As people go, we like to think of ourselves as compassionate. “Only connect” as E.M. Forster put it. We like to think that when the chips are down, we can always return to this universal love – this guiding axiom of the ‘humanitarian’ spirit. In the idealist’s vision of the world, “there is no difference” between the subject on the ground, hands raised in the air, and the other above him, boot pressing on his neck.
What makes us human? One might say that ‘our enemy is only our enemy when his story is untold’ – that what composes our humanity is part of what ‘connects us’. Such a notion is simplistic however, and is limited to only the most benign injustices. One cannot simply expect to resolve the problem of slave ownership, for example, by instructing the slaves and the masters to hear ‘both sides of the story’ – a whole history of oppression cannot conclude itself as part of an organic and shared “human nature.”
In an obverse sense, perhaps the most efficient way for ideology to persist in today’s disillusioned post-ideological social ritual is bound up in that warmest of gestures itself. As one should always remind themselves: the worst slave owners were those who were kindest to their slaves. It is the point where we mystify what it means to have a code of ethics: to connect with another’s human sensibilities before blowing their brains out with a rifle. Thus we put to rest the human being itself, bury the corpse, and plant flowers on its grave – for today we are more than that; we are past it all. Welcome to the age of the post-human.
To encounter this phantasmic kernel, one need not look further than the disavowed ‘coupling’ which subsides in Hollywood entertainment; of the over-arching ideological circumstance (ecological catastrophe, imminent terrorism or alien threat, etc.) which partners the subsidiary narrative of its human constituents (mother mourns the loss of a child, family crisis, love triangle, etc.).
The apparent ‘intrusion’ of this humanist life-story into the film, of course, serves the perfunctory secondary routine of the ideology’s very provision, inasmuch that the continued ‘decentred involvement’ of the subject’s detachment allows for the smooth operation of the prevailing cultural machination. The Nazi officers in German concentration camps, for example, were perfectly capable of gunning down Jews without distinctive trauma. Why? Because the intrusive surplus-enjoyment always necessarily involved some base-level detachment as its supplement: “I am not actually a part of “that”, I am really just a normal human being doing his duty for his country. I go home to my family, cradle my children to sleep, listen to Wagner and Beethoven, and make jokes about my shitty day at work.” To this end, Žižek bluntly summarises the case:
The experience that we have of our lives from within, the story we tell ourselves about ourselves in order to account for what we are doing, is fundamentally a lie—the truth lies outside, in what we do.
– Slavoj Žižek, First as tragedy, then as Farce
Thus the human itself – this ‘narrative within’, (“the story we tell ourselves about ourselves in order to account for what we are doing”) serves not to undermine the efficacy of the prevailing symbolic order, but actually functions as its very background; the disillusioned son to a cold and indifferent father may posture his dislike among friends, but only with the apparent consequence that the symbolic connection to the Big Other remains unperturbed – in the company of his father, the son acts as obedient and disciplined as ever, internally maintaining the relationship’s integral structure. The ‘angered posturing,’ therefore, serves as a kind of offset preventative measure – like venting steam from a saucepan to prevent over-boiling.
Prometheus, Ridley Scott’s latest directorial ‘prequel qua symbolic successor’ to Alien, radicalises the human-subject ideological knot insofar as it outright resists the temptation of humanised decentrement. Three crucial sequences entangle the offset audience perspective into a phantasmic “cold gaze,” emphasising visual self-evidence above ‘storytelling’ and postured characterisation:
- The film opens on a Palaeozoic landscape torn with hard dark rocks. At the peak of an enormous waterfall, a pristine humanoid-thing resembling a marble statue, complete with ‘tasteful’ loincloth and broad physique, steps forward and drinks from an unknown liquid. He disintegrates.
- Later, in the sex scene leading up to Shaw’s ‘abortion’, the film features another ‘tasteful censorship’ joke; here, the camera ‘fades to black’ in order to protect the audience’s gaze from the imminent fuck. This blocked act results in the formation of a squid-baby with seven vaginas, (vagina dentata) who rapes (devours) the aforementioned marble giant. The so-called ‘trilobite’ is completed by its hysterical capacity to mature and grow without nourishment.
