BROKEN KNOWLEDGE (17)
By:
December 14, 2025
University of Toronto philosopher Mark Kingwell and HILOBROW‘s Josh Glenn are coauthors of The Idler’s Glossary (2008), The Wage Slave’s Glossary (2011), and The Adventurer’s Glossary (2021). In 2022, they engaged in an epistolary exchange about science fiction. Via the series BROKEN KNOWLEDGE, the title of which references Francis Bacon’s philosophy, HILOBROW is pleased to share a lightly edited version of their exchange with our readers. Also see Josh and Mark’s previous exchange 49th PARALLEL.
BROKEN KNOWLEDGE: FIRST CONTACT | WHAT IF? | A HYBRID GENRE | COUNTERFACTUALS | A HOT DILUTE SOUP | I’M A CYBORG | APOPHENIC-CURIOUS | AN AESTHETICS OF DIRT | PAGING DR. KRISTEVA | POLICING THE GENRE | FAMILIAR STRANGENESS | GAME OVER | THE WORLD VIEWED | DEFAMILIARIZATION | SINGULAR CREATURES | ALIEN ARCHAEOLOGIST | THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF SCREEN-TIME | HOMO SUPERIOR | EVERYTHING IS US.
17th November 2022
TORONTO
I am back from the hospital a week now, and feeling “more human” as we sometimes say. But as I’ve suggested before, the category human is potentially misleading here. Mr. Data’s quest to be less android-weird and more human-“normal” is quixotic and rather silly. He’s a superior being! He should revel in it, even if that falls well short of the evil-domination ambitions of dark twin Lore.
I think I read Baudrillard, at least the first time, differently — though I kind of love your emphasis on charm/magic. Like most philosophers, I was struck by his dismantling of the appearance/reality distinction, which might be considered the foundation of all Western metaphysics except maybe the Pre-Socratics. But the two readings (yours and mine) converge on the liberatory qualities of the hyper-real. For a philosopher, this notion obliterates the shackles of the type-token relationship. You can have tokens for which there is no type! Indeed, the experience of hyper-real culture and art is that of things that (might) seem familiar but which have no obvious back-links. This can be uncanny in a good way, I think. I walk into a contemporary hotel or airport lounge and what do I feel? A whole bunch of vague references to mid-century style, postmodern use of materials, a slick semi-familiar nostalgia for the future. In the old days, before the pandemic and my illnesses, I’d order a big manhattan or martini — or better yet, a Vesper cocktail from Casino Royale — to complete the experience. Now that’s simulacral culture! (Forget apricots. You can make philosophy out of a cocktail containing gin, vodka, and Kina Lillet.)
I love the point about the Surrealists being, in effect, halting hyper-realistic avant la lettre (if that’s accurate). Freud’s point, on which I have embroidered many times, is precisely that feeling of slippage. It needn’t be unpleasant, even though most of the uncanny-valley examples we use are indeed so (zombies, threatening androids, etc). What if traversing the uncanny valley were more like an epistemological adventure? (My book is your guide!) Then we “return to the human” only to find the second uncanny valley, even more potentially congenial this time, of posthuman politics. Here we must avoid transhumanism depredations, which can look like neo-liberal eugenics, and concentrate on inclusion, tolerance, and recognition of rights — classical liberal ideals, yay!
Two more points from you, and then some new thoughts I’ve had. When it comes to watching myself watching movies, of course I am mostly aware of composition: shot construction, cuts, blocking, camera angles. Hitchcock’s overhead shots become iconic, as do (less noticeable, but with more creepiness) his tic of showing characters approaching danger from the inside, not their point of view (that is, the camera — and so the viewer — takes the position of the threat, not the threatened). Very cool. Fritz Lang is unsurpassed in making the camera feel claustrophobic, not expansive; David Lean is the opposite. Perhaps heretically, I find Spielberg a boring filmmaker because he always puts the camera exactly where you expect it to be. He’s a master of what we might call Elevated Cliche (the battle sequences in Saving Private Ryan are cases in point — harrowing, brilliantly shot, but ultimately boring). By contrast, the central tank battle in Fury, much of it shot from above, is exceptional: a chess game of close-quarters mechanized death.
So when I’m watching these sequences I am the opposite of immersed — I stand aside, as a critic. But I’m still a viewer. This is one thing my students comment on all the time: the mixed blessing of critical attention. “Thanks,” they tell me, “I’ll never watch movies the same way again.” It’s the same thing with reading, I think. Some writers force you to pay attention to what tricks they are performing (DFW, obviously, but also Martin Amis, some Pynchon, some Cheever) while others are “window pane” craftspeople who have a POV which they work to conceal (John O’Hara, say, or Fitzgerald). My favourites are those writers who have it both ways, usually with complex mechanisms of irony (Austen, Waugh, even Greene after his fashion).
