Andrés Vaccari

Is there anything NEW to say about 2001: A Space Odyssey?

I watched it again the other day for the fiftieth time. It occurred to me that we can read the film as presenting a synoptic, imagined history of technology. This imagined history perpetuates many myths about technology, as well as offering a comprehensive range of different ways in which technology has been culturally perceived. There are four main stages in this history, according to Clarke and Kubrick, which are punctuated by the appearance of the strange black monolith:

1) It begins with the tool, with the famous scene where our primate hero throws the bone up in the air. The bone describes an arc and is transformed into a spaceship. In the same simple movement, a whole stage of the history of technology is encompassed. It is like nothing has happened between the tool and thespaceship: the same essence defines both artifacts. The tool represents, in part, a conception of technology as prosthetic means. Before the arrival of the tool (which follows shortly after the first sighting of the monolith), we are presented with a range of survival problems, whih the primates must surmount to achieve mastery over nature: predators, territorial disputes, the general struggle of natural-animal (pre-technological) life, etc. The tool then arrives to fill these needs, to provide a solution to these pre-existing problems. The tool does not fundamentally alter these problems, or change things in any way, but is a transparent means to achieve a resolution, a tool of mastery. The appearance of the monolith suggests the miraculous genesis of technology, which descends from heaven to be grafted onto a ‘natural’ human that, again, is modified in certain respects (its powers, reach) but not in its essence. Technology arrives as divine intervention, as a result of intelligence. The primate finds the tool: the cunning, abstract reason of the primate also precedes the tool. The human masters (and invents) technology, not the other way around. Intelligence, consciousness, and language are human features, proceeding from a non-technological essence. There’s nothing more to add to the nature of technology and its relations with the human. What follows (hundreds of thousands of years of technological history) is redundant.

2) The second stage (the Space Age) shows us the peaceful coexistence of technology and humans. This vision is dominated by spheres and circular movements (the perfect kind of movement for Aristotle and medieval Christianity, the movement of the spheres, only found in heaven). Technology is transparent here, amenable, helpful. The beauty of these scenes (laden also with the symbolic, Nietzschean meaning of self-overcoming through Richard Strauss’ scoring of Thus Spoke Zarathustra: a straight continuation of the self-overcoming of the primate through the tool) is legendary. There is a distance, however, a certain tension between humans and their creations. Technology is transparent, acquiescent to our will, our touch. But it is not invisible. Rather, it is pervasive, spectacular. The vastness of the technological landscape dwarves the human form, which acquires its meaning only in terms of its place in a system. Even the spacesuits and uniforms embody this ambiguity: everything is perhaps too clean and controlled, and humans are becoming a seamless continuation of the technological environment. At the end of this part of the film, the monolith arrives again. With an ear-splitting scream, the monolith announces the next break, leading into the next part of the film.

3) The third stage shows a darker side: technology out of control, pursuing its own logic, alien to that of the human: amoral, distant, impassive. HAL 9000 is perhaps the manifestation of that logic we have glimpsed in the previous stage. Technology and the human are out of phase, the former having outrun the intentions of its creators, the bounds of all human calculation and rationality. HAL’s apparent irrationality is simply a hyperbolic rationality, technoscientific rule extrapolated to the point of self-destruction. The human victory over this technological force is uncertain: David Bowman can finally disable HAL, but at a high price. At the end of this part, the monolith is seen again, behind the moon of Jupiter, announcing the break into the next phase.

4) David Bowman is transformed by the monolith into a disembodied super-being, able to behold past, present and future in a single moment, transcending all time and space, flesh and death. This is the final stage of the technological fantasy of the modern west. This magical, final stage in human-technology coevolution marks the arrival of a unworldly technology that has merged the human into itself, becoming all-pervasive, and spiritualizing the human. Thus Bowman becomes a cosmic wise child, returning to earth, which is now dwarfed by the uterine light of this technologically-enhanced consciousness.