ALIEN RHYTHMS

58 ALIEN RHYTHMS Amy Ireland From Deleuze’s reworking of Kantian schematisation to Mark Fisher’s theorisation of the weird and the eerie to the “zone” trope in contemporary science fiction, this essay examines ‘pathological’ productions of space and time first as rhythms, and then as sites of dread and desire. This paradoxical affect is owed to their alien, other, or “outside” status relative to, following Kant, the universal and homogenising “inside” of anthropic temporal succession and spatial co-existence. Their danger is apparent from the outset and yet they carry an irresistible allure for the various figures – professors, stalkers, scientists, tourists and travel guides – who find themselves under their spell. Functioning variously as alternative economies of material goods and genetic information, these alien rhythms concern transformation above all else. A transformation that involves great risk. But such is the cost of novelty. There was only one thing that I didn’t like. In the very back of the garage, near the canisters, I could see something silvery. That hadn’t been there before. Well, all right, so there was something silvery, we couldn’t go back now just because of that! I mean it didn’t shine in any special way, just a little bit and in a calm, even a gentle way. I got up, brushed myself off, and looked around. There were the trucks on the lot, just like new. Even newer than they had been the last time I was here. And the gasoline truck, the poor bastard was rusted through and ready to fall apart. I didn’t like the looks of that tire. Its shadow wasn’t right. The sun was at our backs, yet its shadow was stretching towards us. Well, all right, it was far enough away from us. It seemed OK, we could get on with our work. But what was the silvery thing shining back there? Was it just my imagination? Now, the thing to do would be to light up, sit down quietly and think it Alien Rhythms 59 through – what’s the silver stuff above the canisters … why is the tire’s shadow like that? The Vulture Burbridge told me something about the shadows, that they were weird but harmless. Something happens here with the shadows. But what about that silver stuff? It looks just like a cobweb. What sort of spider could have left it behind? I had never seen any bugs in the Zone. Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic What is the schema of the spider? The schema of the spider is its web, and its web is the way it occupies space and time. […] take the concept of a spider; the concept of a spider will include all of its anatomical parts and even the physiological functions of the spider. Thus one will encounter that funny sort of organ with which the spider makes its web. But can you deduce from it what we can now call the spatio-temporal being, and the correspondence of the web with the concept of a spider, which is to say with the spider as organism. It’s very curious because it varies enormously according to the species of spider. There are cases of very extraordinary spiders that, when you mutilate one of their legs, which is nevertheless not used for fabrication, make abnormal webs in relation to their own species, they make a pathological web. What happened? As if a disturbance in space and time corresponded to the mutilation. Gilles Deleuze, “The Schema and Synthesis,” Lectures on Kant Xenomorphic Extremism Alienness – and the alienation that results from a confrontation with alienness – is the genesis of novelty and change. Wherever one encounters the alien, a mutation or a transformation is not far behind. And yet, because alienness involves an aspect of unknowability and unpredictability – an erasure of the familiar and the homely – it is also one of the things in the world which makes us most afraid. We fear the different and the strange, yet we require these things in order to evolve. This makes for a paradoxical affective relationship with the notions of otherness and difference that alienness encompasses – a bizarre and complex orientation unifying dread and desire. Already there is a kind of geometrical confusion in this: desire drives you forwards, while dread forces you back. As Mark Fisher writes in The Weird and The Eerie, it’s not a simple case of “enjoy[ing] what scares us.” Rather, “it has […] to do with a fascination for the outside, for that which lies beyond standard perception, cognition and experience,” an affect that involves Amy Ireland 60 terror and distress, but isn’t wholly described by them. 1 Fisher’s invocation of “the outside” immediately brings into play the prefix “xeno-,” a denotation nominating what follows it as foreign or alien – an “outsider,” someone or something that arrives from the outside. Rebekah Sheldon offers the following extended etymology of the term, alongside some of its contemporary applications: Xeno. Greek ξενο-, ξεν-, combining form of ξένος, a guest, stranger, foreigner, adj. foreign, strange; used in various scientific and other terms including, e.g. peculiar accessories; cross-species disease; symbiosis and parasitism; a snake