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• Dark Genesis
• Animal, Vegetable, and Mineral Becomings in a
  Monstrous World or How I Became Elemental and
  Lived to Tell the Tale

Phillip Thurtle
Assistant Professor Comparative History of
Ideas University of Washington
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A Story in Three Parts

• Part 1 Why Genesis?
• Animating the Future
• Look at how comic books are used to explore the
  affective/phenomenological domain of media
• Explore the culture of the new or novel in comic
  books
• Part 2 Why Dark?
• One Bad Day
• The novel is beyond the visible
• Tells us about the structure of the world beyond
  cognition
• Part 3 Why Monstrous?
• Escape to a Monstrous World
• Elemental logic of an inhabited world

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Part 1 Animating the Future
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Envisioning the unthinkable

• The countless disaster movies bear witness to
  this fantasy, which they clearly attempt to
  exorcize with images, drowning out the whole
  thing in special effects.

Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism
Adventures of Superman issue no. 596 Released
September 12, 2001
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Animating the future?

• What is it about drawn or animated content that
  allows for envisioning novelty?
• Informational ecology of media
• In what ways do media inform us?
• Media and scale
• How do these scales influence the
  phenomenological and affective dimensions of
  media use?

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Why comics?

• Multiple images and mass production
• Multiples are good example of mechanical
  reproduction
• Think of your grocery store shelves
• Comics-multiple volumes and multiple panels to
  the page
• How you build complexity using simple elements
• Points to the economies and affective-phenomenolog
  ies of scale in mass mediums
• Tells us about how (post)industrial societies
  situate themselves in the world
• Non-representational
• Strength of animated content not in representing
  the real
• Helps us see what cant be represented
• Merleau-Ponty Painting gives visible
  existence to the invisible

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What is information?
Information informare--to give form to or to
shape and fashion. Two different conceptions 1)
Information as message-involves understanding
symbols and meaning Doesnt recognize the
informational content of the unanticipated
event 2) Information as a field of unarticulated
possibilities Information as a habituation The
difference that makes a difference-Gregory
Bateson
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Informational ecology

• News as information
• highbrow
• New York Times
• News stories
• News as entertainment
• lowbrow
• The World
• Features and Advertising
• Still informs us

Adapted from Michael Schudson, Discovering the
News A Social History of the American Newspaper,
1978
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• Inhabiting as game play
• From The World, Jan 28, 1890

The comic strip and the ad belong to the world
of games, to the world of models and extensions
of situations elsewhere. Marshal McLuhan,
Understanding Media, 169
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Comics as novelty
Detail from Action Comics 1, June 1938
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From Alan More and Kevin ONeill, The League of
Extraordinary Gentlemen
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• Comic production as the novelty library
• A library that articulates unarticulated
  possibilities
• Affective/phenomenological not semiotic

Chris Ware, Acme Novelty Library No. 2, 1994
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Part 2 One Bad Day
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It is all in the numbers Media and scale
The magic is in the numbers . . .
There are 356 pages and 124 illustrations in the
average comic book. A single issue ranges in
price from 1.00 to over 140,000. 172, 000
comics are sold in the U.S. every day. Over
62,780,000 each year. The average comic
collector owns 3,312 comics and will spend
approximately 1 year of his or her life reading
them. Opening sequence from the movie
Unbreakable
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Non-normative events
But, for all that, there is something queer about
the twin co-ordinates of this comic-book
world. There is, for example, the matter of
calculating chances and probabilities as a basis
for virtuous revulsion from crime. Thus, in
Crime Doesnt Pay there is a separate tale
called A Lesson in Murder, which begins One
hundred police working on a case can make a
thousand mistakes before they strike on the right
solution, but the criminal, working against these
hundred police, cannot afford to make a single
error. So far as human daring and courage go,
this stacking of cards is a challenge. And the
kids feel it as such. The criminal is the hero
because he is fighting against hopeless odds.
Against this kind of daredevil there is no use
taking up the mealy-mouthed righteousness of the
respectable businessman. Marshal McLuhan, The
Mechanical Bride, 31.
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One Bad Day The disaster in comic books
This city has seen its share of disasters. I
watched the aftermath of that plane crash, I
watched the carnage of the hotel fire. I watched
the news waiting to hear a very specific
combination of words but they never came. Then
one day I saw a news story about a train accident
and I heard them there is a sole survivor and
he is miraculously unharmed. The movie
Unbreakable) Much of our lowbrow media as
looping peoples bad days
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Disasters and industrialization
As both Creation and Fall, the accident is an
unconscious work, an invention in the classical
sense of uncovering that which was hiddenbefore
it emerges into the light of day. Unlike the
natural accident, the man-made accident is the
product of the introduction of a new device or
material substance. Pg. 23. Paul Virilio,
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The importance of qualitative change
To endure can lead one to a new qualitative logic
. . A logic of non-scalar events
From Doom Patrol, Archival Edition Volume 1
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Scale free systems
An accident at a highly connected juncture can
become a disaster
From Albert-László Barabási, Linked The New
Science of Networks, 71
Industrial Technologies mediate relationships of
scale
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9-11 as scale free event

