This essay is based on a lecture given within the context of the project Schemas of Uncertainty, at Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam, in 2019.
The only way the European could make himself man was by fabricating slaves and monsters.1
Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Sartre introduction to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1963).
I’d like to start this text by looking at two scenes from apparently very distinct films, in order to think through what I have been calling “parallel futures”2. These are two famous examples in the history of cinema. Thinking with film may serve to highlight how it is not only about how we imagine far away futures but also about how we shoot, write, or translate futures that are already here in the present. On a more unresolved note, what I want to say may also contribute to how we might visualise differences between unequal and incommensurable worlds; worlds perhaps inaccessible to one another, be it for historical reasons (they belong to another time, perhaps long gone) or socio-cosmological ones (they belong to radically different agreements between the spheres of the always shifting notions of nature and culture). Of course, I’m talking from the standpoint of someone who works with images, and there is only so much one can do with them.
See Pedro Neves Marques, “Parallel Futures: One or Many Dystopias,” e-flux journal #99 (New York: 2019).
I want to compare a scene from Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Palm d’Or winning film Uncle Boonmee, Who Can Remember His Past Lives (2010) with Ridley Scott’s science fiction classic Blade Runner (1984).
In a central scene from Uncle Boonmee, we find Boonmee, a farmer who is dying from kidney failure, joined by his sister-in-law, Jen, and her fellow companion Tong in the balcony of his farm. They have come to say their last goodbye to Boonmee, and so they sit around the table after dinner, talking about his health, diet, and other trivial details. Beyond them lies the pitch-black darkness of the forest and the mountains, filled with nightly sounds. At some point, they are interrupted by the apparition of Boonmee’s long-deceased wife, Huay, who quickly joins the conversation, and later also by his long disappeared son, Boonsong, who they now discover was transformed into a spirit-like ape-man.
As for Blade Runner, I want to focus on an equally iconic scene. This is the moment when the blade runner Rick Deckard first meets the android Rachael in his pursuit of the four fugitive Nexus-6 replicant assassins. Deckard meets Rachael at Tyrell corporation’s headquarters and proceeds to examine her using the Voight-Kampff test. He is asked to test if she is a human or an android. Meanwhile, an artificial replicant howl observes them from a shadowy corner.
At first, these two scenes may seem miles and worlds apart (and yes, they are), but I would also claim that they are exactly the same. These are both moments of encounter with someone or something (an android, a spirit, a human-animal hybrid) existing outside the norm. In other words, these scenes present the dilemma, faced individually by each character, not only about what it means to be human but also what it is to have a world of one’s own beyond, but also always in relation, to a world that thinks itself as the centre.
In both films all other-than-humans are figures of loss: 1) the ghost; 2) a human who “regressed” into an animal; 3) an android who knows she’s been denied a future, given that her lifespan is limited. All these beings are decentred in relation to the human. And so in both films these othered beings enter from the shadows, from the night. At the start of each scene, we find that it is only the humans who are “in-scene.” The othered enter from outside the frame, while the humans are always at the centre of the frame: an anthropocentric theatre or mise en scène.
In Blade Runner there is no outside that room: we are reduced to a duel. As for Uncle Boonme, “There are many beings outside right now,” warns Boonsong when he arrives, by which he means the dark forest. “What beings?” asks Boonmee. “Spirits. And hungry animals. Like me, they sense your sickness,” Boonsong answers. The human world is only interrupted when others appear, due to how exceptional the situation: Boonmee’s disease.
In this respect, Uncle Boonmee offers a series of curious film cuts. Boonsong, the ape-man, appears from the shadows, coming up the stairs, his red, glowing eyes gazing directly at the camera, or at us spectators. Then cut / the humans—Boonmee, Jen, Tong, but also the ghost of Huay—are sitting at the table, and as they gaze over the shoulder they are also looking directly at us, the audience. Then cut / the ape-man again, as he slowly joins the gathering at the table. As always in cinema, we spectators sit outside the frame. But sometimes we are called in when the fourth wall is broken: the ape-man and the humans, each in turn, confront us directly. The darkness of the forest is the dark inside the cinema room. And the outside of the frame a clear division between nature and culture, the human and the other-than-human.
