Looping Wor(l)d

(continues from here)

Here I go more conceptual, and away from the specifics of the show. I found a great article, written way, way better than I ever could. So this second section about the show will be in the form of direct commentary to that article.

https://thelastinstance.com/posts/transcending_a_mere_multiverse/

That first paragraph is spot on. I have avoided to comment on the “form” of the show, the direction, because it’s done really well and there’s not much I can add. There are aspects of it that are well done, but here I’m more interested to delve into “meaning.” As always I try to take things seriously, and so beyond the art form.

The rebus-like symbolic tangles that emerge within this world are a kind of apophenic sense-making.

Apophenia is about seeing patterns where there are none, so this line seems a kind of oxymoron. Apophenic sense-making is already about getting lost in the labyrinth. Being led astray by the very nature that makes “sense” possible. The hint here is that the condemnation is structural. Built in. Embodied. And so, again, not a choice.

it is as likely to turn out to have been All A Dream as anything else — but the shared activity of following the threads, puzzling out your collective condition, is all you have.

Here is the first big hint. Adding the rest of the line makes this read like it’s a straightforward statement on “the human condition.” But instead what we’re dealing with here is something a lot more specific.

We have to detach from the level of the narrative. Of course it’s all metaphoric, but metaphors can lead astray if you aren’t aware of context. So, “likely have been all a dream” doesn’t refer to OA’s story. It’s not fictional. The metaphor holds as a reflection on real life. What’s suggested here is Westworld’s iconic “have you ever questioned the nature of your own reality?” In the same way that question, in that show, is to us and not the robots, here the dream hypothesis isn’t about OA, it’s again about us. Our life and reality.

Yes, what we are living could all be a dream. Or a simulation. The show is gnostic, so it means it will have… a theory of consciousness and reality. It will need to be structured. We have to accept that it will work on these two layers. The fictional and the real, where the fictional is a metaphor to “illuminate” the real. What applies to OA is generalized and applicable to us.

So again, “the shared activity of following the threads, puzzling out your collective condition.” It’s about the “your”, so us. Not simply her and her peculiar situation, or other characters in the show. We are all caged in reality. Or like a “stage” where we act our lives. But we don’t know the nature of our reality, we don’t know real meaning, truth, purpose. And so we look for answers, for understanding. We follow the threads and try to find that meaning. But how we decide that meaning is found or created? How we decide truth?

Season 2 of The OA collides two seemingly disjoint epistemological stances, which I’ll describe as the “local knower” stance and the “big data” stance. The “local knower” stance grounds knowledge in embodied, situational, phenomenological experience, mediated via communal meaning-making practices; it eschews the global ontology of the scientific “worldview”, favouring a “view from somewhere” over the “view from nowhere”.

Here’s the deal: dualism. Plainly shown. The old dichotomy of philosophy. The mind and body, the explanation gap. Phenomenology and everything else. The distinction between first and third person. Observing systems. And so on, since it all unravels from there.

The quote is clear, what we are dealing with is epistemology. We are dropped in a cage (because it has boundaries), reality, and we have to decide what’s true. It all comes back to epistemology. The methodology of truth-making, or more pragmatically: how you decide to navigate the space. The tools you rely on. The foundations of knowledge.

The “local knower” is simply the phenomenological stance. The observer. Consciousness as it is experienced. The you who “feels”. The qualia. But you can see how that quote is already oriented. It’s not neutral, not much because it carries the point of view of who writes, but because it is explaining the show. And it’s the show to be oriented: somewhere versus nowhere. Something over nothing.

The straw man begins here because science and objectivity are demonized. They aren’t simply described, but they are qualified negatively. The view from nowhere is a false view. A trick. The “big data” is the obscure process that takes control and answers to no one. It all begins here: obscurity is moved outside, unknown processes outside the mind, nihilistic nonhuman voids.

It’s no coincidence that Hap, the “mad scientist” in this scenario, is a figure of evil

Oh yes, it’s called straw man. And it’s pathetically done.

an ontological malcontent who refuses to abide within the finite stance of the local knower, and treats the world around him as experimental material in a deranged and violent quest for transcendence.

And this is pure projection. Science, as a third person, doesn’t actively move. You need to give it intention, you need to make it human. At that point you have a villain, because you’ve taken the evil inside and you have moved it outside. You’ve fashioned a monster.

This is where epistemology dies. Hap, as the external knower, wants to transcend. But it’s instead the closed point of view, the first person that has the need to understand the truth of the world and should transcend its blindness. The outside is already free from that cage. It’s one step ahead.

