‘The Limits of the Traversable World’ –
negotiating the Posthuman in Finding Fanon II (Achiampong and Blandy, 2015)

2016

Author: Steffen Krüger
 

Larry Achiampong and David Blandy, Still from Finding Fanon II, 2015

Two men, young and elegant, brown suits, dark-brown leather shoes; one white skinned, straight brown hair, shoulder length, glasses, white shirt, cream-coloured tie; the other one black, short dreadlocks, glasses, light moustache, pastel-green shirt, grey tie with yellow stripes. Both in free fall. Until they hit the earth and, regardless of the impact, arise immediately, their attire and themselves in immaculate condition, and carry on moving on foot.

Falling to earth, being cast onto it – this existentialist motive is a befitting start for Finding Fanon II (2015), the machinima piece by the artists Larry Achiampong and David Blandy, created in the Grand Theft Auto 5 (GTA 5) in-game video editor. After all, Frantz Fanon (1925–1961), a Martinique-born psychiatrist and pioneer of the decolonization movement in the 1950s, whom the artwork evokes in its title, was a close confidant of Sartre and de Beauvoir, his thinking deeply imbued in existentialism, Marxism and psychoanalysis.

In view of its philosophical and postcolonial references, the Finding Fanon series can be understood as the artistic rendering, or facilitation, of an ongoing confrontation between the two artists, who in and through their artworks sound out the possibilities and conditions of their friendship in the face of the histories of colonialism, ethnicity, race and class, which keep them apart – their families having experienced these histories from opposite sides. Achiampong is second-generation Ghanaian; his parents came to Britain in the late 1970s. His uncle, in an attempt to come after, was held in various immigration detention centers. Achiampong remembers visiting him there as a child together with his mother, thinking that his uncle was in prison.[1] Blandy’s grandfather, in turn, was a key figure in developing the pineapple industry in Kenia in the 1960s, a large agricultural programme funded by the UK government designed to retain Kenia as a British colony (see Finding Fanon I, 2015). Nevertheless, their opposing histories draw them together and the Finding Fanon series is to facilitate this rapprochement, as the beginning of part I (2015) explains:

This is the story of two men, marked by images from childhood, the violent scenes that upset them and whose meaning they would grasp only years later, happened in the streets and schoolyards of London in the 80s, sometime before the outbreak of the war.

Finding Fanon I is filmed with a digital camera, the two artists playing themselves as the film’s protagonists. Set in an old shipyard, inside a moldered houseboat, with references to ships and the sea gesturing towards European imperialistic and colonizing ambitions. The imaginary add-on of a war that will have happened in the future gives the Finding Fanon series its fantastic departure from reality, placing the two men’s calm negotiations in a post-apocalyptic setting, devoid of other humans, with the net of civilization and its historical ties not so much stripped away entirely, but lying in ruins and rendered into relics of a past that now has to be reread and reassessed. In part one, the two men are shown together in the houseboat, sitting quietly together, playing a board game, lying side by side on a carpet on the floor, looking at maps, conversing. Then, they leave the boat and, for the final scenes, climb over rocks to reach the beach and overlook the sea.

Larry Achiampong and David Blandy, Still from Finding Fanon I, 2015

Already in the scenes offered in Finding Fanon I, technology plays a central role. Historical advances in technology are shown to have made colonialism possible: ships as means of transportation; maps with their suggestive logic of reachability, availability and land being up-for-grabs on a first-come-first-serve basis; lenses as (precarious) means of scientific objectivity, surveillance and control. These technologies, the film suggests, brought people from different continents in contact with one another and facilitated Western domination.

At the same time, the post-apocalyptic setting suggests that this history of technological advances also played a role in the downfall and eradication of this civilization and its violent history of colonialism. In this way, the setting and its vague gesturing towards a future-perfect global catastrophe brings the notion of the posthuman into play – i.e. the notion that humans can no longer see themselves as at the center of the world but must realize that they are only one variable in complex interrelations between, amongst other things, technology, climate and non-human lifeforms (see, e.g., Braidotti, 2013).