genus; metamorphic mineral defacement or partial fusion; foreign rule; disease vectors allowed to feed on pathogens in sterile laboratory environments; a type of diagnostic comparison; crossfertilization; germline engineering and the products thereof; taking its origin from outside the body, as in a disease or a tissue graft; glossolalia; emotional or sexual obsession with the foreign; a gastropod mollusk; a kind of fish with spineless fins, scaleless skin, and a complex sucking-disk between the ventral fins; mineral deposits found at high temperatures; an inactive virus; an armadillo; extraterrestrial life-forms or the study thereof. Etymologically, xeno is trans. As graft, cut, intrusion, or excession, xeno names the movement between, and the moving entity. It is the foreign and the foreigner, the unexpected outside, the unlike offspring, the other within, the eruption of another meaning. 2 “Xeno-” describes both a vector and an alteration: it is the coincidence of transition and transformation. It thereby involves a relationship between an inside and an outside, divided (or linked) by a threshold which becomes the object of a crossing. To better grasp this notion of outsideness that both Fisher and Sheldon call forth, it helps to understand what constitutes the inside, or what Fisher designates as “standard perception, cognition and experience” (8). He provides a clue later in the book when he quotes from an enigmatic text first appearing the “Digital Hyperstition” issue of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit’s infamous underground cyberzine, Abstract Culture, in 1999. The text, titled “The Templeton Episode,” narrates a strange experience undergone by an 1 Mark Fisher, The Weird and The Eerie (London: Repeater, 2017) 8. Subsequent page references to this book are given in parentheses in the text. 2 Rebekah Sheldon, ‘XENO,’ The Occulture, 22 January 2017, http://www.theocculture.net/ xeno/, accessed 19 December 2019. Alien Rhythms 61 eccentric philosophy professor named Randolph Edmund Templeton. Professor Templeton is a scholar of Immanuel Kant, and while meditating one dark evening in his attic room upon a copy of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, he has the unnerving sensation of not being who he thinks he is – of a threshold being crossed. The feeling that something alien – something outside time and space – threatens to invade, thus confirming Templeton’s hunch that Kant’s philosophy, although typically taken to be about the limits of human “perception, cognition and experience,” if read correctly, in fact functions as a “time-travelling manual” (8). 3 In that moment, Templeton realises that he can use Kant’s system “as a guide for engineering time-synthesis.” 4 And “the key,” it occurs to him, “is the secret of the schematism, which – although “an art concealed in the depths of the human soul” – concerns only the unutterable “Abomenon of the Outside.” 5 According to Kant, our experience of the world is governed by conformity to strict cognitive, perceptual and experiential rules. These rules give us objects, temporal succession (which is to say, time experienced as a linear flow that moves inexorably from moment A to moment B to moment C) and spatial coexistence (there are consistent cartographic coordinates that exist for everyone in the same universal space – Antarctica doesn’t disappear just because no one is perceiving it). Human perception thus operates as an inbuilt clock and compass that systematise and universalise our experience, guaranteeing that, even when separated by vast distances, or great stretches of time, we humans think of ourselves as inhabiting the same space, and the same historical timeline, and that this space and time function consistently and predictably across the entirety of human experience. For us, time has only one dimension – that of a line – and space has three. These rules draw the bounds of the inside by constituting the edges of shared perceptual, cognitive and experiential possibility for us as human beings. Consequently, there is a sameness that structures reality for us. Our experience of the world is navigable and communicable because of this sameness. It determines our rhythmic regime – a specifically anthropomorphic regime: linear time, simultaneous, three-dimensional space, and objecthood are its framing parameters – its tempo or its beat. Inside these parameters, diverse and idiosyncratic rhythms unfold – but they never break the beat. Time remains linear; space, simultaneous. Consequently, experience, at its most fundamental 3 Ccru, “The Templeton Episode,” Abstract Culture: Digital Hyperstition (London: Ccru, 1999) 55. 4 Ccru 55. 