Boonmee familial spirits enter smoothly. But what about the android Rachael? She enters firmly and proudly, filming from a low camera angle. Defiantly, she challenges Deckard in the first of a long exchange of verbal jabs, that continues all throughout the Voight-Kampff test.
Making themselves visible, Uncle Boonmee’s and Blade Runner’s other-than-humans rupture a specific “distribution of the sensible,” to quote philosopher Jacques Rancière. And as the scenes progress, we start to feel that it is the human, not the others, who are at a loss.
At the centre of both scenes, there is a table—I’m very fond of tables, they are really good social images. The table is a way of attributing positions to people and distributing them around a common or uncommon space. Tables mark proximity and distance, physically but also in terms of class, through manners, taste, conversational wittiness, culture, and so on. Tables are also decision-making spaces, where politics is enacted and arguments exposed. Around tables, there are winners and losers—even if sometimes a table can also mean a family. In Uncle Boonmee, the table marks a gathering; a moment of leisure in the evening. In Blade Runner, the table marks an opposition, a confrontation: the table is the site of investigation and examination. Does the replicant deserve to sit at the table? Is it not pretending to be something it is not—a human—so that it can sit at the table? For Boonmee, other-than-humans materialise, unapologetically, at the table, and are even invited to sit down; for Deckard, everything’s a test about inclusion or exclusion.
Both scenes are also a reflection on technology. They talk about visibility machines.
Boonsong, the ape-man, was a young photographer who got lost in the forest while hunting monkeys with a camera. In doing so, he was seduced and mated with a monkey, thus being captured by the monkey-spirits and becoming lost at the border between humanity and non-humanity—a hybrid, liminal state from which he found himself unable to escape. His eyes are red, like the light inside a film lab. At one point he looks at us and says, “The art of photography.” The image as trap.
Deckard, however, trusts the Voight-Kampff test—a technology both visual and linguistic, as it is based on the reactions of a subject, registered in the dilatation of their pupils, to a set of questions written down on an inquiry. Most questions in the test deal with scenes of violence, interestingly enough mainly towards animals, that is, to beings outside the human species. The machine gazes at the eyes of an android, checking for any signs of empathy. And here is where you should recall: the human is the animal that defines and becomes itself by withdrawing from all other animals.
Now, technologies do not exist in a vacuum. Technologies carry with them worlds; they are ontological embodiments or expressions of nature/culture agreements. Marshall McLuhan once characterised technology as “extensions of man”. He was only half right—technologies are extensions of worlds, and those worlds are embodied in machines. Technology, much less its uses, is not universal. It both defines and is defined by a cosmotechnic, to use philosopher Yuk Hui’s term3.
Yuk Hui, The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay on Cosmotechnics (Urbanomic: 2016).
Cinema is a perfect example, perhaps because it is so visual—but we could very well go into a laboratory and see this in every little device, from test tubes to computers4. The linear perspective embedded in the camera’s infrastructure implies that all of its representations will always and inevitably pass through a modernist, naturalist filter; that is, an objectifying gaze that captures the environment at a distance, from which a division between self and other is established. Sure, we can always attach cameras to animals, desperately attempting to see from the other’s point of view, only to be reduced to emulation and fail, as Donna Haraway notes in her essay Crittercam, in When Species Meet5. Experimental cinema, as in the abstract work of Stan Brackhage or the colour fields of Jordan Belson, as well attempted to break with perspective, decoupling the lens from space and embracing flat surfaces and hallucinatory states—but then again, why use a film camera when computers are abstract image-making devices; experimental cinema is cheating the machine, not breaking it up.
Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007).
Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2008) 249-264.