And so knowledge has to be bound directly to violence. So that it’s automatically disqualified. Because otherwise knowledge would appear quite neutral, if not positive. Wasn’t the starting point about understanding reality?

So, lets see… What happens if you disqualify external knowledge. Make it EVIL. What happens? What other kind of knowledge is possible?

Delusions.

Those raw, vague “feelings” become your knowledge. Your truths. You’ve just disavowed science as a reliable tool and decided that what’s true is the feeling of truthfulness. You’ve just opened the gates to blindness, by making obscurity ontological. The loop closes. You can only see what you can only see. And so you are blind…

The truth heralded by the OA, embodied in the “five movements” (one for each of the senses), is a truth of revelation: it is not acquired by testing and falsifying hypotheses, but by becoming incorporated into a narrative.

Otherwise called as: truth by deus ex machina. Unquestioned truths coming from above: faith. Blind surrender.

Such knowledge is “proved upon our pulses”, by trial of personal commitment. It is Hap’s prescribed fate to remain permanently hapless in the face of this way of knowing, which eludes him as the Roadrunner eludes Wile E. Coyote.

Yes, the show is PERVERSE. The quintessence of EVIL.

Because it’s the other way around. Once you have disavowed the methodology of science you get hope-FULL. Driven by delusions. You have eluded the only movement possible toward truth (and the “movements” in this season are performed by *machines*, so symbols of lack of choice). Hap is here again just a demonized puppet to feed those delusions. To keep the eyes closed and continue to be a slave.

You look at Hap, feeling sorry for him, right when the cage locks closed around YOU. It’s all a game of misdirection and distraction.

You are driven into the cage while being told that it will be your freedom. You are being betrayed by the same systems you relied on. Seduced and brought to the slaughterhouse.

It happens that this process has accidentally uncovered “unnatural” phenomena, locating a fragment of dream-logic that is somehow germinating within the waking world.

There’s no unnatural phenomena. Only phenomena that aren’t well understood.

When you make of blindness a virtue: you make of obscurity a quality. So this phenomenon isn’t anymore simply “not understood”. But it becomes unnatural: impossible to explain. Obscurity as intrinsic quality.

The OA thus brings together, in a single imaginative gesture, two kinds of ontological excess.

Not quite because in the end they aren’t excess. They are merely the usual ontologies: idealism versus materialism. Perception versus an external reality.

On the one side, there is the local knower confounded by unrepresentable trauma, grief and loss, who has only experience with which to make sense of experiences that don’t make sense, and who must assemble a liveable world through shared narration and ritual practice.

And this is ultimately fine. If your methodology is good then you know that phenomenology doesn’t get overwritten. It might be transcended, so to speak, but it cannot be contradicted. This means that the basic, “foundational” level of the first person is virtuous. It stays valid.

There’s no looming presence outside that threatens it, unless you surrender again to false methodologies that simply project outside the monsters that always lived inside. The idealism, by its constitution, makes an habit of displacing the essence of “being.” It’s all a klein bottle, always inside even when it appears outside. For once the lesson is correct: fear yourself, not the world.

The fantasy here is not merely that an individual’s apophenic pattern over-recognition has a foothold in material reality — that there really is something special about every thirteenth paving stone — but that this over-recognition is mirrored by a breakdown in the global order of knowledge: the machine dreams the same impossible thing into being that we do.

Well, yes. When you bridge the gap then you merge the first person into the third. This is what happens. As I said, the third person doesn’t overwrites the first, it integrates it.

That’s the only thing the show vaguely stumbles on by aimlessly groping in the dark (this time I quote the show):

I don’t suppress the consciousness of the body that hosts me.
That would be vicious.
I integrate.
I share in the experiences of all the bodies that hold me.

Of course in the show this is merely the sum of different subjects. It’s just about merging “souls”.

The “truth beyond the veil”, instead, is that the necessary merging happens between the first and third person. That’s the real “integration”. You bridge the mind/body gap, instead of reinforcing it by making blindness a virtue.

That’s why the show constantly contradicts itself. That’s rejection at a radical level, not integration.

What is blindness, truly? A form of partiality. A distinction between seen and unseen. What is seen is only seen partially, because the whole is hidden. But when you then reject logic and rationality it means you’re building walls around that partiality. Make it your castle.

You are not integrating, you’re separating. You’re widening the gap so that the unreal stays real. And so that the obscurity stays shadowed (in anosognosia, “I don’t know that I don’t know”).

