Tyger and Becoming-Artifical

Hi.  I'm Tharmas, but I listed my username as Roger Whitson.  I've been fascinated by this film short from Brazilian filmmakers Guilherme Marcondes and Andrezza Valentin for almost a year without knowing precisely what to do with it:

The short seems, at first glance, to be an eco-redemptive narrative.  The tyger appears in a nihilistic urban setting and unleashes the primitive core of each character, animalizing them. These characters are, to borrow an often quoted term from Deleuze and Guattari, becoming-animal, their repressed primitive essence exploding onto the bleak world and illuminating it.

But this becoming is not as simple or as easy as my theoretical shorthand suggests.  Becoming, first of all, has nothing to do with essence, nor does it have much to do with the animal.  As Ron Broglio and Fred Young suggest in the subtitle to their essay Animal Revolution, "there are no animals."  Steve Baker's The Postmodern Animal argues further that Deleuze and Guattari's becoming-animal is a mode of experimentation in which the language of subjectivity is sacrificed for the awkwardness of finding a new style, a new way of participating in the "unthinking or undoing of the conventionally human" (104).  One does not become an animal when one is involved in a becoming-animal. 

Tyger struggles with the line separating interpretation and artistic experimentation associated with becoming-animal.  The film must contend with another becoming that haunts literary scholars: its uncertain relationship with William Blake and his poem "The Tyger" written around 1794.  "The Tyger" (you can read the poem from the Blake Archive here) argues against the violence of symmetry by allying it with the ferocity associated with tigers and disrupting the otherwise orderly and arguably symmetrical meter and rhyme with the word "symmetry."   The poem performs the violence of symmetry by highlighting our desire for order in poetry, suggesting that this order can only exist by sacrificing the most important word in the poem (symmetry) and foregrounding our frustration when the orderly structure of the poem is subverted.

Marcondes and Valentin’s film replaces essentialist conceptions of ecology and authorship with one that celebrates the awkwardness and uncontrolled enthusiasm of artistic experimentation.  Its setting suggests the carnivalesque, with early images of roller-coasters and tents replaced with the neon foliage surrounding the drab, flat cityscape at the end.  The tyger is manipulated by shadowy figures, its joints expose a kite-like structure to the animal.  The shadowy figures highlight the tyger’s artificial nature and suggest a sinister presence behind the tyger’s actions.  The distinction between artificiality and nature becomes difficult to maintain in the film as it represents nature with artifice and imagines the cityscape (and its resonances of artificiality) with realistic photographs.   

The filmmakers situate the background with filmed images, and place their flat, artificial characters on top.  As the film progresses, the distinction between the background and the foreground becomes more apparent. This celebration of artifice in the face of authenticity or realism becomes the rallying point for the filmmakers' Deleuzo-Guattarian clamor of being—as the artificial, flat animals rise up and obscure the photo-realistic cityscape at the end.  It also suggests that the becoming-animal is not natural or related to nature, but that to be becoming-animal, one must also be becoming-artifical.   

Comments

[old]

http://www.frieze.com/feature_single.asp?f=1165 is one of the many places you can find the Weizman piece. There is a reference at the bottom there to a full transcript in the March/April 2006 issue of Radical Philosophy.

[Perezoso]

ah yeah the onto-hegemony of a Gorillaz outtake....even Ballard's Sussex surrealism preferable to the like tres sauvvage Tyger flick, BillBlake, or for that matter to D&G.........

[discard]

Well yes, spc. tackle, if that's the case, of course--deterritorialization is not good in-iteslf, etc. I just was looking for clarification that this was the point of sdv or if there was something mroe there.

D/G say this themselves, such as, the minority must become-minor, noting the state of Israel explicitly as an example of a minority's failure to become-minor (perhaps raising the question of whehter it is becoming-minor, or more properly minority status, that can go bad).

[sdv]

Anthony,

Sorry i should have been more specific, pretty typical in my view is Patrik Curry interesting text 'ecological ethics'. It's the numbers that count a planned decline of -6bn and counting.

As for Old's point, to accept it surely you would have to be able to explain how the recent repolitization of the religious sphere is in fact a delusion ?

[Anthony Paul Smith]

I'm very sorry but your wording is still confusing me. Are you saying that you think there is a fascistic element to ecoethics? Are you saying that this is necessarily part of the movement? Thanks for telling me what book you meant, that was helpful.

[sdv]

Anthony,

Sorry, it must be me being eliptical again.

I am not saying that it 'must' be part of an ecologically orientated movement, but that there are significant aspects of the movement which have the potential to make what we think of as 'fascism' look positively liberal.

is that clearer ?

[sdv]

discard/spc.tackle/all

Ok – now I can perhaps escalate the issue to a higher level. The example raised of deterritorialization is excellent - and yet the question inevitably becomes why is it that the family of related concepts of which 'becoming-minor' is almost the least troublesome, are so problematic. Deleuze and D&G were so careful to not say about 'becoming' what they repeatedly said about deterritorialization and reterritorialization.

I suspect that what underlies this is that Deleuze has so much more invested in 'becoming' that in deterritorialization. Because becoming is a key theme in Deleuzes work, along with the other central term 'difference', key terms in the ontology. Philosophically Deleuze develops theories of difference, repetition and becoming, using the term becoming to “describe the continual production of difference immanent within the constitution of events, whether physical or otherwise” (Pearson).

The usual notion of a politics of difference seeks to increase the rights of minorities to function in the majority. In other words what constitutes the majority becomes increasingly broad. D&G do not deny this is important and obviously support this political approach, the majority-minority binary construction. However they introduce the third term (becoming)-minor whilst avoiding the issue we have been discussing here. Perhaps it's because the third term carries with it a possibility of identification, briefly for example the concept of becoming-animal which begins with references to animals through Jung and Levi-Strauss (see 236 in MP) but crucially D&G insist that becoming-animal is not an identification because as they say 'they are perfectly real' which begins the change and the reference to becoming as 'the principle according to which there is a reality specific to becoming' (238) ---

The purpose of this note/comment may now becoming clearer, what this leads me to propose is that the underlying problem with the becoming-minor is that the examples and uses D&G make with it in C&S begin to produce some slight cracks/fissures in Deleuze's refusal of the Western Traditions 'Being and Identity'. The tool becomes in C&S a potential threat, a potential problem with the Deleuzian use of becoming, in other words the ontology itself, because they cannot avoid the problem of identification and identity.

sigh, painful process this...

[sdv]

Anthony,

i wouldn't want you to think that I was picking on Curry, try Lovelock's recent work 'The Revenge of Gaia' as well.

[Roger Whitson]

sdv,

This reminded me of Judith Butler's book _Undoing Gender_, which I found bizzare because it vacillated between a politics of identity (which Butler doesn't want to take away from certain queer movements) and a recognition of the fluidity (or more radically) the non-existence of sexual identity as such. The book seemed (to me) to fall apart in its own ambivalence. Perhaps the problem here is the combination of D&G? D's nuanced philosophical approach with G's commitment to radical politics? This is obviously too simple, but I think the problem you are noticing might be due to a tension in the many authors that wrote the book...becoming can't really be appropriated to radical politics and yet there are passages that attempt to do just that in ATP.

[sdv]

Roger,

Agreed and nicely put, with Deleuze a great deal appears to depend on whether you approach him, though the toolbox, as a philosopher of engineering or if one is content to 'read' him and continue to repeat the all to obvious logical and political errors. However becoming can be used to support a leftist politics, but you need Marx and not one whose social and historical context was about to become the neo-liberal counter reformation.