4 responses to “China Miéville: Marxism and Halloween – Socialism 2013”

1. A socialist defence of monsters? I was having a similar thing discussion re Pacific Rim with @JosephKay from the libcom collective. My quick reading of Pacific Rim runs like this:

   In the film the world is destroyed by capitalism right? The reason that the Earth- although we only see the oceans and the urban centres- can be inhabited or colonised by the Kaijus. If you’ve not seen the film the Kaijus are great giant monsters who are invading our world via an interdimensional portal at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. Here the implication is that they’re the very beasts of hell. Quite hilarious is the way they get categorised in terms of being category 1s (weak) up to category 5s (strong)- a categorisation that seems necessary to cope with their monstrosity but also feels like an unconscious lampooning of Kantianism.

   We know the Kaijus are the result of capitalism because a representative of the the military-industrial-scientific complex tells us that “we have terraformed the Earth” for them. So it would be easy to read the Kaijus as personifications of ecological disaster. But they’re actually something new- this is the point about them coming from hell/another dimension. They’re monsters because of their scale, yes, and their horrific appearance, yes, but what prevents them from being merely comic is that they come from elsewhere- in a rather Lovecraftian motif. They are uncanny, not at home here and yet the only being still at home here. So for me, the Kaijus is actually a kind of reading of the subjectless subject, the actual negation of society, that appears after the ecological catastrophe: the proletariat in the Anthropocene.

   @JosephKay was correct to point out the image of a failed security wall in the film is the analogue to the Kyoto protocol but wrong to point out that the big mechs that are built to save the day are communist. These Jaeger’s are operated by human pilots linked together neurologically and then neurologically coupled to the battle mech- so a kind of linking of labour to a form of automation that could really be fully automated or teleoperated. In other words, they reproduce both images of a possible neurototalitarianism AND the slavish subordination of labouring bodies to the machines: faith in the technfix of capitalism. This is where the human heroes of the film are actually the enemy.

   A long way for me to go just to say that we are the Kaijus. It’s not that the sleep of reason breeds monsters- it is a particular application of reason that breeds monsters. And we are those monsters. To me this recalls without repeating Marx’s statements on the gravediggers of capital.

   On Meivellie particularly – I think his reading of Lovecraft is unfair- after all, the nihilism of Cioran is very close to Lovecraft and its the former who is the most ironic and comic of all nihilists. He is also the one who says we fear the unknown, but that death isn’t the unknown…that life is. It is life that we’re afraid of- this is why death and suicidality…monstrous thoughts….can be therapeutic.

   I think Meiveille has some good points in the above but I don’t think we can or should follow his conflation of fear and anxiety, anxiety and OCD. There is a difference between existential dread and catastrophised cognition- the former has very good reason, the latter is baseless- this is why it is a pathological or counter-productive modality of coping. So much of what else he says is really resting on this conflation of dread and dreaded outcomes. “Catastrophisation” is also ultimately a hermeneutic concept centred on the misinterpretation of somatic symptoms- so there is a question of embodiment here and how it opens up to death…but its ultimately cognitive rather than itself somatic.

   On the commodification of women’s bodies at Halloween- did you see the Anna Rexia costume?

   • yeah, I think I’ve mentioned before my distaste for people using pathologies as analogies, not only is it wrong in fact (tho I would say cognitive is a kind of somatic, as psyche is soma) as you note but surely there is something similarly poetic available that doesn’t make use of someone’s suffering/disability as a tool/resource, but that aside I like championing what/who is made to look monstrous by the powers that be, like the call for imagination and the carnivalesque that isn’t waxing nostalgic/Romantic, and like the idea that one isn’t just focused on tool use but focusing on, imagining, being open to potentials/possibilities, plus self-deprecating humor, so for a Halloween talk pretty damn good I think and no I haven’t seen the anna rexia costume and you can’t make me, yikes…

2. I agree that the cognitive is also somatic but that isn’t cognitive psychologies self-understanding, at least not until the third wave of its clinical application.

   For the monstrous imaginations re-reading parts of Phen of Perception, I’m struck by a feeling of phenomenology as vampiric and as spectre. Could be something in that….phenomenology as always already hauntological.

   • I don’t really follow cognitive-psychologies (partly for this reason) except to the degree that they have become the mandated tool of the accounting practices that rule managed-healthcare (I’ll spare you the ever mutating and expanding horrors of medical insurance) in my country, so I’m sure that you are right about that. Well certainly it is about being a spectator so if your into roots/echoes of words I’m sure you could make something of that but there are no doubt many uncanny aspects to such devotions.