THE END OF THE UNIVERSE, PART XIII: REVERIES OF THE ALIEN

Theory of the Little Girls. How Not To Not Speak. Greta Is Nobody Because Nobody Reads Greta's Cues. Greta Is The Reading Cue Itself.

FIRST OF ALL, RIDLEY SCOTT

These are reveries about Aliens (1986), the second film. We focus on the interplay between two little girls, or yung [sic] girls, taking care of their inner eternal girls. Ripley and Newt. We link this pair of girls and/or women with ‘Language Without Communication Intentions’ by Galen Strawson, which was written in 1981, revised in 1986, but only published in 2018. Given Galen’s theme, which is that there might be a community of those he calls ‘As’, who have something like ‘language’ but without any sensible experience of intentionality and meaning (they simply ‘take’ content and work according to ‘the truth’), it seems interesting that Strawson kept the piece to himself for so many years and, seemingly, nearly didn’t publish it at all, since he also imagines, for example, a community of ‘Cs’, who ‘become even more limited than the As in having no ability to produce sound’. Now, this will also be a way of talking about many things in other parts of ‘The End of The Universe’, but first I want to say that the Cs are a bit like Newt in how she is when Ripley finds her inside the colony on LV-426. Newt is perhaps actively being an example—but she is no example at all and that’s the thing—of what Malabou would call post-traumatic growth. Barricaded in with the aliens, and seeing her whole family taken by them, knowing they will be cocooned and then killed, she becomes tough and learns a kind of ‘third language’, the language of the Cs, which is as if non-verbal and militarized, like the sort of thing humans would need at the fireside if they were to ever know how to survive a possible extinction event. In other words, how a little girl knows how to survive when she is surrounded by lethal monsters and how she is bent on survival at the cost of all and is unsaved except by very direct and as-if silent alliance with non-language is how things might have gone, an image for how things are—and for what is going on broadly.

Strawson talks about how the Cs become ‘pure hearers/“understanders”’; that is, they put actual parlance into second or third or even fourth place, and do so rigorously, because the question is survival as life, and not just life before survival. Ripley, because she has been there—she is like Greta Thunberg, we will say—allows herself to be taught by Newt, who she mothers but allows to go ahead of her. Newt says, falling asleep, surrounded by the very worst, and here is our reading cue:

My mommy always said there were no monsters. No real ones. But there are, aren’t there?

In other words, all maternal assurances are out. There are real monsters now, even though we still pretend to keep them at arm’s length by giving them all sorts of names: ‘Fermi Paradox’, ‘ends of worlds’, ‘abstract horror’, and so on. There’s a definite moment here where these ‘real monsters’ come up over the horizon of historicity and show their faces (as if) for the first time. And that moment is, it is implied, here, now; it is here and now. It is even the-here-and-the-now. The film is about that and we are able to read it in their faces, and in the transformation of Newt from a little girl bickering with her brother into a militarized soldier girl living in air-ducts.

THE END OF THE UNIVERSE AND AIDS

I read somewhere that the Alien films are about the AIDS moment in history, when sex goes over onto the side of the horrific because we can no longer do it while disconnecting it from death and the need for ‘protection’. The massively and sometimes still stupidly phallic nature of the xenomorphs is interesting not least because it doesn’t belong to sex. And here are reading cues for what we mean:

beyondsex

and

there is something more than life

They don’t breed, the aliens, they use humans or other organisms to produce or rather bring to term eggs. Think for example of the moment in Lacan where he seems to get on this wavelength and says that finally we don’t want to be ‘vored’, we just want to be ‘nudged’ or ‘pinched’, like Saoirse punching Timothée in Little Women. For example, because you can’t (really) vore someone sexually, you give them a dead arm, and that’s tenderness.

sextinction is a dead arm

DEAD ARMS

Perhaps sex won’t be possible at some point soon and all we’ll have is dead arms. The equivalent moment to what Newt says in Little Women seems to be, or could be:

I can’t believe childhood is over.

This moment resonates because I heard Greta Gerwig explaining in an interview that Frances Ha was about these moments, like in the lives of dancers (she mentions someone called Dusty Button), where one suddenly realizes one is done, and that can come at different times, for different careers or different ages and epochs. Really, here, the age of the ‘little women’ and their experimental stage is over. They all have no more part; they all have to move apart.

But also, it’s the epoch of the-childhood-is-over. The age of childhood is over. We were children in our hopes and optimism, we were told by mommy there were no real monsters, but there are, aren’t there? When Newt adds ‘aren’t there’, she is not asking; at least when you hear her say it, her tone, in the film, is affirmative. She is ‘affirmative’ or declarative, angelically dogmatic.

