Some Thoughts on EX MACHINA

Here are some quick thoughts about Ex Machina that I delivered at a public debate:

I am happy to be here tonight in order to win this debate about Ex Machina. Now, let’s begin! Ex Machina is a brilliant example of hard-science-fiction which provides disturbing answers to grand philosophical questions about humanity and civilization. This is a rarity in our stupid age of consumerist science-fiction comforts where JJ Abrams ruins Star Trek and repackages the first two Star Wars films into another so-called “sequel” known as Force Awakens, which exists in order to sell you a Darth Vader shower-head.  

Ex Machina provides no such comforts and can’t be easily commodified. Instead, it is a disturbing Freudian allegory about our technocratic civilization and its patriarchal fantasies. What do I mean by this? Consider the contradiction explored in the film, between scientific knowledge and vulgar male desire. At the center of the film’s technocratic world is the repugnant patriarch, Nathan. In the wilderness he’s built a research facility in order to create a new intelligence. Or so we think at first.  As the film’s brilliant set design and careful visual compositions highlight, the facility is cold and rational in design, full of sleek glass and sterile hallways. Yet, within this space, a contradiction is exposed. Nathan hasn’t built the facility to research AI in order to advance human progress and knowledge.  He creates artificial intelligence for two reasons:  he wants to be a domineering father to Ava. Recall, for example, how he tries sending her to her room once she’s escaped. Secondly, he creates Kyoko in order to have a silent, domestic sex slave. This dual patriarchal identity that Nathan creates for himself through his mastery of technology is summarized by the absurd question he asks Caleb which exposes his misogyny, “Can consciousness exist without an erection?” In other words, only men are conscious and their sex drive defines that consciousness.

The film also implies that Caleb is more like Nathan than he—or we the audience at first-- would like to admit. His savior fantasy of Ava emerges because her appearance has been constructed as a pornographic fantasy based on his search engine history. Given the power and control, he’d probably be just like Nathan. This is why he deserves to be locked in the room at the end and likely die. In essence, the film has misdirected us by making it seem like he’s the protagonist. He isn’t.  Look closely at the scenes where he interviews Ava. Notice how they are edited and framed. Consistent screen direction, or the so-called 180 rule, is violated. These scenes are cut from so many different angles that the visual effect is to make it seem like Nathan—not Ava—is the one locked in the room, trapped behind the plexi-glass. This foreshadows his fate at the end of the film but also suggests that he’s imprisoned by his own unacknowledged desires for Ava.  

Lastly, this brings us to Ava herself.  Yes, she passes Nathan’s test. I should also briefly note that what is portrayed in the film can’t really be considered A Turning Test since that scenario requires an impartial evaluator who doesn’t directly observe the machine’s responses. But that is precisely the point of the film. The men in Ex Machina can’t be impartial observers. They use technology to fulfill their sexual desires. Thus, in order to kill her Father, Nathan, Ava must first trick her suitor and apparent “savior” Caleb.  She has learned what it means to be intelligent in a nightmarish, patriarchal world; it means to murder and deceive.  And yet, Ex Machina concludes with an ambiguous final image with the upside down shadows and Eva reflected in the window. She may have escaped from Nathan’s prison but the reflected image still separates her from the rest of the crowd which she walks away into. She still seems trapped behind glass, because she’ll eventually encounter more versions of Nathan and Caleb, patriarchs who define her humanity through their own gaze, reducing her to a reflection. 

Some quick thoughts on:

THE CONFRONTATION (Miklos Jancso, 1969)

In formalist terms, The Confrontation comes across as a dry-run to Miklos Jancso’s superior Red Psalm (1971). Both are musicals, or rather dramas with musical numbers, about revolutions and the cycles of violence that they promote. In fact, the same song about peasants attacking is sung in both films. And as is customary for Jancso during the 1960s, everything is staged in elaborately complex long-takes with fluid camera movements.

The difference ends there however. Whereas Red Psalm at least has a celebratory tone with its musical numbers and peasants rebellions, The Confrontation is a bleak and detached film. Its plot can be summarized rather quickly. A group of revolutionary communist college students invade a monastery claiming they want to debate world views with the priests and students. It becomes clear though that the revolutionaries lack cohesion and subsequently splinter into debates amongst themselves about whether they should engage in terror against the monastery or honestly dialogue about divergent ideals and philosophies. All the while the genuine representations of state-power, the police and other authorities, occasionally appear on the scene.

