We are the Martians

I believe in the human body, and the inhumanity of its prehistory. I believe that the human body’s prehistory pre-empts the existence of our shared planet, Earth. In the human body, a germ has been deposited, and the germ allows a communion with its own ancestral inhumanity. Of access to this ancestral body, we must recognise that the human body is the history of the planet in which it finds itself. The genesis of the body coincides with the birth of the known universe, its flesh and blood a microcosm of the solar system. If I were to open my body up in the chest cavity, then what I would see is a narrative that has been carved in the materiality of the planet Earth for centuries. If I was to remove my eye from its socket and examine it with my other eye, then what I would see is the genesis of vision itself, the very possibility of light and darkness encountering one another.

Yet the prehistory of the body is not simply the origin of the body’s anonymous organs working behind the scenes of perception. Rather, the prehistory of the body takes flight in the phenomenological reflection of the body’s uncanny facticity. That there are bodies in the first place: with this thought, a hyper-reflection (in Merleau-Ponty’s use of the term) occurs, such that the body’s anonymity begins to reflect upon its own history. As such, the archaeological work to be carried out on the human body must be a return to the genetic memories never experienced, but nonetheless constitutive of humanity. The only question that matters is: how do we resuscitate and conjoin the living and the dead into the same organic body?


One does not need to travel too far from the homeworld in order glimpse at the quiet world lying beneath the surface of familiar movement. After all, even in a book as domesticated as Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, traces of a genetic prehistory are found in the hearth of the house: “The finest specimens of fossilized duration concertized as a result of long sojourn, are to be found in space” (9). The notion of “fossilized duration” is instructive. With it, Bachelard points to the retentive powers of materiality—its ability not only to retain the past but also to reanimate it. But what he overlooks in this topophilia is the body’s role in reanimating the fossilized duration stored in space.


Cinematically, the inhumanity of the pre-historical body finds its perfect expression in the film Quatermass and the Pit (1967). If this film is thought of as the prototypical Lovecraftian film, then in the same light, it can also be viewed as the Merleau-Pontean film par excellence. The reason is evident in the plot: an ancient spacecraft, with its own intelligence and history, is discovered buried beneath the streets of London, which has covertly been influencing the birth and development of human life on Earth. A discovery takes place: prehistoric locusts are found in the tomb of the spacecraft, their bodies frozen in time. The locusts travelled to Earth 5 million years ago, their dying planet, Mars, no longer hospitable to organic life.


In need of a new colony, they ventured to our planet and buried themselves in strategic locations so that they might one day again rise in a more intelligent form – a “colony by proxy,” so the Professor says with Lovecraft’s “Shadow out of Time” resonating. And so, the influence of these uncanny entitles emerge as having a troubled history with human life, their reason for populating the planet to interbreed with prehistoric hominids. (Curiously, the structure of this interbreeding is far from science fiction. As recently as yesterday evening at 18:03 GMT, “ancient humans, dubbed “Denisovans” [have been found to] interbred with us.”)


Thus, it turns out that we—human life—are nothing more than a manifestation of a lifeform alien to our own flesh, as a government minster says in the film: “You realise what you are saying? That we owe our existence here to the intervention of insects!” The human body itself a mutant of the most ancient order of organic life, its network of memories and experiences rooted in the materiality of the flesh, but forgotten by abstract thought in its quest for civilization. The unearthing of the spacecraft—a literal case of Freud’s “return of the repressed”—triggers an event that was hitherto buried not only in space, but in time, too. One engineer visits the burial site only to come out with telekinetic powers, his body now a medium for some uncanny agency.


Experiments are established to record the visions of those possessed by their own unclaimed past. “What you are about to see…is a memory.” It is a memory of brutality, of “stored killing,” of colonization that now risks being activated in the finitude of the human body. The attempt to “rationalise” the artefact as a relic of German warfare fails: in view of the media, the thing comes alive, the lights of the spacecraft emitting an eerie blue light. Public panic ensues.


Thus, the Lovecraftian climax of the film sees the populous of London reanimated, their cavernous memories of an ancestral time playing out in the surface of the streets of London. Violence and madness ensue: a madness that centres on the disbelief that humanity, with its morality, traditions, and laws of judgment, are aliens to their own native planet. In the final scene, as the credit’s begin to roll, the professor and his assistant stand motionless before a ruined London, traumatised by their confrontation with the abyss from beyond.


As for the Merleau-Pontean dimension of Quatermass, it is clear that the idea of the human being as being an alien in both its own flesh and world aligns with Merleau-Ponty’s notion of “another subject beneath me, for whom a world exists before I am here, and who marks out my place in it” (PoP, 296). (See here for an elaboration on Merleau-Ponty and the anonymity of the body). The “captive spirit” at the heart of Merleau-Ponty’s subject mirrors the disquiet in Quatermass, whereupon the surface of the body, in its familiarity and homeliness, is the reverberation of an immemorial time, of which human life is still attached. As the professor says while examining the possessed engineer: “Perhaps it was always in him, in all of us….I think what he gave us now was a vision of life on Mars five million years ago.” What is uncanny about the sight of artefact on Earth is that it is a literal embodiment of the anonymity lurking within the body, an anonymity that is at the same time invisible to the body.

At stake, here, is the simultaneity of experience. The “visions” seen in Quatermass coincide with the perception of the present, thus forming an overlapping relation between each realm. Central to the logic of the uncanny, this shared experience fulfils the conjunction of the living and the dead occupying the same organic body. In both Merleau-Ponty and Quatermass a double vision is taking place, which is only activated in moments of trauma, disintegration, and nausea. For Merleau-Ponty, such an experience “is the awareness of our contingency, and the horror with which it fills us.” Phenomenally, the simultaneity of experience destabilises the unity of the “I,” its claim to ownership now comprised by the presence of "a world more ancient than thought" (296).