5 Ccru 55. Amy Ireland 62 and unconscious level, is ordered, familiar, comfortable, and homely, scaled reassuringly to match our perceptual affordances. It is not often that we come by experiences that threaten to disturb these patterns. Given the choice, most of us would deliberately avoid them. “It makes sense” writes psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud that “repetition, the reencountering of identity, is itself a source of pleasure” 6 – for pleasure, as Fisher helpfully glosses, “always refer[s] to previous forms of satisfaction” – it is defined by familiarity (13). But what if this situation were inverted – the heterogeneity and diversity that can be sustained by rhythm preceding the necessary homogeneity of the tempo? What if objects didn’t work how you expected them to? What if the framing logic of time and space was different? What if the beat was … eerie? In his book, Fisher contrasts Freud’s unheimlich – the “uncanny” or the “unhomely” – with his own treatment of the weird and the eerie. The unheimlich, he writes, “is about the strange within the familiar […] it is haunted by an outside which it circles around but can never fully acknowledge or affirm.” However, he continues: “[t]he weird and the eerie make the opposite move: they allow us to see the inside from the perspective of the outside” (10). The weird and the eerie designate distinct affective tonalities related to “modes of perception” or “modes of being” proper to these zones of traffic, leakage, or porosity between the standardising pulse of the inside, and the transformative rhythmicity of the outside (9). While the weird is related to “that which does not belong” – bringing “to the familiar something which ordinarily lies beyond it, and which cannot be reconciled” with it using known rules of assimilation or intelligibility, the eerie describes the absence of a purposive agent where there should be one, just as much as the presence of a purposive agent where there should not be one (10). In the weird there is something extra and unintelligible in what would otherwise be an ordinary scene – “an exorbitant presence, a teeming which exceeds our capacity to represent it”; in the eerie there is a problem of misplaced action (61). “The eerie is fundamentally tied up with questions of agency,” he writes, it clings most readily to “landscapes partially emptied of the human” (11), where one is prompted to ask “What happened to produce these ruins, this disappearance? What kind of entity was involved? […] What kind of agent is acting here? Is there an agent at all?” (110) He identifies it 6 Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, ed. Todd Dufresne, trans. Gregory C. Richter (Peterborough, ON, Buffalo, NY and London: Broadview Press, 2011) 75. Alien Rhythms 63 with particular acuteness in science fiction scenarios dealing with the inexplicable emptiness of outer space – and with the implacability of terrestrial capitalism: “eerie impasse[s]” arise “when mismatching modes of intelligence, cognition and communication confront one another” (115). When brought into contact with an eerie outside agency, “‘we’ ‘ourselves’ are caught up in the rhythms, pulsions and patternings of non-human forces” (11). Because both the weird and eerie describe the “new” in this radical way – as an intrusion of alien outsideness – whether as the operation of an eerie agency or of something in the environment which does not belong – they automatically indicate the impossibility of knowledge and explanation: “When knowledge is achieved, the eerie disappears” (62). In a fashion similar to Fisher’s dismissal of the uncanny as subordinating alienness to familiarity – of merely locating the strange within the greater frame of the familiar, of neutralising novelty in advance – Sheldon writes: “If the uncanny marks the hideous return as if new of what was always already known – the groundwork whose repression allows the enclosure of a domestic interior, [the outsideness of] XENO is of its own order.” 7 What exactly would it mean to come into contact with this “order” that is outside order? Where the weird and the eerie reign, where the parameters that structure experience are open to wild and violent variations that efface all knowability and predictability, that make every movement treacherous and charged with the ambiguity of desire and dread, novelty and fate? What if moving forwards through space did not necessarily mean moving forwards in time? What if “forwards” and “backwards” were to lose their meaning entirely? What would it feel like to interface with a spacetime – an alien rhythm – that does not follow any recognisable human pattern and whose agency remains opaque? Who are these perverse creatures that would desire such a thing? If you are frequenting the right corners of the internet, you might be asked by some passing anon to “tag yourself” on a spectrum of alien desire that looks something like this: 7 Sheldon n.p. Amy Ireland 64 This chart, courtesy of the rabidly metastasising cultural distribution-system known as 4Chan, is interesting for several reasons. First, it conceives alienness on a spectrum devolving from traditional humanoid morphology to the wildly unfathomable monstrosity of “multidimensional eldritch horrors” in seven successive stages. Second, it figures this desire sexually – a suggestion which becomes graphically more untenable via the usual human means as monstrosity increases. And third, it implies