Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Perhaps in films like “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” perhaps in the figure of Caesar, the chimpanzee revolutionary, we have finally and completely transferred our aspirations to another species.  They need no longer burden us, or wound us, or remind us of our failure.

     

As in Charles Stross’s “Saturn’s Children,” our end is an afterthought, neither the central scene of the Terran drama, nor an instance of historic tragedy.  That part of the story is necessary only as exposition—to explain why we have gone.

This transfer of our ideals to the apes is part of a complex transactions.  We turn the zoa into a symbol of our ideals as we drive it into extinction.  The cinematic ritual is the exorcism of our wishes.  Like the chimpanzees before they are given the neuro-cognitive drug AZ-112, we are mute.  In the traditional exorcism, the subject, the subject speaks in legion voices, exchanging this mad multiplicity for a singular voice possessed by reason.  In this belated fantastic exorcism, our demons show themselves by our linguistic disarticulation.  We have nothing to say.  What we might have said has been amputated, severed.  And the marker of our redemption arrives in the voice of a chimpanzee.  Caesar becomes like that poor man in Afghanistan, peddling the collection of false legs he has found.

Presumably, as a species, we achieve a more grateful mutism.  The problem was not our inability to give voice to our ideals, but rather the obsolescence of the wish to have the voice to do this.  It is like a nostalgia for our lost gills.  To the ape we entrust this neolithic gift and move on.

There is a genealogy here, an evolution.  We begin with Julian Jayne’s idea of humanity up to the Bronze Age.  In the heroic age we had a bicameral mind.  Many voices possessed us.  We heard gods and demons.  Gods and demons spoke through us.  It was all very archaic and violent.  Then we achieved the single voice of the Cartesian subject, troubled only by what it repressed.  It was all very neurotic and violent.  Then came our resentful silence, our penultimate phase, as we grudgingly gave up the ghost.

Our teleology is immediate communication.  Without voice, without subject.  Without message or messenger.  We become quantum entangled with our own existence.  Alienation is no longer possible.  Estrangement is no longer possible.  Perhaps the desire to speak, the possibility of speaking, was born out of estrangement and alienation, as it was born also as system of signaling danger to others.

All this we leave to the chimpanzees.