There is a kind of theory of vibe at work in The OA

“Theory of vibe” is another oxymoron. Something strict, like a theory, versus something vague, like a vibe.

Where’s the distinction? In obscurity.

A theory is a theory. It’s thoroughly explained, explicit. A vibe instead is only a theory that has been occluded. That you cannot exactly pinpoint even if you seem to glimpse its shape. It’s a potential coming out of doubt, but it’s once again dangerous if you take that obscurity as a virtue.

The series itself is more persuasively attentive to mood and incident than it is to plot: it short-circuits the logic of narrative, instead creating and sustaining a “feeling of meaning” that can attach itself to almost any event. It is the kind of series from which you come away slightly dazed, looking at the world around you as if daring it to come alive with meaning in the same way. Which would be terrifying — but at the same time, wouldn’t it also be strangely welcome?

It’s welcome because it’s alluring. It’s meant to seduce. The mothes go toward the artificial light because they trust their “feeling.” Their code. They are slaves to the machinery that moves them. They go through their “movements” as they received them.

But at least they don’t idolatrize that machinery. They don’t consciously justify slavery.

This is instead a movement TOWARD blindness. It’s blindness embraced. Ultimate misdirection. Perverse as a Pied Piper song.

It’s scary because it weaponizes the phenomenological grief. It earns trust through intense, honest emotion, but then cynically exploits it to induce delusions.

It’s sad that show preys on the ingenuity and credulity of its public. It’s shameful. And it’s, once again, perverse. The true face of evil.

Considering Westworld, The Man in the High Castle, and then Lost and its own rib, The Leftovers, but also that other stuff with Jason Isaacs like Awake, Touch and Dig. Or Upstream Color and Brit Marling’s own Another Earth… They are all more worthwhile to watch than The OA. (this is a reference to what I wrote back then about the first season)

(I’ve recently seen the three seasons of Travelers and that too is quite good and recommended. I mention it because it is also obliquely about the problem of epistemology)

I of course like and enjoy the “weird”, but only when it’s done well and those who do it know what they are doing, or at least sincerely try, like groping in the dark for meaning. Step by step. The earnestness of the struggle would be enough. The first season of The OA fell in this category and I still appreciate it. It was ambivalent, open, and it was quite “honest”, all things considered. There was a lot of worthwhile, well placed magic in that first season, and I was waiting this second one to see where it would all lead. In the end there wasn’t all that much to figure out. The show wasn’t a riddle to solve because it simply didn’t offer enough pieces to work with. It, in some way, “held itself back”, without really showing its hand. So I accepted it as a whole, as a kind of suspended thing that still worked on its own even if it felt also ephemeral.

The second season is somewhat satisfying in the sense that it offers a number of exhaustive answers to its mysteries. If season one held back and only hinted, season two instead is more blunt and explicit. The problem is that all these answers are very underwhelming and insubstantial in their meaning. The overall feel is that “the king is naked.” There are a few infodumps here and there, delivered by literal deus ex machina, and this foreign and unnatural source of information isn’t even the damning point. The problem is that when you brush away all these mysteries you are left with an exposed core that in this season is extremely emphasized to the point that it overwrites everything else: anti-scientific lecturing.

There is no way around this time. The character of Hap is even more clearly the straw man of science. This role is so heavy handed and unsubtle that this time it doesn’t work at all. There’s no nuance, no real complexity. Simply a cartoonish villain that at some point the show tries to re-enable through even more hokum.

This comes out after a little more than two years since the first season. I was really waiting for it because I had no idea in what direction it would be spun. This interest then increased because I read a few comments in the last few days calling it a “masterpiece”. Then I looked at the titles of the episodes and noticed one was “SYZYGY”. And I know what that is. Are they trying to blend in the mythology of the CCRU? Are they really diving into that stuff? Is that you, Nick Land? But nope, it was all for nothing. The “syzygy”, besides its very superficial and symbolic meaning, is used only as the name of a night club and then to solve a pointless riddle with no other ties. A macguffin that represents the great majority of the substance of this season. Inconsequential meanderings, looking for inspiration and ideas that just aren’t there…

That it is all largely pointless was quite evident from the first episode. This detective finds a riddle that reads something like “what’s above the sea but under the stars?” The detective comes up with a straightforward solution: “birds.” But it turns out it’s not the right one. At that point I stopped the video and tried to see if I could figure out another answer. I thought of consciousness, breath and stuff like that, but they didn’t quite fit with the five letters required. So I resumed the video to see where it all lead… Turns out the answer to the riddle is the code of an airplane that was flying over that specific location, that you could only see though the augmented reality app. This is quite exemplary because this riddle-house is one of the main themes of the season. Everything that relates to it amounts to nothing at all. Those riddles are so specific and so empty that instead of offering some insight, or a spark of intuition when you guess right, instead you are merely about guessing the arbitrary answer that the riddle-maker set up. The WORST kind of riddles. When the riddles are that arbitrary then there isn’t anything to them. No valid hints, no getting progressively closer to an answer. It’s all the random chance of ending on the same spot, looking at the same thing, and having the same thought of the designer. Pure coincidence. It’s predestination versus choice.