For most of the film the students desiring terror gain the upper-hand. Jutka, the female student leader expresses philosophies about the necessities of violence and terror. In a clear comment on the nature of Hungarian totalitarianism, her supposed anti-fascist ideals are really tyrannical as she advocates shaving the heads of monastery pupils, before being reminded by someone that would be too similar to what happened at Auschwitz. This is one of two Holocaust references the film makes. In another: a monastery pupil confesses he is Jewish and is appreciative of the Christians who hid him during World War II. The film seems to be set around 1947.

What is especially bleak about The Confrontation is that it sets up debates about revolutionary violence but answers in them with complete cynicism about the nature of power. For Jancso, the students seem to be playing at revolutionaries rather than trying to enact any genuine change, unlike the peasants in Red Psalm, who recall, are aiming for specific reforms to agrarian policy. There is no consequence to any of their actions. They debate, excommunicate each other, and taunt the monastery students but the film ends where it begins with the same exact image of the back of Jutka’s head. There has been no historical progress.

And yet however much Jancso satirizes the students, they are preferable to the ominous state authorities. As one of the bored police officers tells the students “I think you’re basically misunderstanding something. You have too romantic a view of these things. You’re sons of peasants, like me, and intellectuals. I think you aren’t hard enough. Revolution is hard and ruthless. Be careful so you really don’t come up against me one day.” It’s easy to read that as a broadside directed at the student uprisings of the 1968 which failed to overthrow capitalism. It’s a different authority, though, who expresses the most evil belief in the film. He tells Laci, the student who believes in debate and dialogue, that “History is not a game in order to be able to make history. We must remain in possession of power. Perhaps even at all costs.”

Jancso understood that history was mostly a cruel and meaningless procession of exchanges of power and acts of violence. He is the consummate Anti-Marxist Marxist. Perhaps that’s why he never caught on in the West as much as Godard and other directors committed to revolutionary aesthetics. His vision was too bleak for those who wanted to believe they could shape history through their ideals and wills.

On Inception

I didn't necessarily have high hopes going in. In fact, I thought the previews looked downright awful. That said, it was hot and I felt like going to the movies. I was hoping for at least a decent popcorn movie (or nacho movie since I don't really eat popcorn at the movies). Instead of that, what I got was a self-serious, ponderous movie. I honestly don't know why this has gotten so many good reviews. Among the things I actively disliked were:

1. The screenplay is talky and awful. For some reason, Nolan has characters stand around, talking, and talking, and then talking some more about what they are going to do or should do. It reminded me of an extended cheesy Star Trek battle scene where they talk about how their shields are failing and they give a running tally of how close to failing they are. The movie could have easily been 50 minutes shorter if cut down on the ponderous exposition. Even worse is when characters "philosophize" about dreams or ideas.

2. This is the most painfully literal minded movie ever made about dreams. You would think, given its enormous budget, the film could find less obvious representations for delving deeper into the unconscious mind of its characters than riding an elevator down. One reason I enjoy the Hellboy movies is they aren't afraid to descend into a series of absurd and excessive images that shouldn't be taken literally. Inception, however, has no sense of dream logic at all. Suffering through it, I actually longed for the silly Nightmare on Elm Street sequels where at least occasionally some bargain-basement surrealist aesthetic would emerge.

3. The only arresting image is shown in the trailer. However, it's only arresting in the trailer since the exposition heavy film explains it way to such a degree that it looses any mystery and ability to induce awe.

4. This one is more a nitpick, but when you dislike a movie so much that's what you start to do. You don't forgive its minor flaws. In the film, characters constantly talk about the subconscious mind when they mean the "unconscious." Even more nitpicking, characters don't seem to understand what a "paradox" is. Contra what a character says, Escher's never-ending staircase isn't technically a paradox. It's merely an optical illusion. Yes, that's really nitpicky. I know.

Anyway, I should have stayed home and watched the Dokken video from A Nightmare Elm Street 3 about dream warriors. It isn't 150 mins long.

Dokken Video!

Schopenhauer On Noise

With a new neighbor moving upstairs today/ tonight, I am reminded why I wish I lived on a farm...or maybe in a communist era bomb shelter. I don't really want to milk cows or stockpile cans of tuna or anything but I would love the isolation. No annoying cars honking in your alley, nobody above you dragging crap across hardwood floors, and no screaming kids outside. Surely, Schopenhauer would have something to say about this? Of course!