THE ANGELICISM COMMUNITY (THE CLONES)

At the very end of his article, Strawson suddenly imagines the Ds, a kind of add-on category, and these Ds are like Newt in moving in something like what Kant called ‘intellectual intuition’. They only need the ‘affirmative’, hence a longer cue:

The Ds are a community of silent creatures who resemble the As in respect of their endowment with semantic attitudes, but who do not and cannot ‘voice their thoughts’. An experienceless object in the centre of their village emits sounds that they take as representing how things are, and act on, and in this way benefit from (for it nearly always tells them true and useful things, given what their semantic attitudes lead them to take the sounds it produces to mean). It is, however, a fluke that its sounds, so experienced, are useful—no one has planned this.

We are thinking movies as thinking thinking and what we want to say is that what Newt seems to do is aligned with this myth of the Ds in some perhaps weird way that remains necessarily hard to put into normal, workaday language. Newt does ‘voice her thoughts’, but we can note that she only does so, and only has to do so, minimally.

That is, given the deserted compound under siege where she comes from and survived on her own longer than any adult or military presence, she has managed to get along by successful reversion to a kind of sole imperative: there is no need to communicate except in the ‘affirmative’ because there is no need to communicate anything other than the priority of life as survival rather than (just) life over survival. The inability of adults to survive comes down to their inability to listen. Which is to say, their inability to let go of, as, in language.

This is our inability to adhere to (reading cues themselves).

WHEN WE ARE NO LONGER CHILDREN

When Brancusi says,

when we are no longer children we are already dead

perhaps this last point about nonreading of cues is what he means. What fore-ordains adults to non-survival in conditions of emergency and lethal threat is the inability to drop away from language and simplify, as the threat approaches. In each of the Alien films, Ripley has to survive the other adults simply because they do not notice that the time has gone for talk and language. What has survived language, ideally speaking, is the ‘language’ of cues which Newt has been forced to speak: the nearly-muteness of a mutilated idiolect of firm quietness.

To be sure, she is too young to command. But take the moment where Hicks lifts her up onto the electric map table because (silently) he seems to recognize that she is the one who needs to see. She may be a little girl, but she has just as much a right to see and be part of the plans to combat the aliens as ‘the adults’. In fact, more so. What is striking is that even Ripley does not seem to remember that Newt is the one with direct experience of the tunnels and corridors that make up the domain of survival. Where Newt might have been ‘the experienceless object in the centre of their village’—experienceless precisely because in this case she is the only one with experience; that is, being-experienceless equates to having direct intellectual intuition—she is in fact either ignored and kept to one side, or perhaps respected in terms of her guiding and minimal muteness, which Ripley understands very well from her own experience. In any case, it has already been said, just as it is perhaps said around every campfire around the world, and then ignored. This is what is being said (and this is the most difficult cue to ever read):

It won’t make any difference.

This is what Newt says in response to Ripley when she first comes out of total muteness. She (Newt) is responding to Ripley’s assurance that there are soldiers here now, and that all will be well. We know full well that Ripley knows full well that this is not the case, but she tells Newt the story anyway: some fantasy structure is always necessary, it seems. Some piece of language or some evasion of sorts, even when it comes to the Ds, themselves only an image. But Newt does not, in fact, need this assurance and knows exactly what it is. Only a little girl can know that the pure statement to be made that nobody ever hears—under any circumstances—is ‘it won’t make any difference’.

This statement is too flat to hear, too alien. Too banal. There has to be a structuration to keep on going, the electronic map table, and the machine guns in the tunnels, and so on, even though the principle of an alien force (‘real monsters’) whose job it is to outsurvive everything has already been revealed. When Newt says ‘affirmative’ she is merely echoing the adult and military talk: they arrange things and they do things, and they will go extinct, and it won’t make any difference. There is no necessary connection here between the feminine marking of a little girl and the capacity to say this, but the same structuration that ‘must go on’ also embraces a functional role for the ‘little girl’ who is able to survive in the corridors or under the sign of the irreversible, for a while. (The ‘girl’ is always a function of what doesn’t get said. (The girl is the end of the universe.))

ABSOLUTE NONDIFFERENCE

We know that this absolute nondifference is often still protested against in the name of the need to philosophize and make philosophical differences and retain the power to distinguish. Put simply, the fear of nondifference is the fear of the extinction of all philosophical difference and of the principle of action. The ‘real monsters’ are a principle of unobstructed parasitism that has to be, in pure Kantian terms, admired. There is, in fact, no point to experience at all. Cued:

There never has been any point at all in saying anything.