• Hubs and connectors

. . . the attacks had a critical effect on
another kind of network that weve created among
ourselves a tightly coupled, very unstable, and
highly nonlinear psychological network. We are
all nodes in this particular network, and the
links among us consist of Internet connections,
satellite signals, fiber-optic cables, talk
radio, and 24-hour television news.
Thomas Homer-Dixon
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Alan More, The Killing Joke
One Bad day as non-scalar event
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To endure is to be a superhero
From Plastic Man, Volume 1,Issue 1
Spiderman-radioactive spider bite Flash-tritiated
water Plasticman-acid Batman-urban
crime X-men-low level radiation On and on
The thing about Jim was no matter how many times
he got shot he always got back up again. Of
course nobody knew what a mutant was in those
days. We just called him Lucky. Lucky Jim. From
Ultimate X-Men, Vol. 5, Issue 2
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The monstrous

• The Superhero as monster embodies the monstrous
  logic of the world
• The possibility beyond comprehension
• That savage anomalythat marks quantitative
  change

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Escape artists and magic
Escapism is an art. . . It depends on where you
escape to
Neil Gaiman and John Bolton
Brian Vaughn and Pia Guerra
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Part 3 Escape to a monstrous world
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Monstrous World

• Change does not come from personal transformation
• Superhero as agent
• Doesnt recognize the elemental nature of the
  superhero
• Change comes from inhabiting a world beyond
  control
• Philosophically the world is the monster. The
  monster is not an invasion from outerspace, its
  an ingress from immanence an emergence from or
  surprising self-disclosure of the world already
  in process (Brian Massumi, Parables for the
  Virtual, 233)

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Monstrous World

• Change does not come from personal transformation
• Superhero as agent
• Doesnt recognize the elemental nature of the
  superhero
• Change comes from inhabiting a world beyond
  control
• Philosophically the world is the monster. The
  monster is not an invasion from outerspace, its
  an ingress from immanence an emergence from or
  surprising self-disclosure of the world already
  in process (Brian Massumi, Parables for the
  Virtual, 233)

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The elemental logic of the world

• The world is telling us things all the time
• Listening to the world requires a willingness to
  inhabit the monstrous
• There is a consistency to the world that comes
  through our inhabiting it and allowing for the
  possibility of the one bad day.
• This consistency is one way to think about
  information-comes about through the interaction
  of things with things (difference) although our
  knowledge of it comes when it enters our event
  horizon (makes a difference).

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Welcome to the World,Welcome to Your Duty

• In Alphonso Lingis terms it is an embodied
  imperative
• The transport of one who at length found the
  song he was born to sing, who one day standing on
  Himalayan summits or in the white Antarctic night
  knows that she sees the grand things her eyes
  were made to see, who has found the intellectual,
  social, or environmental task that commits in the
  most exacting fashion all his energies, is the
  exultation of destiny. (Alphonso Lingis, The
  Imperative, 2)