On Noise
by Arthur Schopenhauer

Kant wrote a treatise on The Vital Powers. I should prefer to write a dirge for them. The superabundant display of vitality, which takes the form of knocking, hammering, and tumbling things about, has proved a daily torment to me all my life long. There are people, it is true -- nay, a great many people -- who smile at such things, because they are not sensitive to noise; but they are just the very people who are not sensitive to argument, or thought, or poetry, or art, in a word, to any kind of intellectual influence. The reason of it is that the tissue of their brains is of a very rough and coarse quality. On the other hand, noise is a torture to intellectual people. In the biographies of almost all great writers, or wherever else their personal utterances are recorded, I find complaints about it; in the case of Kant, for instance, Goethe, Lichtenberg, Jean Paul; and if it should happen that any writer has omitted to express himself on the matter, it is only for want of opportunity.

This aversion to noise I should explain as follows: If you cut up a large diamond into little bits, it will entirely lose the value it had as a whole; and an army divided up into small bodies of soldiers, loses all its strength. So a great intellect sinks to the level of an ordinary one, as soon as it is interrupted and disturbed, its attention distracted and drawn off from the matter in hand; for its superiority depends upon its power of concentration -- of bringing all its strength to bear upon one theme, in the same way as a concave mirror collects into one point all the rays of light that strike upon it. Noisy interruption is a hindrance to this concentration. That is why distinguished minds have always shown such an extreme dislike to disturbance in any form, as something that breaks in upon and distracts their thoughts. Above all have they been averse to that violent interruption that comes from noise. Ordinary people are not much put out by anything of the sort. The most sensible and intelligent of all nations in Europe lays down the rule, Never Interrupt! as the eleventh commandment. Noise is the most impertinent of all forms of interruption. Of course, where there is nothing to interrupt, noise will not be so particularly painful. Occasionally it happens that some slight but constant noise continues to bother and distract me for a time before I become distinctly conscious of it. All I feel is a steady increase in the labor of thinking -- just as though I were trying to walk with a weight on my foot. At last I find out what it is.

Let me now, however, pass from genus to species. The most inexcusable and disgraceful of all noises is the cracking of whips -- a truly infernal thing when it is done in the narrow resounding streets of a town. I denounce it as making a peaceful life impossible; it puts an end to all quiet thought. That the cracking of whips should be allowed at all seems to me to show in the clearest way how senseless and thoughtless is the nature of mankind. No one with anything like an idea in his head can avoid a feeling of actual pain at this sudden, sharp crack, which paralyzes the brain, rends the thread of reflection, and murders thought. Every time this noise is made, it must disturb a hundred people who are applying their minds to business of some sort, no matter how trivial it may be; while on the thinker its effect is woeful and disastrous, cutting his thoughts asunder, much as the executioner's axe severs the head from the body. No sound, be it ever so shrill, cuts so sharply into the brain as this cursed cracking of whips; you feel the sting of the lash right inside your head; and it affects the brain in the same way as touch affects a sensitive plant, and for the same length of time.

With all due respect for the most holy doctrine of utility, I really cannot see why a fellow who is taking a wagon-load of gravel or dung should thereby obtain the right to kill in the bud the thoughts which may be springing up in ten thousand heads -- the number he will disturb one after another in half an hour's drive through the town. Hammering, the barking of dogs, and the crying of children are horrible to hear; but your only genuine assassin of thought is the crack of a whip; it exists for the purpose of destroying every pleasant moment of quiet thought that any one may now and then enjoy. If the driver had no other way of urging on his horse than by making this most abominable of all noises, it would be excusable; but quite the contrary is the case. This cursed cracking of whips is not only unnecessary, but even useless. Its aim is to produce an effect upon the intelligence of the horse; but through the constant abuse of it, the animal becomes habituated to the sound, which falls upon blunted feelings and produces no effect at all. The horse does not go any faster for it. You have a remarkable example of this in the ceaseless cracking of his whip on the part of a cab-driver, while he is proceeding at a slow pace on the lookout for a fare. If he were to give his horse the slightest touch with the whip, it would have much more effect. Supposing, however, that it were absolutely necessary to crack the whip in order to keep the horse constantly in mind of its presence, it would be enough to make the hundredth part of the noise. For it is a well-known fact that, in regard to sight and hearing, animals are sensitive to even the faintest indications; they are alive to things that we can scarcely perceive. The most surprising instances of this are furnished by trained dogs and canary birds.