- At the film’s end, the castrated robot David takes flight with the Final Girl (Shaw) after a closing exchange:
Following this, we cut to the now-abyssal depths of the Prometheus ship. On board, the film features a dark-mirror take to Shaw’s early abortion sequence. Only now, it is the once-pristine Übermensch (engineer) who bursts open with the afterbirth some disgusting creature. It vaguely resembles the phallic Giger creature from Ridley Scott’s Alien – only now, all its faculties are totally non-threatening. Rather than being a phallic monstrosity, its head is now conical and pointed; its mouth protrudes with an overbite; the whole creature comes out lumbering and fish-like – excremental. As it screams, helpless and confused, the image cuts to black.
We, too, are left helpless and confused.
Perhaps the biggest audience lapse of judgement, coming away from Prometheus, is to ‘take seriously’ the core-subjectivity of man in Scott’s universe. First and foremost: Prometheus is an absurdist film. Its examinations of human psychology determine a very specific kind of viewer-detachment in order to work. Its primary audience alignment, as such, is that of the on-board android, David. Through this lens, it takes literally Chesterton’s pre-historical approach to the object-human as a universal “stranger”:
The simplest truth about man is that he is a very strange being; almost in the sense of being a stranger on earth. In all sobriety, he has much more of the external appearance of one bringing alien habits from another land than of a mere growth on this one. He has an unfair advantage and an unfair disadvantage. […] Alone among other animals, he is shaken with the beautiful madness called laughter; as if he had caught sight of some secret in the very shape of the universe hidden from the universe itself.
– G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man
Today when we want to talk about social pluralism, or on same sex marriage, or over the rights for others to practice their religion, the most persistent habit of populist philosophy is to resort to obfuscate ideology through discussions about “humanity” – what would a human do? Our argument subsists an insufficient tautological knot: “Because we are all human-beings, and all human beings deserve the same treatment, we must treat each other the same way.” So when talking about human beings, we do so in the abstract; we make the ‘human’ substitute for the master-signifier itself.
Prometheus’s trick here is to ‘fold back’ the positive “human” signifier to its negative ’empty’ signified state. The closer the narrative gets to discovering the customs and mechanics of the mysterious ‘engineer’ society (the people who created us), the more entangled we become in the very “strangeness” of the human animal. The “unfair advantage and unfair disadvantage” of which Chesterton speaks is that man acts as though he were ‘rational’ throughout; the case is rarely ever so.
From this wellspring, Prometheus satirizes the so-called ‘professional’ praxes of its subject-ensemble. This is why a geologist manages to lose his way inside a mapped cave-system, why a biologist provokes a literal snakething to attack, and why two characters make the impossible mistake of running headlong into the shadow of a tumbling, burning, crashing wreckage. The obvious point to be made is the precise negative-correlation between Superego, (that which I am supposed-to-be, in ‘rational,’ professional every day life), and Ego (but how I act as such). The tertiary missing factor to be uncovered at the heart of this formulation is therefore Id. Freud’s notion of the repressed ‘dark reservoir’ of human desires, thoughts and drives, enters in its symbolic excess.
The point to be made out of this satire is that human subjectivity is an inherently ‘split’ kind of fixation. When we talk about “humanity,” we do so on the basis that we are in some ways ‘detached’ from the totality of its polyphonic residue. If someone performs an ethical, random act of kindness, we are likely to call it ‘humanitarian’; “This restores my faith in humanity” is the idiomatic form we adopt. In the obverse, we “lose our faith in humanity” when a priest molests a child, or when a gunman takes down a building filled with innocents. This is why the signified “human” cannot form for itself a complete ‘master’ signifier. The tautology “humans are humans” fails because there is no anchor point besides that which signifies.
Enter the mysterious ‘dark fluid’ which drives the Prometheus narrative.