Especially Finding Fanon I is keenly interested in the posthuman, with references and fragments of various definitions strewn across the text read by a voice from the off. When the film shows the two men putting electrodes on each other’s faces to then fall into a deep sleep in order to access their cultural unconscious (which the film offers as a kind of dream sequence, with images and words flashing by, commented upon by a computer-generated voice), we behold of a weakly hopeful, utopian element in the midst of the dystopian scenario. Maybe technology, once it is cleansed of the misguided, Western ideals of humanism (the dialectics of which helped unleash its highly destructive potentials), can now facilitate a new understanding between people from different ethnic backgrounds?

This question, which the series’ first part puts forth, is what drives the second. Beyond the existentialist implications, the fall at the beginning of Finding Fanon II is to mark such a handing over of oneself to technology – the transition from a physical state of existence, if not ‘in real life’ so at least in a post-apocalyptic dystopia, to a digitized and virtual existence – a fall into the virtual as a kind of de-actualisation and what the German philosopher Odo Marquardt (1981) called Vermöglichung – ‘possibilisation’, a word-play on Verwirklichung (realization/materialization) that turns the act of realizing and substantiating onto its head and is meant to stop the process of realization from closing down the realm of the possible. Literally, the two artists – now in digitized form – are made to fall from their physical existences into the possibilities of the virtual of the GTA 5 game world, where their conversation and negotiation is to continue. In parallel to the shipyard setting of the first part, also the GTA gameworld has been cleaned of all signs of other people in order to continue the post-apocalyptic theme of the series.

What will interest me in the following is this theme of the posthuman in the Finding Fanon series, which, albeit a central interest of the series, sits extremely uncomfortably within the latter’s overall focus on the histories of racism and colonialism. Thus, it is my understanding that particularly Finding Fanon II performs a clash between the liberating promises of technology, characteristic of a specific branch of posthuman thought, and a colonial past that constantly threatens to renew its hold, not only on the two artists, but, in continuation, on the players of GTA as its wider sociocultural context. In keeping with the overall movement in Fanon’s works, which seek a way ‘forward’ towards a free, decolonized state of existence, but constantly bump up against the relics of colonialism and their afterlife, also Finding Fanon II seeks a way forward in and through the new virtual terrain only to come up against such inner and outer obstacles. In this conflict between the posthuman and the postcolonial paradigm, psychoanalysis, which was a major influence of Fanon’s, plays a key role. It becomes evoked in the protagonists’ apparent inability to “find peace” (Finding Fanon II), or a viable way to each other. In what follows, I will retrace this conflict.

Larry Achiampong and David Blandy, Still from Finding Fanon II, 2015

The Pitfalls of the Posthuman in the Finding Fanon series

“These sunsets are the most beautiful they’d ever seen”, states the voice from the off to images of the two avatars’ silhouettes in front of the rendering of an orange-red glowing sunset over the sea and, indeed, in this moment, Fanon’s utopia of a decolonized state of existence and the hope that Fanon might truly be “waiting here, inside the polygons, behind the texture maps” (Finding Fanon II, 2015) seems almost in reach.

This hopeful moment connects the art piece with traditional thinking around “cyberspace” and the posthuman – with the machinima piece associating the heroic images of San Andreas sunsets not only with the independence and liberation movements of the 1960s (“There was so much hope then”, the voice says vis-à-vis the setting sun), but also, via the implications of the context of the game, with US West Coast positive psychology as well as Palo-Alto-esque tech-solutionism and its continuation of Manifest-Destiny thinking in a hippyish mode. Posthumanism’s most romantic, commercially adaptive – as well as naïve – conception can be captured in the fantasy that by rendering our existences digital we will be able to leave behind, not only our bodies and their limitations, but also the limiting histories of thinking about the human body, as encountered in ethnocentrism, racism, misogyny, homophobia etc. and Finding Fanon II gestures towards this reverie.