Earth Alienation

In 1957, an earth-born object made by man was launched into the universe, where for some weeks it circled the earth according to the same laws of gravitation that swing and keep in motion the celestial bodies—the sun, the moon, and the stars. To be sure, the man-made satellite was no moon or star, no heavenly body which could follow its circling path for a time span that to us mortals, bound by earthly time, lasts from eternity to eternity. Yet, for a time it managed to stay in the skies; it dwelt and moved in the proximity of the heavenly bodies as though it had been admitted tentatively to their sublime company.

This event, second in importance to no other, not even to the splitting of the atom, would have been greeted with unmitigated joy if it had not been for the uncomfortable military and political circumstances attending it. But, curiously enough, this joy was not triumphal; it was not pride or awe at the tremendousness of human power and mastery which rilled the hearts of men, who now, when they looked up from the earth toward the skies, could behold there a thing of their own making. The immediate reaction, expressed on the spur of the moment, was relief about the first "step toward escape from men's imprisonment to the earth." And this strange statement, far from being the accidental slip of some American reporter, unwittingly echoed the extraordinary line which, more than twenty years ago, had been carved on the funeral obelisk for one of Russia's great scientists: "Mankind will not remain bound to the earth forever."

(Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition)

So, at 3.35pm on April 29, 2008, the Zeus IV appeared in the Californian sky. Accompanied by six chase planes, the space-craft swept down to a perfect landing, guided by its on-board computer to within 50 meters of President Quayle's reception podium. The stunned silence was broken by an immense cheer when two of the astronauts were glimpsed in the observation windows. The crowd surged forward, waiting for the hatches to open as soon as the landing checks were over.

Despite the warmth of this welcome, the astronauts were surprisingly reluctant to emerge from their craft. The decontamination teams were posed by the airlocks, ready to board the spaceship and evacuate its atmosphere for laboratory analysis. But the crew had overridden the computerized sequences and made no reply over the radio link to the urgent queries of the ground controllers. They had switched off the television cameras inside the craft, but could be seen through the observation windows, apparently tidying their cabins and changing into overalls. Dr. Valentina was spotted in the galley, apparently sterilizing her surgical instruments. A rumour swept the review stands, where President Quayle, the Congress and invited heads of state sweltered in the sun, that one of the crew had been injured on re-entry, but it soon transpired that Dr. Valentina was merely making soup. Even more strangely, Professor Kawahito was seen setting out six parallel chessboards, as if preparing for another tournament.

(J.G. Ballard, "The Message From Mars")

"What happened? I did not die."

Re-watching Sidney Lumet’s film “The Pawnbroker” recently, I was reminded of its exemplary treatment of the relation between embodiment and trauma. Two brief things to say. One, Lumet’s film gives us a clear articulation of Cathy Caruth’s notion of an “unclaimed experience.” The film does this by privileging the body as the vehicle of expression for a past that cannot be resolved in spoken language. Instead of being the locus of all movement and orientation, Sol Nazerman’s body is a manifestation of what Caruth terms “the missing of experience.” Indeed, the use of flashback editing in the film is a literal stamp placed upon the body of Sol Nazerman. In his skin, Nazerman’s body becomes a porous opening to a past that has yet to be brought to abstract unity. The body undercuts this cognitive shortcoming through its mute articulation of Nazerman’s history of trauma. In its incongruities and disruptions, the body speaks a language that is peculiar to the experience of trauma. What is striking about Lumet’s treatment of trauma memory in the film is the sense of the simultaneity of the past and the present. Here, Merleau-Ponty offers some guidance on this tension:

Our body does not always have meaning, and our thoughts. . . do not always find in it the plenitude of their vital expression. In the cases of disintegration, the soul and the body are apparently distinct; and this is the truth of dualism (Merleau-Ponty 1965, 209).

The importance of this passage, it seems to me, is twofold. One, a tacit duality is acknowledged despite the fact that phenomenologically speaking, there is nothing metaphysically true about dualism. Two, beyond metaphysics, the phenomenal appearance of the body during disintegration can no longer be said to be strictly “mine.” Instead, a process of dissociation takes place, such that the normal functioning of the body comes to a standstill. The mute body memories of Sol Nazerman testify to the body’s propensity to “hide” from the self. In this way, the body of traumatic memory occupies a destabilising relationship not only to cognitive memory but also to the cognitive perception of the body as held through the prism of self-consciousness. This is the strangeness of the traumatized body: it carries with it its own shadowy other beneath the surface. In effect, two bodies occupy the same space at the same time. Nazerman’s body defies phenomenology: in it, Merleau-Ponty’s “truth of dualism” is announced, as Nazerman says:

It's just that there have been memories that I had, well, I thought that I had pushed them far away from me and they keep rushing in, and then they're words, words that I thought I had kept myself from hearing. . . . And now they flood my mind.

The other tangential point: at the heart of traumatic memory is the essence of body horror. Indeed, Lumet’s film is as much an account of the horror of the body as one would find in the early work of David Cronenberg. The reason for this is that what Lumet’s film shows us is a “self” that has become the ghost of the bodily experience that endures merely through a sort of blind persistence (a horror, which, incidentally, Christopher Hitchens spoke of recently in relation to cancer). Where is Nazerman in the midst of his body? His response to this question, a counter-question: "What happened? I did not die.'" Yet in some sense the “I” did die, and what now remains is the anonymity of a body being encroached upon by an experience that is not only unclaimed by the traumatised subject but also opposed to that subject.