Our first glimpse of its effects appear in the opening scene, where we witness a total ‘in-universe’ explanation of its symbolic function. As the marble-statue Übermensch stands facing a body of water, his actions, alongside his gaze, remain ‘fixated’. We are to here recall the Greek myth Narcissus, who, staring at the beauty of his own reflection within a body of water, damns himself to become ‘fixated’ for eternity. From this image derives Freudian ‘narcissism’ wherein subjects who lack specific ‘rooting’ in their lives (either out of parenthood, or otherwise) apparently ‘self-fixate’.
Unable to find a reliable reflection in the rampaging body of water (completed by a ‘fall’ no less), the fixated Übermensch qua subject rapidly deteriorates. It is crucial here to make the distinction between subject and object: ‘subject,’ in opposition to populist philosophical discussion, is not the thing which ‘imposes’ and otherwise ‘moves about’ a world of static, impartial objects. But rather, it is the thing which anchors (is fixated) within a world of apparent chaos, growth, and disintegration. Objects, in a reverse sense, ‘impose’ insofar that they render palpable the symbolic-negative Real in all its fluid and traumatic excess. It is at this point, as the ‘ooze’ of un-anchored objectivity takes hold, that the ‘tasteful,’ non-shitting, asexual self-image erodes.
The dark fluid is thus the ‘Id’ itself – life in excess. The result of its insemination (internalisation) into the human body produces a rapid ‘overflow’ excretion (symbolised lovingly in Prometheus as reproduction). The apparently single-sex engineer, having deteriorated after consuming the liquid, re-animates on a microbiological level. In the very next shot, which ‘fades’ from the title sequence, we see a binary heterosexual coupling (representing ‘hysterical’ and ‘obsessional’ halves respectively) chisel away at sedentary layers inside a cave-network. The point to be made here is that Superego and Id form a perpetually antagonistic kind of friction. The genesis of ‘human nature’ itself, as Prometheus points out, results from the negative “split” of subjective self-doubling.
This is why, on a symbolic level, oppositionism stands at the very core of identification: male/female; night/day; rational/hysterical, and so on. Hegel’s point follows that objects are not only identified in terms of their ‘positive attributes,’ but also in terms of their ‘negative lack’: where, I am not simply what I am, but also what I am not. The problem we face, when confronting “human” identification, is that there is no self-sufficient opposition. We cannot claim that “humans” are the opposite of “animals,” for example, because it becomes all too apparent that humans are also animals (Humans are also robots, aliens, engineers, etc.).
So what happens for the narcissistic man, torn within himself at the lack of an appropriate Other, is this secondary oppositionism between man and woman. It is through this brutal “split” where Lacan identifies ‘woman as the symptom of man’ (and within that formulation: ‘woman does not exist’). The spontaneous feminist reaction here is to be resisted however; in Lacan’s defence, ‘woman as the symptom of man’ subsists a radical critique of symbolic identification.
To better understand this point, Prometheus’s second ‘tasteful’ joke provides a stark interpretation of Phallic sexuation, encircling jouissance. Prior to this ‘censored act,’ of course, the hysterical Shaw bemoans that she “cannot create life.” The sex, in turn, becomes a kind of ‘obsessional’ censure of its own. What Holloway sees in Shaw are precisely these ‘negative co-ordinates’ acting as dialectal points of opposition to his own positive self-identification:
H: Okay. I guess you can take your father’s cross off now.
S: Why would I want to do that?
H: Because they made us.
S: And who made them?
H: Well, exactly. We’ll never know. But here’s what we do know. Is that there is nothing special about the creation of life. Right. Anybody can do it. I mean, all you need is a dash of DNA and half a brain, right?
The important ‘kernel of desirability’ which drives Holloway’s argument is thus not the insufficiency of Shaw’s beliefs per se, but within that lack, the reflective ‘negative excess’ which hence makes for a positive compensation in the subject-narcissist’s ego.
What Holloway’s love for Shaw consists of, therefore, is an unperturbed stream of this compensatory excess – an imbalance which feeds and nourishes the narcissist’s desire to ‘know 
themselves’. So that, later on, after Holloway discovers that his own body is ‘bugged,’ there follows two distinct sequences wherein the subject falls back upon itself; the first, which consists of the obsessionist demanding of Shaw, “Look at me! Tell me what you see!”, and the second, which subsists a literal mirror-image reflection – the gruesome magnified detail of Holloway’s eye, where, on the periphery of the pupil’s dark abyss (lack), there wriggles a ‘live-foreign’ excess.