It then continues on this path of deus ex machina, “guess-what-I’m-thinking” pattern. The riddle house is a labyrinth without any direct or symbolic significance. It’s just that, a labyrinthine labyrinth that delays its solution until the very end, just in time for the necessary twist to end the season. And the solution is lame outside those 20 second when the post-modern layer drops. The “behind the curtain” moment is always cool. The fourth wall breaching. But if you have at least a little experience with it then you’d expect at least a tiny bit more than it simply being shown. Here instead it just goes nowhere. The OA can travel through dimensions, so why can’t she travel to a dimension where The OA is being made as a TV show? WHOA! Whoa… Well, alright. Is that really it? Nope, because they drop the ball by making it a fictional semi-reality. Where Brit Marling is actually married to Jason Isaacs and gets hurt during the finale while it was being made. So it’s not quite here, but almost. Am I supposed to be impressed?

So yes, the fourth wall breaking is always quite effective because you don’t expect it. And to the general public of Netflix it might also look like a shocking plot twist. But it is a known tool. You have to give it some purpose, make something out of it. There’s nothing here beyond that cheap surprise. It’s just sleight of hand for its sake, that it works because it simply aligns with the perspective of the show where multiple realities are an established mechanic. So why not? Because there’s nothing else to it. There’s nothing implied, nothing “truthfully magical.” There is no beyond, no revelation, no transcendence, no understanding. It’s a labyrinth that the showrunners couldn’t solve. It’s a closed loop without emergence. It ends flat, monotonous. It sinks.

Instead of understanding that mythology and using it to show the way, it falls into its trap. Fails to see ahead, to see clearly.

The enchantment that worked for the first season simply wore off, now the king is stark naked.

And again, the problem isn’t that nakedness. The problem is what’s left after you remove the game of mirrors and pretense: that anti-scientific core. The message couldn’t have been emphasized more. The king is not only naked, but completely blind, and he made his blindness a virtue.

Like in Twin Peaks, this show is itself condemned to OBSCURITY. That last moment when Laura Palmer SCREAMS. She’s lost once again because she’s trapped inside (inside fiction, worlds). Part of this loop that cannot be shattered. NO MATTER HOW MANY TIMES Cooper tries to save her, traveling to other dimensions. Do you see the parallels? The OA is Laura Palmer, and she can’t save herself because she IS blind. She never got any insight because the show as a whole has made the gnostic obscurity its idol. You cannot awake if you are structurally blind, not able to see the forest for the trees. No help outside nor within. There’s nothing else but surrender to the blindness itself.

This celebration of gnostic blindness couldn’t be more EVIL because there’s no Cooper fighting against it. Instead of fighting darkness, it’s a celebration of it. It’s blissful nihilistic abandon to a false sense of truth. Like moths flying around an artificial light. The show essentially incarnates the enemy it pretends to fight. It blindly states that it lost the capability to navigate the space. It permanently lost orientation. A victim with no salvation. A prey to the higher forces. No choice, no will. Just a prey that cowers and wails.

The OA is the blind loop that in Twin Peaks Cooper tried to shatter. A cage. And if Twin Peaks ended with the perpetuation of that endless “chase”, maybe The OA embodies better our modernity. Because it idolatrizes blindness itself and shows that human beings are structurally unable to navigate the space. They are broken in a definitive way. Structurally broken in a way that salvation is simply not possible. There is no narrow bridge to cross. No journey to go through, no lesson to learn. There’s only the desperation that drives you deeper, closer to the ultimate damnation. There is no hope. There is no choice. And there is no understanding possible. You die, and die blind.

Here is where we go a little deeper, because this pattern of chasing after blindness isn’t new. And it happens in the show because the show comes from that same angle where blindness is always sublimated. What it would be? Idealism of course. That gnostic blindness mistaken for “light”. The power of the soul. Of this anti-scientific false idol.

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