THE LAST DAYS OF NEW PARIS (3)
“I have argued that the term noetic estrangement, or in Deleuzian language noetic deterritorialisation, best describes the type of non-mimetic fiction or Weird realism that can be found in China Miéville’s works (amongst others).”
“His latest novella THE LAST DAYS OF NEW PARIS is a good example as it describes the consequences of an “S-Blast”, the result of the explosion of a surrealist bomb, unleashing a swarm of weird creatures on a Nazi-occupied city. There is a self-referential dimension to this premise, as “S-Blast” well describes not only China Miéville’s own writings, but the whole domain of “weird” literature.”
“There is also a political dimension: the S-Blast corresponds to Gilles Deleuze’s notion of “irruption of the Real” that he sees taking place in the event of May 68.”
“Thus the novel also functions in some ways as a manifesto, as it declares in favour of the power of the imagination to maintain our resistance against the forces of fascism.”
“This is not to cede to a magical fantasy of the omnipotence of the imagination. As with Deleuze, Miéville’s conclusion is that an “S-Blast” is a good start, but it is not enough.”
“In Deleuze’s terms a creative subjective redeployment needs to be relayed by a political and an economic redeployment to be effective.”
“True to his Nietzscheanism Deleuze has commented Lovecraft in giving priority to his affirmative elements over the more standard pessimist image (something he does with Beckett and Kafka as well).”
“I think this shows the “new” weird was already present within the old. This is in line with the vision expressed discursively in Miéville’s interview in THE AGE OF LOVECRAFT, and imagistically in the novel THE LAST DAYS OF NEW PARIS, of the problematic synergy in Lovecraft’s works between the surrealism (affirmation of fantasy) and the fascism (elevation of a master-race).”
“Miéville’s repeated evocation of the sublime in explicitly Lyotardian terms goes in the same direction. For Lyotard the aesthetic of the sublime was an indication that the post-modern did not come chronologically, or even logically, after the modern but accompanied it from the beginning.”
“Surrealism too had its fascistic tendencies when it organised itself into a School. Just as Breton’s surrealism was an appropriation and codification of the multifarious Dadaist and Surrealist experimentations, we see today an appropriation and codification of Weird Realism by philosophies that are neither weird nor realist, but rather conformist consensual idealisms.”
“Graham Harman’s attempted hi-jacking of the weird in his object-oriented philosophy (see his “WEIRD REALISM: Lovecraft and Philosophy”, 2012) is properly called “weird sensualism”. Harman’s ontology is based on a radical disjunction between manifest, or “sensual”, realities and the unknown ineffable invisible Real. In terms of this version of OOO the Weird is not Real at all, but sensual.”
“Slavoj Zizek’s quantum meditations produce a weird realism in which manifestation is as such real (and one should note that the Surrealist entities in Miéville’s novel are called “manifs” or “manifestations”). This is his debt to Deleuze’s concept of simulacra, which Zizek has explained in great detail in the first chapter of his book LESS THAN NOTHING (also published in 2012).”
“In the first chapter, Zizek outlines a concept of pure semblances or pure appearances, that would not be the appearing of any more fundamental but totally unknown reality. These appearances are to be distinguished from the simple negation of reality that is implicit in post-modern sophistry and purely aesthetic play.”
“For Zizek, pure appearances, simulacra, or semblances, are real in their own right, and contain immanently the criteria for distinguishing illusion from substance. This is the same sort of non-bifurcationist pluralist ontology that is to be found in Deleuze’s and in Miéville’s works. It merits the name “weird ontology”. The little that Deleuze says about the ontology underlying Lovecraft’s weird fiction is coherent with his own ontology, whereas Harman’s meanderings on “weird realism” are in contradiction with his own bifurcationist schema.”
“This is the basis for the role that the American magician’s apprentice, Jack Parsons, plays in the novel. He is not content with a purely aesthetic, ultimately ineffectual, resistance in a separate domain cut off from the real word. He seeks to “weaponise” surrealist creation and avant-garde experimentation and to undo the separation by combining them with magic in the construction of his S-device.”
“Zizek’s post-Deleuzian ontology is far more consonant with Weird fiction than Harman’s OOO. Any ontologically informed list of “Weird Realists” should not include Harman at all, but only those that question the simplistic bifurcation between subject and object that is Harman’s starting point. My favorite Weird Realists are Zizek, Stiegler, Latour, Laruelle (in his “non-standard” and “philo-fiction” phase, Badiou (in his post LOGICS OF WORLDS phase), and also Lyotard, Deleuze, and Feyerabend.”
“Another criterion of the Weird, besides its suspension of the subject-object bifurcation, is that it typically belongs with an ontology of abundance. This second weird theme involves the suspension of the principle of identity in favour of alterity, multiplicity, difference, and becoming.”
“Harman’s OOO is the exact opposite, it proposes an ontology of withdrawal and impoverishment (for more details, see my ONTOLOGY: Abundance vs Withdrawal).”
“One of the most disquieting aspects of Graham Harman’s OOO system is its annexation of movements that are diametrically opposed to its own ideas. Harman’s revisionist account and annexation of Bruno Latour’s work is a case in point: he has managed to associate his name with a philosophy totally opposed to his own.”
“Another example is his annexation of Weird literature by means of his concept of “weird realism”. In terms of Harman’s OOO the weird is sensual, not real.”
“In contrast, Deleuze’s philosophy is “weird” from the very beginning, and becomes even more so in the collaboration with Guattari. Lovecraft plays a very important role in A THOUSAND PLATEAUS, but Harman makes no mention of Deleuze and Guattari in his own book on Lovecraft.”
“I do not care for the enshrining of a genre tag for a market niche in a substantial critical category, but if the term “New Weird” has any sense it is to be sought in the Time Image as analysed by Deleuze in his CINEMA II.”
“Contrary to what many commentators seem to believe, the system outlined in the “cinema” books is not limited to the cinema, but is meant to provide a general classication and phenomenology of images and signs.”
“The New Weird with its metamorphoses and impossibilities, its becomings and cosmicities, with its ontological hesitations and its undoing of the barrier between real and unreal, belongs to the regime of the time image. Harman’s OOO cannot deal with that aspect, as for him time is unreal period.”
“Monsters and metamorphoses, hybrids and becomings, are all sensual. His real objects are unspeakable, not in the Lovecraftian sense of an ineffable overwhelming of our most basic categories, but in the more banal sense that they are unsayable because there is nothing to say about them, they are boring empty posits, vapid non-entities.”
“It is clear from their positive treatment of Lovecraft in A THOUSAND PLATEAUS that for Deleuze and Guattari his works as presentations, at the level of content, of “time images”, according to Deleuze’s later terminology. The synchronic spatialised image (Chronos) of time, which is all that Harman’s OOO is capable of attaining, is suspended in favour of a mutant image (Aion) based on abundance, multiplicity and dispersion.”