The real trauma of narcissistic identification, therefore, is not that we find within ourselves nothing, but that, instead, we find ‘intruding from within’ the very negative kernel we require for displaced (externalised) identification. Prometheus, as such, is packed with this violent, penetrative, homoerotic detail; where, finally, a disavowed joke about gay sex (“Alright, boys. Sleep tight. Try not to bugger each other.”) can no longer resist internal symbolic eruption (and so Millburn awakens the phallic snakething, calls it ‘she,’ and swallows it whole).
The most sincere running parallel is thus Shaw’s abortion sequence. As most feminist writers have correctly pointed out, the medical pod’s ‘male only’ designation is not to be taken as a simple contrived foreshadow or plot convenience. Rather, it boasts the film’s most formal critique of sexual difference.
The satire, of course, extends the ‘human’ identification into the knot of ‘biologically-truthful’ difference. In anthropological science, when we say ‘male is a male’ and ‘female is a female,’ we do so for the convenience of a ‘will to know’ (as Foucault would come to put it) – a precise classification; these are terms which describe minuscule variations between chromosome data, between sexual reproductive function – differences that result in growth-mutations of the human body. What gets sublated on a level of social symbolic order, however, are the abstract tautologies these very terms consist of; so what completes Phallogocentric sexism is not simply the notion that ‘women are hysterical, superficial, bitches,’ and so on, but that women are ‘shallow, hysterical, bitchy etc.’ because they are women.
The purpose of Shaw’s infertility is thus not only to provide the film an ironic ‘segue’ to her actual insemination, but to remove from her the tautological knot which binds the symbolic function of ‘the two sexes.’ The question Prometheus asks us, therefore, sublates the most fundamental deadlock to sexual difference: if human beings can only be identified by classificatory biology, what then occurs as this opposition mutates? “I cannot create life” brings about the dissolution of the hysteric.
Holloway’s answer to Shaw is, of course, symbolically-loaded cynicism. Remember: in order to censure his lover’s complaints about her deficiency, the narcissist shuts her up by reinforcing the ’emptied’ Phallic connection. The ‘tasteful’ fadeout I before mentioned serves the secondary purpose of making this act all the more castrated; the blocked masturbatory jouissance which lies in the core-potential of the sequence fails to surface until Holloway has died – until the act gets translated (doubled upon) by the excessive ‘repressive’ emergence of Shaw’s swallowing/penetrating vagina-monster.
What the ‘male only’ obstacle subsists of, then, is not simply the pragmatic-survival of this so-called ‘foreign object’ lurking within Shaw’s womb. But rather, on a more radical critique of pleasure-based identity, the Phallic-law itself which inscribes to the Superego a block on the complete and total fulfilment encircling jouissance. On the level of ‘psychic real’ (the level which Prometheus works best at), Shaw does not really desire to “destroy the alien within her,” but instead desires to unleash that which had been there this entire time.
Our real trauma, in finally facing the emergence of this ferocious ‘trilobite,’ is not that the thing coming out of Shaw is so radically strange or inhuman (like something we’ve never seen before); but, rather, that it is the exact opposite thing. It is, to put it as Nietzsche did, “human, all too human.” It is the emergence of pleasure itself, of actualising the inarticulable monstrosity of our own pent-up jouissance. It is phallic as well as yonic; it binds, it swallows, it spits. And, whether we like it or not, it cannot be killed, starved, or escaped from. In truth, the only way we can ever bring ourselves closure to the traumatic excess of this thing, is to accept it as our own – let it have its way.
What bisexual sex might look like.
No sooner do we see Holloway set on fire than do we see Shaw with this ‘thing’ coming out of her. It is, as Lacan would have it, the very emergence of the objet petit a (object-cause of desire) – the “thing inside me that is more than me.” Its function in Prometheus extends to an examination of Holloway, and his cold insistence that the creation of life is meaningless. For Holloway, this objet a is the disavowed fetish which nourishes his cynical capacity to act as though “there is still nothing.”