a distinct – almost Orphic – threshold which, once crossed, offers no opportunity of return. As the hypothetical object of one’s desire modulates across the spectrum from “humans” to “unconventional non-humanoids,” it correlates with certain intensities of xenophilia corresponding to an amplitude of sameness or difference. Those for whom anything beyond general humanity, with perhaps a dash of lime-green skin, is unappetising are designated as “Normies,” shading into the still dimorphically-sexed “Monster Girl Fan” (or Monster Boy Fan – this, as is stated in the bottom left-hand corner, is the “female edition”) with the transition to the fairly typical, traditional alien imaginary including “Greys” and “Little Green Men” – before emphatically crossing a boundary at the point where the human face starts to lose its distinctness, a desire for “Teratomorphic Humanoids” ominously classified as “Trapped with No Way Back.” “OpenMinded Alien Lovers” have a penchant for increasingly anomalous forms, moving from “Borderline Humanoids” in which a retreating anthropomorphism is concretised in the erasure of sex organs or the addition of various non-human Alien Rhythms 65 appendages, to “Conventional Non-Humanoids,” where it disappears completely in a chimerisation of insectoid, vegetal and machinic parts. 8 At the furthest extreme of weirdness one encounters the realm of “Unconventional NonHumanoids”: dimensionally anomalous, of “indefinable shape” – a situation of strange liminal plasticity in which it becomes “unclear where [the] body starts and ends.” The corresponding subject position is that of the “True Xenophile,” one caught up in a desire of that which exceeds even form itself. An ambiguous joke posted on a related thread reads: “Why are monstergirls better than a real woman?” “Because the monster is on the Outside.” Here “xeno-” comes into its own. Strictly defined, a xeno-morph[ē] is something that is outside form. These aliens are at the furthest end of the spectrum – a spectrum whose logic follows an explicitly anthropomorphic order – because they overturn this order entirely. There is no eighth classification: form, past this point, is irrelevant. Alien desire extinguishes itself with the dissolution of form into the conditions of form: the laws of space and time. These extreme xenomorphs – formal outsiders – encapsulate something close to what weird fiction author H.P. Lovecraft gestures towards when he writes of his characters’ wishes “[t]o shake off the maddening and wearying limitations of time and space and natural law – to be linked with the vast outside […].” 9 What I want to suggest here, applying Fisher and Sheldon’s concepts of outsideness as something beyond the fundamentally human rhythm of linear temporality and simultaneous, three-dimensional spatiality, to this spectrum of alien desire, is that the truly alien, the most extreme and productive mutant edge of alienating difference, is the alien understood as a space-time – a rhythm – a temporal cartography – an eerie beat – that operates in a way that is wholly other to the standardised “perception, cognition and experience” that spontaneously structures reality for us humans. A “True Xenophile” is a lover of alien rhythm. 8 Untitled Image, ‘Ver. 1.2. / 2018-04-28, Female Edition.’ Page no longer exists. 9 H.P. Lovecraft, “The Whisperer in the Darkness,” H.P. Lovecraft Archive, http:// www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/wid.aspx, accessed 19 December 2019. Amy Ireland 66 The Pathological Web This is a scene from Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film, Stalker. 10 The eponymous stalker is just about to enter the “Zone” – a space in which physical laws do not seem to apply in the same way as they do in the outside world – or better the inside world, for once they have crossed the border of the Zone, the stalker and his customers, known only as the “Writer” and the “Physicist,” find themselves beholden to a spatio-temporal logic that is entirely different from our own – a realm of extreme xenomorphia – the weird and eerie utternullity of an obscure and alien beat (125). Tarkovsky’s Stalker is just one particular treatment of what has now become a persistent theme in contemporary science fiction – something we might call the “zone” trope, first innovated by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (who also wrote the screenplay for Stalker) in their 1972 novel, Roadside Picnic. More recently, invocations of the “zone” can be found in M. John Harrison’s Nova Swing; Jeff Vandemeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy – comprising the novels, Annihilation, Authority and Acceptance – and Alex Garland’s 2018 film Annihilation, which is based loosely on the latter. 11 10 Stalker, dir. Andrei Tarkovsky (1979, Moscow, Dom Kino). 11 Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic; Tale of the Troika; trans. Antonina W. Bouis (London: Macmillan, 1972); Stalker, dir. Andrei Tarkovsky; M. John Harrison, Nova Swing (London: Gollancz, 2006); Jeff Vandermeer, Annihilation (London: Fourth