But, of course, things are more complicated than that. In How we became Posthuman (1999), Katharine Hayles voices an early, powerful critique of such over-enthusiastic, wishfully redemptive departures from bodily restraints into an existence as ‘pure information’. Referring to Hans Moravec’s Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence, she does not hide her disappointment when coming upon the passage where Moravec “argues it will soon be possible to download human consciousness into a computer”: “How, I asked myself, was it possible for someone of Moravec’s obvious intelligence to believe that mind could be separated from body?”

Instead of seeking to withdraw the body from the task of imagining a humankind whose possibilities are radically extended by technology, what Hayles suggests as a more fruitful exercise is to think about what will happen with the body once it has become radically malleable through information. She suggests “mutation” as a specifically fertile concept with which to engage and embrace the challenges of the posthuman. Contrasting mutation with castration – i.e. the psychoanalytic concept traditionally evoked in thinking about crises of (established male-centered) humanity – she writes that “[t]he crisis named by mutation is as wide-ranging and pervasive in its import […] as castration is” (Hayles, 1999, p. 33). Indeed, Hayles implies that it is reaching further than castration in that it transcends the patriarchic, male-centered connotations of sexual difference – a difference also relevant in terms of ethnicity (Parker, 2010).

“Rather than studying Freud’s discussion of ‘fort/da’”, the game in which Freud (1920) famously recognized his little nephew’s attempts at coming to terms with the absences of his mother, Hayles suggests,

theorists interested in pattern and randomness [i.e. a cybernetic, posthuman paradigm; S.K.] might point to David Cronenberg’s film The Fly. At a certain point, the protagonist’s penis falls off (quaintly, he puts it in his medicine chest as a memento of times past), but the loss scarcely registers in the larger mutation he is undergoing. The operative transition is not from male to female-as-castrated-male but from human to something radically other than human. (Hayles, 1999, p. 33)

The potential residing in mutation and the mutant that Hayles suggests here, namely a radical break away from traditional thinking about humankind, resonates with a text by Donna Haraway. As early as 1985, in the “Cyborg Manifesto”, Haraway anticipated a kind of posthumanism in which the messiness of bodily boundaries, limitations and histories of social coding are not so much escaped from, but transgressed much in the way in which Hayles’s concept of mutation suggests. Harraway mused that “a cyborg world”, of which the breakdown between the physical and non-physical is a main characteristic, might not so much be about leaving the social and the corporeal behind, but

about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints. […] Cyborg unities are monstrous and illegitimate; in our present political circumstances, we could hardly hope for more potent myths for resistance and recoupling” (Haraway, 2000 [1985], p. 295).

In terms of the posthuman, then, what seems to me to be developed in both Haraway and Hayles is the chance of new beginnings, of venturing into new directions, that comes from the ‘accidentality’ that is mutation; in Hayles’s words, “it reveals the productive potential of randomness that is also recognized within information theory when uncertainty is seen as both antagonistic and intrinsic to information” (Hayles, 1999, p. 33). When our conception of humanity and its reproduction is radically confronted with uncertainty and the possibility of mutation and monstrous couplings, our established binaries of male/female, black/white, hetero/homo etc. threaten to break down and therein lies the liberating potential of the posthuman that takes the body on board.

Larry Achiampong and David Blandy, Still from Finding Fanon II, 2015

Interrogating Kinships

Turning back to the Finding Fanon series with these thoughts in mind, it is clear that what Finding Fanon II suggests is not anywhere near such ruminations and bodily experimentations and not anywhere near the radical questioning of established borders that, say, the monstrous can be made to imply. Although the series is questioning and seeking in its own right and although one can detect cautious gestures towards a merging of the two main characters – centrally, in the dream sequence of part I, where it is the mutual unconscious of the two men that produces texts and images – it is much more guarded and anxiously observing of bodily boundaries, unable to give itself over to such bold propositions. At the same time, it neither buys into the naïve fantasy of turning one’s existence into pure information – after all, both avatars retain their insignia of racial difference. Rather, the postcolonial dimension of the series’ project makes propositions such as are entailed in Hayles and Haraway’s works unthinkable. While Finding Fanon II displays a longing for the wish that bodily and social limitations can be transcended and left behind, what it finds in the virtual space facilitated by the GTA gameworld are many of the same old boundaries that do not cease to exert their power over the interracial relations.