We find, then, the paradox of a being which can reproduce itself only in so far as it is misrecognized and overlooked: the moment we see it ‘as it really is’, this being dissolves itself into nothingness or, more precisely, it changes into another kind of reality. That is why we must avoid the simple metaphors of demasking, of throwing away the veils which are supposed to hide the naked reality. We can see why Lacan, in his Seminar on The Ethic of Psychoanalysis, distances himself from the liberating gesture of saying finally that “the emperor has no clothes”. The point is, as Lacan puts it, that the emperor is naked only beneath his clothes, so if there is an unmasking gesture of psychoanalysis, it is closer to Alphonse Allais’s well-known joke, quoted by Lacan: somebody points at a woman and utters a horrified cry, “Look at her, what a shame, under her clothes, she is totally naked”
– Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime object of Ideology
For the cynic, the universe is ‘of course’ a meaningless void, where, when things are stripped of their clothes, their ‘utter reality’ is betrayed entirely. He’s the cousin of the nihilist. Such a character will often times impart to you his ‘jaded life lessons’ in the form of a confidential whisper, “all you need is a dash of DNA and half a brain, right?” and will then berate you for wearing your father’s cross.
The important point to make here is that, even after all is said and done, the cynic will still fuck you because he claims he’s so in love. In reality, the reason one cannot be a ‘true cynic’ is because the Real itself (the negative space in which cynicism thrives) is already-obfuscated in the excess of symbolic signification. For Lacan, the Real is literally ‘that which is not symbolized.’ When a loved one dies, or when we give birth, the ‘indescribable experience’ felt (often times too much to bear) is the irruption of this Real into the everyday experience. For this reason, the Real is always traumatic; it demands we make for it a veil, or ‘fetish’ so to speak, to conceal its organic totality.
Jouissance is thus the extreme-suffering (or the extreme-suffering experienced as pleasure) derived out of the excess of this inarticulable void. Both the feeling of sex and the feeling of extreme sorrow are at once entangled in this knot, experienced as pleasure-pain signifiers which overlap and distort a ‘clear rational’ perspective. This is why, even in the midst of the alienation and desublimation which lies at the core of the Prometheus narrative, characters still fuck each other as though none of it mattered.
This is also why Holloway’s criticism directed at Shaw is so loaded, and why rational cynicism should always be met with extreme scepticism. The proper answer to Holloway’s challenge – “I guess you can take your father’s cross off now” – is therefore an inversion of its critique; what we must ask of Holloway is: where, then, do you conceal your cross? Is it not more authentic to wear one’s fetish around their neck, than to obfuscate that which brings comfort and ultimate meaning (if not, proximate meaning)?
Holloway’s version of the cross is of course the objet a, Shaw herself. Which is why, upon discovering that there is also a foreign kernel which resides in him (that he is as vulnerable to insemination as she, if not more so), he opts for total self-annihilation. It is at this precise moment that the false disavowing-fetishist cynic transitions to the actual-cynic – the one whose body finally disintegrates (desublimates). Thus what follows is a symbolic mirror-homage to the opening scene, wherein which the transfixed Superego ‘falls apart’ at the immediate exposure to life in its excess. The effect of the dark fluid is as such psychosomatic in its entirety- regulated dependent on the subject’s identification to the symbolic real.
The importance of faith in Prometheus is therefore unrelated to the veracity of the belief itself. Prometheus is not a spiritual or Christian film by any means, despite the expedient symbolism of the Shaw’s cross and the Christmas tree; more accurately, it is a film better described as apatheistic, meaning that it does not care whether a God really exists or not. What matters, nonetheless, is that we continue ‘acting as though there actually were a god.’