All of these attempts are happy failures. They are not a bad thing. Again, they are simply the confirmation of ontological embodiments in technological devices. But the ontological difficulty in achieving total cultural transparency by scientific and technological means—and the Western modern world is the only one obsessed with this—should not be a concern, nor does it undermine any anthropological attempt at cosmopolitics: a politics of worlds clashing, meeting, agreeing and disagreeing on the nature, and the culture, of things. Quite the opposite, it is only when one accepts the materiality of limits, frontiers, and boundaries between worlds that cosmopolitics actually begins.
The optical machine used in the Voight-Kampff test is an extension of a film camera taken to its extreme: it not only captures subjects within its gaze at a distance, but also, akin to a polygraph, decides on its eventual termination by subjecting the eye to a test. On the other hand, the photographic image is what leads poor Boonsong, as he was chasing monkeys for the perfect shot, in the opposite direction: instead of distancing him from “nature,” photography dissolves and deconstitutes him, breaking the gap between the human and the nonhuman realm.
If there are many worlds on this planet, each with its technological extensions, fortunate misuses are bound to occur when those technologies change hands. For example, are spirits beings or a technology? If the question seems bewildering to you, that’s your problem, not the question’s. Seeing spirits as self-contained beings might very well be the limit of a modern worldview—or, to rephrase, perhaps the view from this world, that is, my world, cannot see beyond the imagination of spirits as beings, as ghosts, as apparitions and immaterial bodies. This is where our anthropological problems begin, our narrow sightedness. For example, as anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro writes, from an Amerindian animist perspective,
a spirit in Amazonia is less a thing than an image, less a term than a relation, less an object than an event, less a transcendent representative figure than a sign of the immanent universal background—the background that comes to the surface when the human and the nonhuman, the visible and the invisible trade places. An Amazonian spirit, in sum, is less a spirit in opposition to an immaterial body than a dynamic and intensive corporality6.
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “The Crystal Forest: Notes on the Ontology of Amazonian Spirits,” Inner Asia, 9 (2007), 20. Emphasis is mine.
In fact, in his biography and political treatise, shaman and chief Davi Kopenawa, from the Yanomami people living at the forested border between Brazil and Venezuela, refers to spirits as image-spirits: utupë7. If a spirit is an image of a virtual intensity, in the Deleuzian sense, grasped or contacted for the briefest moments only, then a spirit cannot be contained. It would take me an entirely different text to pay adequate respect to Kopenawa’s ideas. With the replicant Rachael in mind, I’ll try a different strategy, and simply leave these questions open:
Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert, The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman (Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 2013).
What if androids are modernity’s spirits? Are androids a relation as well?
Each society has the exteriority it demands. The android only exists in relation to the human, and the human in relation to the android. They invent one another. But they do not dominate one another—for they always exceed the image their other has of them. The Voight-Kampff test is a failure. Perhaps that’s too harsh. I’ll rephrase: the Voight-Kampff test is a trap.
In his iconic text, “Vogel’s Net: Traps as Artworks and Artworks as Traps,” anthropologist Alfred Gell claimed that animal traps in the wild are technologies bridging radical differences because in order to successfully capture prey the trap must interpret lifeworlds otherwise opaque to one another: the lifeworld of both hunter and prey8. According to Gell, the animal trap “communicates a deadly absence.” By this, he means that the trap must be shaped according to either the animal’s bodily form or its dispositions, its behaviour or intelligence. For example, the trap can be shaped and sized to fit the prey; it can use the prey’s tastes and diet; it can mimic its habitat (ant nests, for example); it can even go deep it the prey’s bodily functions (using pheromones to attract insects). And if the animal is too smart, such as a monkey or an ape, then “you [simply] need a clever trap for a clever animal.” The trap embodies the prey in a ghostly form. It predicts it. On the hunter's side, the trap also embodies them, no longer necessarily as a semiotic representation of their body but surely in relation to their skill.
Alfred Gell, “Vogel’s Net: Traps as Artworks and Artworks as Traps.” In The Art of Anthropology: Essays and Diagrams (London: The Athlone Press, 1996) 203.
