Quelle Ă©tonnante servilitĂ©! Les choses sont sages comme des images. A la lettre: comme des images! Elles nâinquiĂštent plus du tout les hommes. Aussi, mĂȘme du coin de lâoeil, ne les considerĂšnt-ils plus.
[What an astounding submissiveness! The things are tame, like pictures. Literally like pictures! They no longer worry people at all. And thus they are no longer noticed by them, not even out of the corners of their eyes.1]
Dâabord la chose est lâautre, le tout autre qui dicte ou qui Ă©crit la loi, ⊠une injonction infiniment, insatiablement impĂ©rieuse Ă laquelle je dois mâassujettir.
[Beforehand, the thing is the other, the entirely other which dictates or which writes the law, ⊠an infinitely, insatiably imperious injunction to which I ought to subject myself.]2
The Villainy of Things
In the Mickey Mouse cartoons, representations of material reality change over time.3 In the earlier episodes, things behave treacherously. They take on a life of their own, even a waywardness. They are unpredictable actors. The hero is constantly grappling with them. He is literally thrown around by them, and they take pleasure in tormenting him. It is not at all safe for him to be near them. Doors, chairs, folding beds or vehicles can at any time turn into dangerous objects and traps. Mechanical things are diabolical. There are constant crashes. The hero is exposed to the vagaries of things. They are a permanent source of frustration. The cartoons are entertaining to a large extent because of the villainy of things.
In his early films, Charlie Chaplin is also hopelessly at the mercy of the villainy of things. They fly around him, and they block his way. His battles with things create the filmsâ slapstick humour. Torn out of their functional context, the things lead lives of their own. The films present an anarchy of things. In The Pawnshop, for instance, Chaplin, the pawnshop owner, examines an alarm clock with a stethoscope and a hammer, as if it were a body, and opens it with a manual drill and a can opener. The mechanical parts of the disassembled alarm clock then begin to move around as if they were alive.4
The villainy of things is now probably a thing of the past. We are no longer maltreated by things. They are not destructive; they do not offer any resistance. The sting has been taken out of them. We do not perceive them in their otherness or as alien. This weakens our feeling for reality. In particular, digitalization intensifies the de-realization of the world because it de-reifies it. Derridaâs remark about the thing as the âentirely otherâ (le tout autre), as dictating a âlawâ to us to which we need to subject ourselves, now sounds strange. Things are submissive. They are submitted to our needs.
Today, even Mickey Mouse leads a digital, smart and immaterial life. His world is digitalized and informationalized. In the new series Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, the representation of material reality is markedly different from that in the early episodes. Things no longer have an independent life; they are obedient tools for solving problems. Life itself is seen as problem solving. The handling of things no longer involves conflict. Things no longer appear as unruly actors.
For example, when Mickey and his friends end up in a trap, they need only to shout âOh, Tootlesâ and the âHandy Dandy machineâ appears. The screen of the machine, which looks like a round smartphone, displays a menu of four âMouseketoolsâ, that is, four objects from which they can choose in order to solve the problem. The Handy Dandy machine has a ready solution for every problem. The hero no longer collides with physical reality. He does not have to deal with the resistance of things. In this way, children are fed the idea that there is nothing that cannot be done, that there is a quick solution, an app, for everything and that life itself is nothing but a series of problems to be solved.
The Reverse of Things
Sinbad is shipwrecked. He and his comrades find themselves on a small island that, to Sinbad, looks like the garden of paradise. They stroll around and hunt. When they light a fire to cook their kill, the ground suddenly warps. Trees collapse. The island is, in fact, the back of a giant fish, which has been resting for so long that fertile soil has formed on its back. The heat of the fire has disturbed the fish. It dives down into the deep sea, and Sinbad and his comrades are thrown into the water. In Ernst Blochâs reading of the fairy tale, it becomes an allegory for our relationship with things. Bloch objects to the instrumental treatment of things. He sees human culture as a very fragile institution built on the âreverse of thingsâ: âWe know only the front or right side of their technical subservience, their benign incorporationâ, but we see neither their âundersideâ nor âwhat it all floats inâ.5
Bloch considers the possibility that the subservience of things is only their front, the part of them that is turned towards us, and that they actually âbelong to another world, one only interspersed into this oneâ.6 He suspects that, behind their subservience, things lead an irrational life of their own that runs counter to human intentions:
The fire in the stove burns even when weâre not around. Therefore, we say, it must have been burning in the meantime, since the room is now warm. Yet that is not certain, and what the fire was doing before, what the furniture was doing during our absence, is obscure. No proposition about it ...