It is here David’s quoting, “The trick is not minding that it hurts,” translates to the outward enterprise of the act. Shaw, in dissecting her body of the trilobite, sees herself for what she really is: literally organs, pulp, and intestinal entanglement, compressed and stacked together for absolutely no reason whatsoever. It is at this point, Holloway would have instead preferred death. But for Shaw, the absolute belief that ‘there is more to me than what I am’ persists (even after witnessing the ‘death’ of the objet a itself). Her response is that of total action, putting right that which has wronged her, and moving beyond Holloway’s outward-posturing nihilism. In this sense, Prometheus’s ethical attitude can be best attributed the following theistic reading of Albert Camus:
In his best novel, The Plague (1947), Camus writes of a priest, Father Paneloux, who outwardly maintained an aura of serenity as disease ravaged a quarantined city. “But from the day on which he saw a child die, something seemed to change in him. And his face bore traces of the rising tension of his thoughts.” One reason Camus’s writing is so powerful is that he refuses to try to explain the suffering of the innocent. Instead, his response is to be morally enraged and to try and do something to stop it. I think this is the response God wants from people.
– Preston Jones, Is Belief in God good, bad, or irrelevant?
Against opening itself to viewer compassion, the events of Prometheus are already-mediated through David the Robot’s deadpan sneer. What this means is that, from an audience perspective, one is challenged to find any apparent meaning to the film’s overtly-gruesome cold exposition; with the way things occur, it’s as though we should laugh (it is a satire after all). So coming into Prometheus, you cannot help but detach yourself from its portrayals of suffering – to maintain that “aura of serenity” as people literally fall to pieces.
This is to be celebrated as one of Prometheus’s salient strengths. That the film does not attempt to ‘explain away’ suffering represents a broad departure from the typical Hollywood narrative; more radically, it will even resist explaining anything. It ‘wants us,’ like Camus’s third-omniscient narrator, to pull ourselves out from the pit of nihilism and determine our own ethical responses to its seemingly incoherent misanthropy.
Enter Shaw. Moving beyond David’s apparent nihilism, Shaw’s character arc transitions her from the naïve hysteric to the heroine of a kind of Écriture féminine. As postured in the rhetoric of Cixous, the heroine here is one who “writes herself.” She takes that kernel of repressed feminine pleasure (jouissance) and uses it as a weapon for survival against the engineers.
The reason for David’s late admiration for Shaw (“I didn’t know you had it in you”) follows the very logic of this arc. For Prometheus, David is the kind of third omniscient gaze who “refuses to try to explain the suffering of the innocent.” What he “wants” of course is the same thing the audience wants; we, along with David, simultaneously desire either a brutal massacre of these shit-eating ‘characters,’ or to witness at least some kind of ‘New-Ripley’ to come out of the wood-work again – a character we can finally root for and empathise with.
When we fail to get what we want, Prometheus stops being an Alien film altogether. It instead stands as a meta-commentary for science fiction characterisation as a whole, taking the externalised trauma of Alien (the monster out there that will kill as all) and reversing it from the inside (the monster in here of which I am continually alienated). At this point it stops being the ‘gritty’ horror film as we all know and respect, and enters the stage as a kind of satirical pulp-slasher. David’s reaction to all of this is of course knowing amusement; he – like the viewer – is already-familiarised and well versed in alien/xenomorph mythos. So like any practical sociopath (audience viewership, after all, is a kind of disavowed psychopathic enjoyment), he deliberately follows every directive from the highest authority on the hopes that, he too, might witness the full-closure of a narrative arc.
The expectation is therefore something like we’ve all seen before; that the narrative must close either like Alien or like Frankenstein. Either one person ‘triumphs adversity’ or nobody does. David, of course, believes that none of the Prometheus crew really ‘have it in them’ to succeed; he has become so wrapped up and pre-occupied in the repetitious cycle of narratives past that the film as-such becomes a kind of procedural jouissance for him – he knows what’s coming next. Everything that happens, every traumatic ’emergence of the new,’ is thus utterly pre-mediated – a part of the formula.
A quick note about trauma: how the fixated subject often stagnates on something traumatic is through ‘repetitious displacement’ – we repeat things over and over. For example, when something horrible or something mutated comes out of our bodies we’ll try to bury or otherwise repress it; the problem of course, insofar as traumas always go, the repression always comes back to haunt us. It even comes back bigger. Thus we invent stories around it, and we ‘dissect’ it, so that the organic whole which once caused us extreme suffering can instead return as a kind of pleasurable jouissance.