Animal traps acknowledge the gap between lifeworlds. They teach the hunter that they will never be their prey—a successful hunter is a humble one. In this sense, sentences like “to be in another person’s shoes” or “under their skin” are illusions or lies. Perhaps all we can hope for is to experience another’s absence. And absence should suffice for empathy, for in Gell’s words, “the trap embodies a scenario, which is the dramatic nexus that binds protagonists together, and which aligns them in time and space.”9
Gell, “Vogel’s Net,” 202. Emphasis is mine.
Technologies carry with them worlds from which they cannot escape. But there is hope, by which I mean there is connection. Of course, there are good and bad connections: Deckard and Rachael are mediated by a deadly, discriminatory use of technology. But as for Boonsong, the use he makes of photography is what has him slip into a nether world. This is very important: he does not fall into the world of apes, he remains at the frontier. I would suggest this is the most we can aspire to between radical difference. Again, this is not a bad thing. It is a sign of humility.
Talking of humility, the mundane quality of the encounter with other-than-humans in Uncle Boonme is to me what most clearly distinguishes both films. At first, Apichatpong’s characters, sitting at the table, are somewhat surprised by the intrusion of these other beings (a ghost, an ape-man) but they quickly adapt, and from then on the scene plays mundanely. In terms of cinematography, this is perhaps why Apichatpong decides to shoot the scene horizontally. While in Blade Runner the cinematography frames the division between humans and other-than-humans by way of power relations, expressed through low and high camera angles, over the shoulder shots, and a classic shot/reverse shot technique, in Uncle Boonmee we have a horizontality to the scene, where the eye, or the camera lens, refuses to prioritize anyone’s point of view or give any one-character power over the others. Apichatpong refuses the hierarchical drama of ontology. In doing so he does not ignore or surpass the difference between humans and other-than-humans, but nonetheless affirms its triviality. The horizontality of the camera is an acknowledgement of this triviality.
Film critics often describe Apichatpong as a master of the surreal. Quite the opposite, to me he is a master of the mundane—it just so happens that his is not the mundanity of most Western cinema critics. What’s the first thing the humans ask the ape-man when he arrives?
And then the ape-man sits and they keep talking. This is a family that crosses time and space, different species and ontologies.
The mundane has a politics of its own. Ethnographically, it teaches us something, for example, about the different forms that the notion of animism may take, from Southeast Asia to the Americas, and why its erasure from the Western modernity worldview makes it impossible for someone like Deckard to see the android Rachael as anything but an enemy. This text is no place to pursue such a vast inquiry. Instead, I’d simply like to recuperate Rancière’s concept of a “distribution of the sensible”, and, following from anthropologists such as Marisol de la Cadena, push Rancière’s politics of aesthetics into the realm of cosmopolitics.10
Talking about a dispute between the Mapuche Indigenous people of Argentina and the oil industry, with the former seeing the land simply as a barren desert and latter as a living entity, Marisol de la Cadena writes, “The stark contrast suggests that the dispute about the extraction of petroleum is also a dispute about the partition of the sensible into universal nature and culturally diversified humanity.” The question then is, how do these two worlds make themselves visible to each other? Clearly, mediators are needed. Marisol de la Cadena, “Uncommoning Nature,” e-flux journal #65, the Supercommunity issue, guest-edited by Pedro Neves Marques (New York: 2015).
At several points in his early writings, Rancière refers to Gabriel Gauny, a nineteenth-century French worker and off hours writer, long forgotten in some archive of old and dusty Europe, who while laying the floor of a house stops and gazes out the window to the garden outside.11 This rupture in work-time, Rancière says, is driven by aesthetics. In his moment of pleasure, Gauny dissents from his position of worker, disconnecting hand from eye, the body-labor from the aesthetic-body. Rancière is aware that this instant is not enough to constitute absolute emancipation from his attributed role in a burgeoning capitalist society, but the displacement between his senses and his labour suffices to denote a change in the social order. It implies a shift in sensibility, hence in awareness. And it is the possibility of that shift, grounded in the senses, that kicks off politics. This is at the core of what Rancière calls the distribution of the sensible, “the system of self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it.”12
Jacques Rancière, The Philosopher and his Poor (Duke University, 2004).
Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013) 7.
Going back to the films, a distribution of roles and sensibilities is at stake in both tables. But while Deckard is busy with a technologically-enhanced system of control, putting to use a machine of purity and exclusion, those sitting around Boonmee’s table make no case of how weird and alien the confrontation is.
This mundane, or sensible, quality goes against the spectacle of representation found in American cinema. It is only in American cinema that “monsters,” or the other-than-humans, are enemies—like Rachael, the android. It is only in American cinema that a division must always be drawn between a safe inside and a threatening outside, between natives and invaders, to the point where the positions of native and invader become swapped—the settler invaders begin to imagine themselves as natives: “this land is our land.” A settler psychosis no less. In the US, or any similar settler state, what lies outside—beyond the farm, the plantation, or the factory—is always a monster. American cinema as an expression of a settler mentality.
Blade Runner is a science fiction story, while, despite Apichatpong’s proclaimed love for the genre, Uncle Boonmee is not. But if both these scenes are the same, what might Uncle Boonmee teach us about futurity and speculative fiction—which is nothing but a less muscular word for science fiction anyway? In other words, how does Uncle Boonmee refract the fears and exclusions found in Blade Runner?
If, with these two scenes, my point was simply to contrast Western tech-driven science fiction with non-Western speculative fiction, I could’ve invoked a typical techno-orientalist film, such as Ghost in Shell. It would’ve then been easier to contrast the genealogy of androids between East and West. No, I brought you Uncle Boonmee, Who Can Recall His Past Lives, a low-key story about kinship with spirits and other-than-humans.
I’m not interested in science fiction as a genre, but rather more anthropologically, in how stories like Blade Runner or Uncle Boonme express cosmopolitical (and cosmotechnical) agreements between what is deemed natural and cultural. In this regard, the question become: how is science fiction a tool acting in the invention, replication, and continuity of particular worlds against othered worlds?
Blade Runner has become iconic for its cyberpunk vision of an exhausted planet, with technological wealth and a classist, racist poverty living side by side—a depiction of William Gibson’s often-quoted sentence, “the future is already here, it is just not evenly distributed.” This inequality is often described as a dystopia, and it feels increasingly like our present reality, with wealth concentrated in the hands of a few billionaires while the rest of us struggle for a minimum wage and basic healthcare. A time when artificial intelligence is found across all our minute devices, which we check frenetically while commuting in rotten subway systems and dilapidated highways. In a way, the future ushered by the cyberpunk reality of Blade Runner was the end of the future—or, more precisely, a particular, but not universal, future. For what dystopias tend to forget is how “the future” has a history of its own and how it is only one of many possible futures.
Uncle Boonmee’s mundanity is a glimpse into another future, not in front of us, but a parallel future. It demands us to look for the future sideways, horizontally rather than ahead. Or, to break with geometry, to look for futures already intertwined, enmeshed since the birth of modernity, simultaneously symbiotic and in disagreement with preexisting power relations and distributions of the sensible. Perhaps only now, in a time when these parallel futures begin to make themselves visible, will white, modern people, like the blade runner Deckard, be able of saying, like one of the humans sitting around Boonmee’s table, “I feel like the strange one here.”
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Pedro Neves Marques is a filmmaker, visual artist, and writer. Their work has been exhibited internationally in major film festivals and art institutions, having won the prestigious Ammodo Tiger Short Competition at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, a Special Prize at the Pinchuk Future Generation Art Prize, and representing Portugal at the 59th Venice Biennale all in 2021-2022. Their writings have appeared in numerous magazines, being a regular contributor to e-flux journal, with whom they co-edited the special issue Supercommunity for the 56th Venice Biennale (2015). They edited the anthologies YWY, Searching for a Character Between Future Worlds: Gender, Ecology, Science Fiction (Sternberg Press, 2021) and The Forest and The School (Archive Books, 2015). They are co-founders of the poetry press Pântano Books, with whom they published their first poetry collection, Sex as Care and Other Viral Poems (2020) and translated the work of CAConrad into Portuguese, among others.