This blockage, which the artists take their viewers to experience with them, can be made clearer by contrasting Fanon’s descriptions of colonialism with Hayles’s and Haraway’s ideas. For example, when, in The Wretched of the Earth (2014 [1961]), Fanon points to the zoological terms with which the colonizers used to describe the colonized – “the slithery movements of the yellow race, the odors from the ‘native’ quarters, […] the hordes, the stink, the swarming, the seething, and the gesticulations” (2014, p. 7) –  this observation drives home forcefully why the Finding Fanon series must indeed steer well clear of staging, in Haraway’s words, a “joint kinship with animals” and the monstrous. While the posthumanism in Hayles and Haraway’s conception seeks to celebrate such kinship as a radical challenge to old views, the injection of Fanonian thinking into these views serves to stop all such celebrations short by pointing towards their complicity in the denigration of others. Celebrating the kinship of humans and animals might come easy to white educated middle classes – thinkers of the posthuman, for example – but it is still much less palatable for people who for generations have been forced into such kinships as intended markers of their inferiority.

What the artwork thus shows is the impossibility of committing to the posthuman paradigm at the present historical juncture – an impossibility for which Finding Fanon II offers a quasi-psychoanalytic explanation. When the two men’s avatars are reunited after their fall, we see them exploring the gameworld together: running up a hill in the San Andreas countryside in the rain, hurrying along a dirt road through a wind park, walking on railroad tracks by night, through an empty car tunnel, across a freight port. All these urgent movements are punctuated by scenes of standing still, of facing each other and of looking out into the open, the sea and what the voice from the off calls “the limits of the traversable world”, i.e. the limits that, in the context of the game, are the ends of the virtual, programmed platform. On a psychological plane, they are the limits of the thinkable, conscionable, imaginable, acceptable. Thus, as beautiful and impressive as the GTA gameworld proves in the machinima piece, what ultimately comes to the fore is that there is no peace for the two men to be found here, their incessant walking, running and gazing out into the open symbolizing disquiet, restlessness and an uneasy search for Fanon – i.e. for the ‘possibilisation’ of his vision of radical decolonization – which cannot find its release here. After all, such a release would amount to a disavowal of the traumas of ethnocentrism and racial violence that remain fundamental aspects, not only of GTA – i.e. the game upon which the artists’ construction of the virtual is based here – but of the social reality to which the game refers ironically (Miller, 2008). Indeed, we might even say that such a release, were it to be performed here, would mark the foreclosure of these insights, since, along the lines of Lacanian theory (Lacan, 1993), such a foreclosure would make the traumatic violence return in reality. Unfortunately, both the game and the social are geared towards such a return.

Larry Achiampong and David Blandy, Still from Finding Fanon II, 2015

The Limits of the Traversable World

Wisely, Finding Fanon II rejects the temptations of the posthuman with a firm ‘We are not there yet’; at the same time, it does not entirely discard the promise born by its more substantial approaches. Instead, the final scene, in which the two avatars wade into the water, gestures towards the need to continue the search, the need to go beyond the limits of the game and, ultimately, the limits of the sociocultural reality upon which the game is based. In this respect, going into the water makes good on a theme that the voice from the off introduces just seconds before: that of baptizing. The dawn of a future generation is evoked, a generation that will not be free, but for whom the fight for emancipation needs to be fought in the now so that it will be able to carry it on with a ‘fighting chance’.

It is under these premises that the two avatars enter the water, in order to seal their togetherness in that struggle. Their mutual baptizing, their entering the same waters and, in that, their mutual challenging “the limits of the traversable world” is as close as Finding Fanon II takes us and its avatars to what could faintly be associated with Hayles and Harraway’s conceptions of mutation as a liberating process. Although the artists/protagonists cannot dream of mutual origins and must acknowledge their being apart so that the histories of divisive, colonial practices can become thoroughly worked through and understood, they can at least commit themselves to this mutual task of working through.

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[1] Stated in the Q&A after the screening of “FF Gayden: Delete”, Cinemateket, Oslo, 9/12/16.