This is why Shaw is so integral to Prometheus’s handling of this cyclical trauma. Much more than Ripley (who is continually haunted by the phallus monster in each of her film instalments), Shaw rises up to ‘work through’ the spectres that plague her at every turn. So like a kind of sublime narrative force, this Final Girl (post-Ripley), functionally interrupts the repetitious cycle of the Alien franchise through the sublime transcendence of ego-subjectivity.
If David in Prometheus best represents the Posthuman complex (“I am beyond all these dramas, there is nothing more to life than structures and pre-determined narratives, no sex please!“), then Shaw represents its precise negation. She has seen herself as nothing more than bio-mechanical instrumentation, and structurally bound symbolic femininity, yet still refuses to accept it. Instead, her response is to take a stand and ‘do something about it.’
This is what Trilobite’s extraction best represents on a psychic level; in the face of her own pointless suffering, the subject, rather than to linger, ‘works through’ the trauma. When the creature returns, as such, it no longer poses a ‘real threat’ to Shaw, but rather acts as her instrument to revenge (devouring the engineer). The trauma, therefore, is ‘re-integrated’ as part of a new-found Sinthome for self-identification – a direct resistance against that which poses the new ‘real threat’ (the engineer’s incisive ‘purification’ of the human-other).
“I’m a human being and you’re a robot,” as such marks the exact point in which Shaw no longer desires identification with the ‘Big Other’ (our creators, the engineers), and instead plans to confront them as social equals. The distinction she makes, between human and robot, is therefore not to be interpreted as essentialism per se, but beyond the objet a of self-identity, affirmation of a selfhood that transcends the stagnation of base tautology. One need only recall the scene in which Janek jokingly suspects that Vickers might herself be a “robot” (for being frigid), to which she responds that the two of them fuck immediately. The message here is as obvious as it seems: ‘what it means to be human’ is to be located in that very difference experienced between two subjects; thus what humanises us is the simple fact that we are unable to be reconciled to a uniform identity.
The difference between robots and humans, therefore, is to be aligned to the difference felt between the Ego and Superego: humans, in opposition to robots, do not encounter suffering with this “aura of serenity” – rather, out of the compassion of a whim, choose to “do something about it.” The ego, in opposition to the superego, acts in spite of its injunction towards uniformity. It moves beyond “that which I am supposed to be” and claims for itself the very enterprise of its action.
Posthumanism, therefore, is to be rejected the same one should outright resist ‘humanitarianism’. The function of both ideologies is to ‘fixate’ that precise human kernel within the absolute-positivity of the Superego – to transform that which differentiates us into that which ‘connects us’. Instead, what one should try to do is locate ‘humanity’ within the negative-excess of that very difference; our humanity is not that which makes us identical, but that which precisely alienates us from one another.
This alienation, I claim, forms the perpetual basis for a true and proper ‘discourse’ between subjects. We should never, as such, attempt to ‘finally realise’ why the other person acts strangely to us, and we are to hence steer clear of complaints about the ‘irrationality’ of other people. Of course, one should tempt to ask the obscene question: where does this outward difference end? Where best do we draw the line between Id and Ego, and at what point do we establish a true point of cultural sublimation?
Prometheus’s psychic arc presents us a handy solution to this deadlock. What the film presents to us is a kind of multicultural catastrophe – alien archetypes in full opposition; all ‘these things,’ strange as they may seem, all share the common ancestry of the engineer: they are human beings as much as ourselves.
Replace Shaw’s trilobite with a lesbian daughter, abandoned and left to fend for herself; replace the robot David with a boy whose over-bearing father burdens him into a perpetual infantile state; or the Hammerpedes with harsh foreigners, completed by their strange customs about sex and sexuality. The solution, of course, is not one of postmodern populist ‘tolerance,’ which places emphasis on disavowing other cultures as ‘minorities’ (brandishing the self as a ‘majority’), nor is it post-imperial interplanetary segregation (“I see things are different here, so now we will leave after devastating your land”). And, while we are at it, the ‘golden rule’ is also to be rejected: ‘treat others as you demand treatment’.
