A radical alien would not belong to the set of beings whose agency can – in Davidsons metaphor – be triangulated by reference to a common world. Its agency would be perpetually occult to humans. By the same token it could not belong to the common world of the phenomenological account. It would be a closed book. But here we seemed to be locked in a contradiction.
1) The radical alien would not belong to the class of beings whose behaviour can be interpreted as actions.
2) The radical alien would be an agent.
3) An entity whose behaviours could not be construed as actions, even in principle, would be a non-agent.
After all, where else does our concept of agency get its content than its attribution to the things we could treat as agents in principle?
So 1), 2) and 3) are inconsistent. A paradox! However, we can defuse the paradox by denying 3. 3) implies a kind of local correlationism for agency. The only kinds of things that could count as agents are those that are amenable to human practices of interpretative understanding, whatever these may amount to. 3) denies the possibility that there could be evidence-transcendent facts about agency such procedures might never uncover.
http://enemyindustry.net/blog/?p=6091
This is a central tension in the Southern Reach trilogy: Area X exhibits something like an unintelligible agency, it observes and acts but does not disclose any standpoint, motive or bearing within a common world - in particular, it does not react to experiments designed to get a fix on its orientation. It is in this sense that it is “from outer space” - its world is completely disjoint from ours, and at the same time identical to it, camouflaged within it to the point of indiscernibility. The “weird” of the novels is the point-by-point construction of a difference between worlds without the “other” world ever becoming imaginatively available to us - rather than juxtaposing two “parallel” realities, enabling us to map back and forth between them, it shows a region of our world unilaterally determined by an agency that is foreclosed to (“our”, intramundane) thought.
Umberto Eco famously said of Casablanca that it “is not one movie. It is ‘the movies’”: a kind of compendium of genres and gestures which recapitulates the pleasures of moviegoing and in doing so invents, through diagonalisation, a new kind of cinematic pleasure. We might similarly ask of the Southern Reach Trilogy what kind of story it is telling, or re-telling: is the The Colour Out Of Space? Roadside Picnic? In place of the satisfactions of a greatest-hits compilation of weird fiction tropes, however, the Southern Reach Trilogy piles up vexations, consistently refusing to be quite the story it appears to be or to deliver the payoffs that a particular trope promises to deliver. Seemingly extraneous material keeps getting in the way (it’s hard to imagine Lovecraft taking much interest in the lighthouse keeper’s sex life, for example), so that the story can feel like a tangle of elements within which the usual hierarchy of significance has broken down. How do we know what’s important, or when some particular detail is worth paying attention to? At times it can feel as if the trilogy’s entire world is composed of MacGuffins.
One of the functions of genre is to focus attention, to set up a hierarchy of significance, so that we know in a particular kind of story what the “telling” details will be, and are on the lookout for particular kinds of narrative disclosure. The Southern Reach trilogy deploys genre cues eclectically and waywardly, gradually teaching the reader to inhabit a fictional world premised on misdirection. The experience of entering this world is one that will feel eerily familiar to readers of the non-philosophical or “philo-fictional” writings of Francois Laruelle, which similarly stage a breakdown of the authority of genre. Laruelle’s are texts that “go nowhere”, that redeploy the genre cues and expected payoffs of philosophical writing in an attempt to develop a “syntax of the real”. Without spelling it out, or trying to establish the rule of a philosophical Authority over this syntax, my aim here is to conjugate Vandermeer with Laruelle, in order to enter the Area X of non-philosophy and to elaborate the non-philosophy of Area X.