Now, we must put ourselves on the side of the little girl Newt. We must be the little girl. We must be—rationally, emotionally, figuratively, historically, musically, and so on—mute like Newt. We must realize this will mean nothing, that we don’t know what it means, but that we can see it, and that we have no choice. In other words, we are being like this because we are like this. We know what the sole directive is, because we already are it. At least at our emotional cores, we know what Newt knows and we are lifted onto the electronic map. We are the map.

How do we do this and become this? There is no way to do this. And none of it will make any difference. Strawson will admit that in order to arrive at the story of the As, let alone the Cs and Ds, ‘a kind of bogus arithmetic of concepts’ is used. We are already in structuration by fantasy even as we act like Newt and hear Newt speaking to us. If there was a superintelligent experiencessless object in the centre of our world village, and that object told us all the true and useful things that we need to know about all the problems in our world situation, we would still not listen. We know that we are, for now at least, structured like that; but we also know that there is the voice of Newt, which is the voice, sure and calm, as if beyond pain, of ‘intellectual intuition’ (‘angelicism’ as such). 

RIPLEY’S FIGHT

Ripley has to fight through in each of her films to be able to survive even if she will eventually die, only to be resurrected in the fourth film in which her first words happen to be those of Newt we cited: My mommy always said there were no monsters. No real ones. But there are. By the fourth film, the resurrected Ripley says the words as pure affirmation, not a trace of human questioning at all. This is the possibility that Strawson alludes to when he first describes the qualities of a ‘language’ without communication-intention, the possibility that such a ‘language’ can exist without questions. There can be, Strawson says, a language without the grammatical form of the question. A language, he says, which would ‘be very simple and consist only of declarative statements and their negations’. Each of the Alien films is a progression, and acts as a sublation of the language in which questions are still needed into a ‘language’ that does not need or even know ‘questions’. The primacy of the language of the question is here submerged in a language of prior affirmation, a kind of primacy of the answer—of the command line and cue. Affirmative, says Newt, in the electronic map table scene, merely repeating the adults, whose language is over.

At the start of Alien: Resurrection, there is no difference between Ripley’s voice and Newt’s voice. Ripley speaks Newt in the voice-over that begins the film and sets the tone. We know that here too, in this film, it won’t make any difference. In the timelines Newt and Ripley occupy, there is no time for human squabbling and questions. Whether that squabbling always happens anyway, at least for now, is one thing. Whether there are already images of what happens when that squabbling doesn’t happen, or is reduced, is another.   

It is impossible to get here, without talking more about Greta, the figure of Greta, and what she means as little girl. The problem we want to talk about next with Greta is the problem of her name. Because we think about her as her name, ‘Greta’, we forget to analyze who she is and what she says. We forget the voice of Greta (Newt) in Greta; instead she becomes something like a star. She becomes Greta Greta Greta Greta—like a mediatic chant we get too used to straightaway—instead of what she first named. In doing this work of forgetting, we are suspicious of the little girl. The theme is too delicate, especially today. Think of the way people respond to the song from Gigi, ‘Thank Heaven for Little Girls’, saying it is ‘creepy’. But what happens when this happens is that the voice of the little girl for whom we thank heaven is forgotten. What Greta is saying is too much to bear, so we let her bear it, we let her say it, and then we forget the little girl, who is ‘creepy’. The gratitude (‘thank heaven’) becomes a cover for something else, accelerated amnesia. Thank heaven Greta is Greta, so that we can forget even more than before what she says.

We are adapting a description to try and say what we think is happening. In the same way that Newt being lifted onto the electronic map table is an afterthought when it could be a forethought, so analyzing what Greta names rather than naming her is constantly delayed, whereas what she says is quite simple. What she says is:

it should not be delayed

To get to the directness of Greta—to the cue itself—you have to dissect yourself as an adult who is not able to think Greta at all, except as a name that covers over all analyticity. Where Greta is the autist of declarative language, the language of the Ds, we make of her only somebody who sails a ship, somebody who looks a certain way. By refusing to hear her precisely as a little girl, we fetishize her into a little girl, an obscurely sexual object (‘Greta’).

In the name of Greta, we cover and forget in every direction. That Greta notices this and points it out to us in clear terms is then covered over again; it becomes part of our coverage. Why then, since it may be an end of an universe, when I speak like this, am I not speaking as her? Why am I not speaking from her side, the side of the little girl?