You asked about the phenomenology here. I think, with screen-time (as distinct from “the movies” as a specific cultural experience), of course things get altered. Can I rewind to watch a sequence again? Can I pause to get another cup of coffee? These shifts from the benign imprisonment of the classic cinema are crucial to changing what appears to be the very same thing, i.e., a given work of film creation. This all started in the 1980s, when I (like Quentin Tarantino) found a summer job in a video store. The basic platform then was VHS, and the big movie houses still dominated. But the pandemic has put a clear premium on streaming over visiting the cinema — with some creep-back right now. For one thing, few of us in the viewing world realized until now just how many movies get made, but which in the past would not have enjoyed a theatrical release. I think of the dozens of apparently indistinguishable Bruce Willis or Liam Neeson vehicles, uncanny in their sameness. Willis becomes a victim of his own success, his illness catching up to him, as it were, on film. (Neeson remains craggy and unmoved.)
As I’ve mentioned before, I watched a ridiculous amount of screen product while I was in the hospital. It’s very hard to read when there are so many interruptions and no privacy. But the wash of cine-action has a relentless presence that creates a new issue: hyper-immersion. The screen is like a phenomenological bath, lukewarm and omnipresent. It palliates boredom but does not actually stimulate. Empty phenomenological calories, cognitive junk food!
But it’s okay, just like buttered popcorn is okay at the movies. Speaking of which, to work the pivot to my last topic today, namely the superman figure, I note that I’ve started thinking more and more in terms of life hacks. I saw some kids at a local cinema foil the tendency of that hot butter spigot that tends to soak the top of your popcorn bag, leaving the bottom dry. Solution: place a straw down into the bag and squirt the butter into the straw, thus dousing the popcorn from the bottom up. Hospital hacks: the mashed potatoes are like a baseball of starchy nothingness, even as the chicken noodle soup is like dishwater with pasta in it. So pour some broth on the potatoes, discard the rest of the soup, and eat the moistened starch. Save the apple juice for later, when you can mix it with the “ice cream” to create something like a cool sherbert. Take the cheese from the inevitable sandwich and put it together with sliced apple, tossing the cardboard bread. And so on.
Not exactly superman stuff, but it does provide a sense of control that routine imprisonment tends to erode. When I think of Nietzsche’s notion of the ubermensch I think about this idea of overcoming — of clearing some threshold of difficulty or challenge, however small. Going one’s own way, and defining happiness precisely as that feeling of surpassing an obstacle — any obstacle. Sports, for example, can be defined as the artificial imposition, and subsequent attempts at navigating, pointless difficulties. Agon for agon’s sake. Nietzsche speaks of Kriegsspiele as central here, often translated as “war games,” but “contact sports” might be better. (I say this as a lifetime fan, and former player, of football.)
As appealing as it is to think so, Nietzsche’s ubermensch is not Doc Savage, or Superman, still less a Nazi racial giant, Wall Street Master of the Universe, or slovenly Silicon Valley “genius.” I’m not suggesting this is Nietzsche’s view, but what if the ubermensch is more like an accomplished life hacker or talented athlete within a very constrained field. Is Tom Brady an ubermensch? Certainly. Is he a robot? We might well think so, sometimes, but no. He’s a high-percentile human performer who must sacrifice many things (maybe even his marriage?) in order to achieve his success.
And yet, I get it — my students likewise get it, since each one of them thinks he (usually he) must be a superman. The appeal of the transhuman is, as suggested, part of the second uncanny valley: upgrades, intelligence enhancements, other inegalitarian (and probably market-drive) add-ons, like luxury options on a car at the sales lot. But this is very dangerous territory, and I have to be clear always that my defence of posthumanism (i.e., more inclusive politics of belonging within rights regimes) has nothing to do with invidious enhancements, only a recognition of greater degrees of coexistence and interweaving.
Anyway, since we need more concrete returns to sf, I’m curious to hear more about early fictional supermen. I know a bit about this, but you know lots more.
Mark
ALSO SEE: Josh’s BEST 250 ADVENTURES of the 20th CENTURY list | Mark on BATTLESTAR GALACTICA and THE HONG KONG CAVALIERS | Mark and Josh’s exchange 49th PARALLEL.