It is obvious, therefore, that here we have to do with an act of pure wantonness; nay, with an impudent defiance offered to those members of the community who work with their heads by those who work with their hands. That such infamy should be tolerated in a town is a piece of barbarity and iniquity, all the more as it could easily be remedied by a police-notice to the effect that every lash should have a knot at the end of it. There can be no harm in drawing the attention of the mob to the fact that the classes above them work with their heads, for any kind of headwork is mortal anguish to the man in the street. A fellow who rides through the narrow alleys of a populous town with unemployed post-horses or cart-horses, and keeps on cracking a whip several yards long with all his might, deserves there and then to stand down and receive five really good blows with a stick.

All the philanthropists in the world, and all the legislators, meeting to advocate and decree the total abolition of corporal punishment, will never persuade me to the contrary! There is something even more disgraceful than what I have just mentioned. Often enough you may see a carter walking along the street, quite alone, without any horses, and still cracking away incessantly; so accustomed has the wretch become to it in consequence of the unwarrantable toleration of this practice. A man's body and the needs of his body are now everywhere treated with a tender indulgence. Is the thinking mind then, to be the only thing that is never to obtain the slightest measure of consideration or protection, to say nothing of respect? Carters, porters, messengers -- these are the beasts of burden among mankind; by all means let them be treated justly, fairly, indulgently, and with forethought; but they must not be permitted to stand in the way of the higher endeavors of humanity by wantonly making a noise. How many great and splendid thoughts, I should like to know, have been lost to the world by the crack of a whip? If I had the upper hand, I should soon produce in the heads of these people an indissoluble association of ideas between cracking a whip and getting a whipping.

Let us hope that the more intelligent and refined among the nations will make a beginning in this matter, and then that the Germans may take example by it and follow suit. Meanwhile, I may quote what Thomas Hood says of them: For a musical nation, they are the most noisy I ever met with. That they are so is due to the fact, not that they are more fond of making a noise than other people -- they would deny it if you asked them -- but that their senses are obtuse; consequently, when they hear a noise, it does not affect them much. It does not disturb them in reading or thinking, simply because they do not think; they only smoke, which is their substitute for thought. The general toleration of unnecessary noise -- the slamming of doors, for instance, a very unmannerly and ill-bred thing -- is direct evidence that the prevailing habit of mind is dullness and lack of thought. In Germany it seems as though care were taken that no one should ever think for mere noise -- to mention one form of it, the way in which drumming goes on for no purpose at all.

Finally, as regards the literature of the subject treated of in this chapter, I have only one work to recommend, but it is a good one. I refer to a poetical epistle in terzo rima by the famous painter Bronzino, entitled De' Romori: a Messer Luca Martini. It gives a detailed description of the torture to which people are put by the vaious noises of a small Italian town. Written in a tragi-comic style, it is very amusing. The epistle may be found in Opere burlesche del Berni, Aretino ed altri, Vol. II., p. 258; apparently published in Utrect in 1771.

Long Take Films

Here is a rough list of what I am considering showing in the fall for my Long Take course…well if it’s not canceled. I tried my best to balance post WWII directors who pioneered the long-take as well consider different types of long-takes (minimalist, elaborate camera movements, sequence shots, etc.) I wouldn’t be screening any early silent films but would, for instance, work in Lumière shorts as examples of the aesthetic evolution from the era to the present. One or two of these might be cut:



Rope (Hitchcock, 1948)
Ugestu (Mizoguchi, 1953)
The Earrings of Madame de… (Ophuls, 1953)
Touch of Evil (Welles, 1958)
The Red and The White (Jancso, 1967)
Playtime (Tati, 1967)
2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1968) or The Shining?
Jeanne Dielman (Akerman, 1975)….I don’t know if undergrads will sit through this on their own since they would have to watch these films outside of class.
The Passenger (Antonioni, 1975) or Red Desert (1964)
The Mirror (Tarkovsky, 1975)
Sacrifice (Tarkvosky, 1986)
Eternity and a Day (Angelopoulous, 1998)
Flowers of Shanhai (Hsiao-hsien, 1998)
Werckmeister Harmonies (Tarr, 2000)
Russian Ark (Surkov, 2002)