The reason we should resist the Multikulti answer is precisely because it fails to ever go far enough. When we tolerate ‘others’ under the guise that ‘they are humans too,’ we forget that the human signifier never fully articulates a complete identification – that it, in fact, represses the very kernel which separates ‘us’ from ‘them’ (internally making the gap all the more expansive). Thus the reason we should not ‘treat others how we ourselves would like to be treated’ is for the same reason no nymphomaniac should ever expect sex out of a robot; symbolic separation stands at the very core of human identification.
To this end, Prometheus’s final scene provides us symbolic closure to its opening. Here, we are to reject any stagnant ‘realist’ notions that what is taking place may be ‘illogical’ or otherwise narratively insufficient. Instead, we are to interpret the arrival of the Deacon (the creature that looks a bit like a xenomorph) as the psychic-realisation of Shaw’s internalised arc. Playing out like a dream sequence – with flickering lights and dark camera fades – the scene best represents that narrative ‘re-working’ of the the heroine’s past latent trauma (the abortion).
On an imaginary level, the scene of course ‘answers’ the reflection-searching opening sequence by way of offering it a dark mirror. What finally emerges (excretes) from the Übermensch Superego is its own negative self. One can imagine, therefore, the two scenes playing in sequence: the engineer internalises the dark fluid and breaks down; cut to the body at the scene of its fall, and out comes the repugnant alien-thing.
What the two scenarios represent, of course, are imaginary-symbolic alignments coinciding with Shaw’s evolving psychic conscience. At the start of the film, her role is to fulfil the ‘symptomatic’ feminine excess of her lover; the opening sequence, as such, is a fantasy-enactment of the Big Other and its Superego, spawning life on earth out of the benevolence of a purely ‘sacrificial’ (selfless) gesture. Hence: out of selflessness comes selfhood – the relinquishment of the master-identity permits the open domain for the hysteric’s private jouissance.
The final scene, however, represents the absolute dissolution of this Big Other, and its capacity to ‘hold together’ or otherwise justify human life on earth. The engineer’s response (termination) is of course to be rejected; much like any racist or homophobic zealot, the Übermensch’s gut-reaction is a complete radical cleansing. That which cannot be fixed to the pristine marble-white statue image of the human form must be deconstructed. It is this response that quite neatly explains the ‘bio-mechanical’ evolution of the engineer-race; having found that ‘negative kernel’ within themselves, the utmost response is excessive technological obfuscation – to dissolve that organic mass amid the circuitry of Posthuman cyberspace.
One cannot help but bring to attention the use of Giger-esque architecture in the engineer’s ship here. Are we not to compare this hyper-sexualised (yet utterly asexual) digital landscape as perfectly con-substantial to the masturbatory experience one has when browsing the internet? Of course, in popular discussions revolving Posthuman discourse, the internet always encroaches on representing that ‘positive’ big step forward for mankind. But what does this utterly ‘flat’ and ‘ethereal’ image-landscape present to us other than the saturated insistence of a return to one’s bodily imperfections?Today, now more than ever, amateur pornography is one of the most prolific stock the online world has to offer the ‘subject supposed to surf’.
Like the excrement we disavow through toilet flushes, the newborn deacon slips from the gut of the devoured Superego. Here we come to the final psychic reality of it all – the thing we’ve all been waiting for. The human being, rather than an organism of a pure marble-white complexion, is this blind ‘castrated thing’ – an utter stranger to the world. What is our response to the emergence of such an impurity of difference? Far from being the perfect life-form we expected, we must come to realise the obviousness of the truth: that there is no “story” besides that ultimate self-negation. There can be no Posthuman without drastic re-emergence of the absolute reality of organic life. So we must co-exist with one another not as a union of ascendant Übermenschen, but as this – an utterly inalienable alienation. In both life and death, we must struggle.
Social Paranoiac 