen (with intermediate states between them) and spells out what many of his readers have found most plausible ever since: Händel is ‘more zen’ than the self-pitying Schubert, who is ‘more zen’ than bombastic Italian operas, and with Chopin and Wagner (!), things are getting as ‘un-zen’ as anything on this planet. Almost.

Russian stamp (2007) commemorating Andrei Tarkovsky (source: Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

What is the contrary of zen? The moral, the beautiful, the intellec­tual, the emotional, the world-weary, the philosophical. Blyth’s final conclusion is even crueler than that: The Brits are the most zen-like culture in the entire Western hemisphere and perhaps even beyond. In any case, they are much, much, much higher up on the zen scale than the hopelessly Heidegger-heavy Germans who are culturally insensitive to the noble austerity of the zen spirit (even Händel was merely a “jolly good fellow”). Anyone who has ever sat for more than two hours on the antique wooden benches of Oxford’s dining halls understands what Blyth is talking about.

A man named Stalker guides a writer and a scientist through “the Zone”: an apocalyptic wilderness supposedly endowed with supernatural qualities. Rumour has it that a meteorite crashed into the zone twenty years before, creating a kind of cosmic abyss. Inside the Zone there is a Room said to grant people’s most intimate wishes. Porcupine, Stalker’s teacher, had entered the Room and, a week later, became immensely rich. The conflict between his mental inner reality and the reality outside had been so big that he committed suicide. In the end, none of the men dare enter the Room.

I do not know if Dyer knows Blyth, but he mentions Allan Watts, who is a similar ‘expander’. However, Dyer’s book is zen, just like the film he is writing about. Dyer talks about the serious in a lighthearted fashion and becomes profound by doing so. Is this not – in a formula – the contrary of what philosophy is doing most of the time? (And much of philosophy is German.)

Dyer himself says that the book is not a synopsis but an amplification of the film. Amplification towards what? Towards the metaphysical, of course. The book is philosophical in that it asks essential questions: what is film, what is literature, what am I, the writer? Nevertheless, Dyer’s approach is peculiar. He is not writing philosophy, he is not analyzing, and he is not even telling us the story of the film. “Literary anthropology” comes to mind, which does indeed exist. I know some self-critical and repentant philosophers (not all of them Germans) who have consciously turned towards that genre. Dyer himself mentions “Tarkovsky’s filmic archeology of the discarded” (p. 117) and I believe that this is exactly what Dyer is doing himself. The ruminating exploration of places draws us into Stalker, which is a film about a place (the Zone). Dyer retells this place with all its décor, colors, flickering lights, noises and smells. We might have seen the stone in the water, but Dyer lifts it up and tells us what is underneath. Finally, his anthropology of things brings us closer to the metaphysical meaning of the film (he does not identify the 1961 Peugeot 404 convertible, though).

Having started talking about zen, I want to go on a little (I am imitating Dyer’s style). In my opinion, Stalker puts forward zen as the religion of the age of post-secularism and Dyer is showing exactly that. I am not saying “neo-religious age” but “post-secularism”, and to make it clearer, I should perhaps call it “secular post-secularism” to further distinguish it from “religious post-secularism.” The differences are complicated and cannot be explained here. The former option can be found in the existentialist religion of Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky whereas the latter is rather that of the Southern Baptists and the Muslim Brothers of Cairo. Stalker’s Writer is a secular post-secularist who “has gone from extreme skepticism to fearful belief” (p. 137) – but who will return to skepticism sooner or later. At some point, Writer clutches a weapon but is ready to let it drop when Stalker tells him to. That is exactly what makes the film so zen and so deliciously (and secularly) post-secular. Writer would be ready to believe in the Zone, but at the same time, nothing of what he experiences can convince him of its superior character.

Some things do not work: “Writer is the one doing the drinking—maybe he should have been called Drinker.” Dyer’s countless rantings about the vulgar films of Lars von Trier and about the “witless Coen brothers” on the other hand, are interesting and always to the point.

Dyer expresses his post-secular feelings about the film like this: “The Zone is not simply a source of solace, the heart of Marx’s heartless world, it is a source of torment, a system of traps that constantly teases and threatens not just his clients but Stalker himself. No one is immune to the capriciousness of the Zone” (p. 90). The entire film works with the intensity of his despair and – strangely – also with the intensity of hope. Dyer attempts to grasp the post-secularist constellation of despair/hope by researching Stalker and by intermingling the film with his own existential situation. Saying that “the film is in some way about itself, a reflection of the journey it describes” (p. 123), Dyer manages to capture Stalker’s self-reflexive tone and produces a Stalker of its own. What is film, what is literature, what am I the writer? Can anybody “see their – what was considered to be the – greatest film after the age of thirty?” What does it mean to see a film at a young age, to see it again as a disinterested adult? Is it like trying to come to a definitive assessment of your own childhood?

There is a nice allusion to Rilke and his idea that all Russians are sort of proto-Germans in their profoundness and unconditional (crazy?) search for truth. Are Russians zen? Too late to ask Blyth.

Original Mosfilm poster advertising ‘Stalker’, 1979 (Source: Wikimedia Commons, thumbnail used under Fair Use provisions)

And finally: What is a book? What is a book for Dyer, the writer? He tells us what he feels when he receives a copy of his new book: “The next moment comes not when the book is finished … but some time after it is published, when you see it for what it is… Then you see that actually those big desires and hopes, your deepest wishes, turned out not to be so deep at all…” (p. 186). Ha, I found what I was looking for: a point clearly demonstrating that philosophy is superior to literature because a philosophy book can be so entirely incomprehensible that its incomprehensibility alone gives the author full satisfaction or, more precisely: gives him hope that, even in a hundred years, people will still be trying to make head and tail of what he has written. Not that he believes anybody would do this (philosophers are not naïve), but he hopes that somebody will do it. This plunges us into the central subject of Stalker with its Room in the middle of the Zone, which grants wishes but yields disappointment after disappointment, even though – paradoxically – it creates the one thing that humanity needs in a post-secular age: hope. Hope implies a sense for the future and a discontent with the present because what would we need hope for otherwise? This paradox is implicitly contained in Stalker, and Dyer is making it explicit. It is exactly the paradox that, most probably, neither Southern Baptists nor Muslim Brothers will ever figure out.

Interestingly, Dyer mentions secular, over-happy Americans who have similar problems with the paradox of hope and should perhaps be sent to the Stalker school: “When you’re happy, hope, like all the other big questions … becomes meaningless. It is possible, in parts of California particularly, to live a life full of happiness (for what is here now)” (p. 211). Did Blyth not say that the world-weary are un-zen? I don’t remember if he says anything about the overly happy.

The Zone is a matrix and a reality at the same time. Dyer reproduces a Zone in the form of a reflection about a spacein which we are confronted with our hidden wishes and daydreams. In that sense, every book is a Zone and every work of art is a Zone. That might be the gist of Stalker. There is actually, according to Blyth, also a lot of zen in Mozart (though not as much as in Bach). So what about Nostalghia? I still have hope.

Geoff Dyer: Zona. A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room
ISBN-13: 978-0857861665
Price: GBP16.99
Edinburgh, Canongate, 2012, 228pp.

Thorsten Botz-Bornstein is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Gulf University for Science and Technology in Kuwait. He is the author of Films and Dreams: Tarkovsky, Bergman, Sokurov, Kubrick, Wong Kar-wai (2007) and has written a number of books on topics ranging from intercultural aesthetics to the philosophy of architecture.