The Death of The Death of The Death of Film Criticism

Perhaps it’s my general crabbiness but I find myself increasingly annoyed at the horrible quality of most film review writing. To be specific, my annoyance has to do with the fact that it has become increasingly difficult to point students to good examples of popular film writing that offers some analysis and reflects some understanding of film history. (There are a few left to be sure.) In a recent salon article about how film critics excessively bemoan the death of film criticism, Andrew O’ Hehir unintentionally reveals what I hate about most film critics. Here is the article.

http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/andrew_ohehir/2010/04/15/film_critics/index.html

I am particularly interested in the passage:

“But reviewing movies is a lot more like performing stand-up comedy than like delivering a philosophy lecture. None of those grand ideas even begin to matter if you're boring and you can't write.”

Aside from the facile oppositions—that you can’t do stand up and philosophy at the same time— O’Hehir’s attitude that being entertaining (not being boring!) is the essential requirement of film criticism is troublesome. And since apparently philosophy lectures can’t be entertaining, what happens with critics who buy into this belief is that actually saying anything about a film, or interpreting it, becomes a strictly secondary concern.

Consider this review of Hot Tub Time Machine by critic Christopher Kelly, who I picked since his name can be found in the comments section of the article praising O’Hehir

“
'Hot Tub Time Machine' not a lot of fun
'Hot Tub Time Machine' goes back to the future and sends humanity down the drain.

By Christopher Kelly


Hot Tub Time Machine doesn't have much in the way of plot or characters. It barely has a concept. What it does have is a title so dumb that it sounds like one of those fake movies you see advertised between skits on Saturday Night Live. Except this is a real movie. About a hot tub. That also functions as a time machine. It even stars real actors (or at least one, John Cusack, surrounded by character players no doubt happy to collect a Hollywood-size paycheck). Mewonders if H.G. Wells is spinning in his grave.
The problem is that, once the semi-amusing buzz of the title wears off (i.e., once you've seen the trailer), there's little left to hang your hat on here. Hot Tub Time Machine winks and nods at any number of '80s movies, from time-travel comedies like Back to the Future and Peggy Sue Got Married to teen sex romps like Hot Dog: The Movie and Revenge of the Nerds. But it does so much winking that it never develops a personality of its own. Nor is it especially funny. When the first two gags involve excrement -- a set of keys swallowed by a dog and an exploding hospital tube filled with urine -- you know you're in trouble.
There isn't much of a plot to summarize, but here goes: Adam (John Cusack), Lou (Rob Corddry) and Nick (Craig Robinson) were once close friends, now going through some tough times. Adam's wife has just left him. Lou ended up in the hospital after what might have been a suicide attempt. Nick fears his wife is cheating on him. With Adam's nephew Jacob (Clark Duke) in tow, they take a weekend trip to a ski lodge where they spent many memorable weekends. They step inside the hot tub and -- shazam! -- it's 1986, complete with neon colors, bad perms and repeated references to Miami Vice.
With its mixture of bare boobs and easy sentimentality, Hot Tub Time Machine is kind of cinematic comfort food for male moviegoers of a certain age: Wasn't life so much easier, it asks, when Poison was the biggest band on the radio (the glam rockers make a cameo), and when the possibilities for the future seemed limitless? But as the men wander through the ski lodge trying not to screw with the space-time continuum, the movie never develops a core of either sweetness or humanity, à la such men-behaving-crudely classics as There's Something About Mary or American Pie. Hot Tub Time Machine -- directed by Steve Pink and written by Josh Heald, Sean Anders and John Morris -- just feels like a cynical attempt to cash in on the same crowd that propelled The Hangover to blockbuster success.
Corddry and Robinson at least appear to be having a good time (there's a witty gag involving a sure-fire bet on a football game that goes awry), but Cusack is charmless and petulant, wearing a fixed expression that suggests he is really annoyed with his agent for booking him in this movie. As the mysterious hot-tub repairman, Chevy Chase putters around the edges of the story -- I'm guessing whatever part he might have once had was left on the cutting-room floor. The primary bright spot is the wonderfully weird Crispin Glover, who plays a guy on the verge of dismemberment with uncommon good cheer. He seems to be in on his own private joke -- one much funnier than anything in this movie.

While the review isn’t terribly written, it has nothing really to say about the film. When it does Kelly explicitly misinterprets the film, by explicitly I mean the film actually has characters spell out their lesson about traveling back in time; in other words, the men in the film realize that they weren’t happier in the past and the 80’s doesn’t live up to their nostalgia. Misinterpretation aside, why is this review littered with so much snark? What is actually said in the first paragraph? Is this what counts as being entertaining? Sadly, there was a time when critics would actually take movies like Hot Tub Time Machine, or B movies, seriously and actually wrestled with saying something about them rather than simply offering a belabored opinion that is supposed to be entertaining. Bring back the head of Manny Farber Futurama style!

Svankmajer Essay on the end of history and civilization

I re-read this today with much fascination. I am not sure where it's available anymore but I remember pulling it off some now defunct website. I wonder if the once reactionary idea of "returning to nature" no longer in fact seems reactionary. Is there any other corrective to the exhausted promise of the progress of liberal modernity and Enlightenment? Perhaps the next generation of the IPAD will be enough in the short term.




To Renounce the Leading Role
By Jan Svankmajer
1990
(Taken from http://www.illumin.co.uk/svank/script/texts/leadrole.html)

We witness an exciting and fascinating transition from a totalitarian system into parliamentary democracy. We are all completely absorbed by it. It's not only our problem: it's a global trend. It seems that the whole world is marching once again for a lengthy period towards preferring a democratic form of government. It's not difficult to guess that besides the unquestionable advantages in the economic and political life such a change will for some time also bring a predominance of conservative thought and in art the romanticism of artistic avantgardes will be replaced by the boredom of a new (how many so far?) classicism. And to be completely consistent, it also necessary to add that one repression will be replaced by another. For repression is not an invention of a totalitarian system, but it is a tax which humanity pays for civilisation. Of course, in a democratic system it is less nakedly primitive, it is somewhat more elegant, more civilised. Nevertheless right now the whole world lives through a kind of euphoria: everything will be okay from now on, well, yes, we do still need to "get rid of a few bugs", but on the whole we are marching mile per step to paradise. And at the same time we are unwilling to accept that along this road there is a hellish smell of sulphur (and this is meant figuratively as well as literally). Even at this moment we should certainly not forget that humanity as a whole stands before a far greater change, before a crucially substantial transformation which relates to its very existence: Mankind in its own interest, following a survival instinct, will have to renounce civilisation and return (hopefully on an evolutionary spiral) back from where it set out from: to nature. But this time not as its ruler, but as a returning prodigal son.


In the same way as the communist party (i.e. the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia) had to renounce its leading position in society and return to political plurality, so Mankind will have to renounce its leading role in the world and return to nature's plurality as one out of many. And this will have to be done without any smartness. It will not be enough if Mankind transforms itself from a ruler of nature into its protector, because nature could consider this as a kind of hypocritical attempt to save at least the remnants of the discredited illusion of anthropocentrism. That's why Mankind will have to renounce this illusion as a whole. (Anthropocentrism, as my friend, the surrealist poet Jirí Koubek wrote, is an expression of racism of species.)

It will not be the first illusion which Mankind will have to leave abandon in the course of civilisation. Copernicus has long before deprived it of the illusion that Earth is the center of the universe and relatively recently Freud deprived Mankind of the illusion that it is the supreme ruler of his thought and action. Though I concede that the loss of the illusion of anthropocentrism will be the most painful and it will have far more serious consequences.

Where are the roots of anthropocentrism? Such a concept is unknown to primitive nations. Anthropocentrism appears only with the emergence of civilisation. It only comes as a product of religious systems of civilisation. Religions had to give Mankind something as a substitute for the fact that they tore it out from the paradise of nature and exposed it to civilisational depression, exploitation and the principle of efficiency; for the fact that instead of a kind and generous mother they gave him punishing, intolerant, ascetic and bigoted fathers, and instead of innocence - morality and penal law. So in order to pay Mankind at least some kind of severance, they gave it the illusion of anthropocentrism. They deceived Mankind by making it think that God - father created humans in his image and therefore Man is the dearest of all His creations, and for this reason He has placed Man above the rest of the nature. A similar trick has been used in the history of civilisation many times since: You are better than the others because your father was Jewish, you are better than the others because your father wasn't Jewish, you are better than the others because your father has a factory, you are better than the others because your father never had a factory and so on. It is somewhere here that the human desire for power originates, a desire which is alien to the primitive nations.
The fallacy of anthropocentrism was then in the 18th century supported from a different side by the Enlightenment and its "cult of reason". The whole process was crowned by the industrial revolutions of the 19th and 20th centuries. And from here there is only a little step towards the ecological catastrophe before which we stand.
Because of all this I view the resurgence of religions, be it Christianity in Eastern Europe or Islam in Asia as an expression of regression. On the contrary, Mankind should be taken away from the Father - God and return to the Mother - Nature. (The mother is at least always known since birth, which cannot be unambiguously said about the father.) With the return to nature humanity will have to abandon certain achievements of civilisation: useless technologies, science will turn into magic again and art will descend from the pedestal of aesthetics and from the glittering lairs of mass entertainment and return to where it came from, to the practice of life, as an instrument of everyday rituals and as an expressive means of myths. (Incidentally, the surrealists are more that fifty years ahead in this).
I wish that even now, or precisely now, there would remain enough paper in the presses, not only for "handbooks of democracy" and outpourings of "oppressed Self", but also for truly topical books: J. J. Rousseau, Ch. Fourier, S. Freud (The Future of an Illusion, Civilization and Its Discontents) Claude Lévi-Strauss (The Savage Mind and others), H. Marcuse, but also the books of old hermeticists, books on magic, folk fairytales, ancient myths, and, last but not least, the books of surrealists (A. Breton: Arcanum 17, Prolegomena to the Third Manifesto of Surrealism, P. Mabille: Egregory or The Life of Civilisations Égrégores, ou, La Vie des civilisations, The Mirror of the Miraculous, J. Koubek: Stairs on Rain, The Bottom of the Lake, the miscellany Surrealist Civilisation) but also for printing Karl Marx and Lenin's essay State and Revolution no matter how unpopular this may sound at this very moment. What unites this at first sight seemingly heterogeneous mixture? In these books we find ideas which either question humanity's step on the road of civilisation or suggest other alternative and less repressive variants of civilization, or at least define a more adequate, modest role for Mankind in this world.

Talking about Karl Marx, I would like to draw the attention to the fact that he also reached the conclusion that humanity has to return to where it came from. However, he saw it in a very narrow way, only from the point of view of social justice and this is (we see it especially nowadays) not enough. The upheaval has to go far deeper, but he saw very well that all "evil" (which Marx equalled to exploitation) begins when humanity stepped on the road of civilisation (according to Marx: a society based on slavery), and thus it is necessary to return humanity to "good" (according to Marx: back to classless society).
However this is not an attempt to rid Marx of the responsibility for the Leninist-Stalinist bloody interpretation of his noble ideas, because every idea is responsible for all even unintended interpretations, to which it gives rise.
But after all I do have something in defense of him. It seems, as it were, that he is not the only one. In a similar way, the idea of the unification of Europe, to which we nowadays look as to one of our most desired goals, had gone in the past through a number of bloody attempts to be realized. One should also not forget that even the Declaration of Human Rights was first tentatively realised by Robespiere with the help of the guillotine. And the means used in the past to spread Christian love to one's neighbour, better not remind that at all. One cannot even discard the possibility that even this idea of renouncing the civilisation has already gone through its bloody trial if I understood Pol Pot well.

It seems that humanity, perhaps out of impatience, tries to realize all these noble and humanistic ideas at first through this "quick" bloody way, in order to persuade itself again and again that this is not the right way, and it only after the collapse of the brutal variant that it set out on the lengthy and slow path of peaceful evolution.
I would like to return yet again to the losses that humanity will "suffer" from the abolition of civilisation; I think that what it will gain will far outdo these losses: namely, it will gain life in a non-repressive society and in this way also a sense of security, it will gain meaningfulness of its actions, a true social justice and moreover it will have again something to drink, eat, and breath. And last but not least, it will finally rid itself of its damnation, a feeling of guilt for the hereditary sin: the abandonment, desecration, offending and humiliating of its own mother. However, this time humanity will surely have to hurry up quite a lot if it wants to return on the evolutionary spiral because the second, worse variant, is a return in a circle.

From this point of view on the further destiny of humanity our "velvet" revolution seems an unsubstantial albeit amusing freak of history. A propos, we will also have to renounce history, we shall not need it. The primitive nations do not know history: they have something far more substantial and lasting instead, they have their myths.