The Code Is Missing: Orthognosis at the End of the World

1.

Recent work in our field has centered on the elaboration of the logic of symbology through the systematic variation of the possible combinations of the elements of the generative grammar of symbology (orthognosis, mythognosis, etc.). The generative grammar is the symbological Urphänomenon that allows us to recognize symbology among instances of the type that often exhibit dramatic phenotypical difference, but which occupy the same cultural niche by operating according to the same basic developmental structures and desire for the stability of meaning and the erasure of contradiction from our form of life through the integration of potentially subversive knowledge into the status quo. 

Albert and Allen Hughes nauseating Christian symbologist movie The Book of Eli (2009) represents a novel and hopefully unique form of symbological fiction in which the code itself has been destroyed but continues to govern in absentia through the intuitive orthognostic attempts to reinstate its own normal functioning through the dissemination of defunct facile wisdom. A religious war ends in a global apocalypse that has left the Earth and human civilization in ruins. In the aftermath of the disaster, unnamed combatants systematically destroyed all of the world's bibles except for one, which is in the possession of Eli (Denzel Washington). God has spoken directly to Eli and instructed him to walk West until he reaches a "safe place" for the bible. Thirty years later he is still walking. God has promised to protect Eli on his journey, a promise God keeps by making Eli a superhuman ninja warrior. On his journey Eli counters various road agents and villainous post-apocalyptic bike gangs, all of which he mercilessly slaughters through the grace of God. Although the movie's action revolves around the possession of the bible—now literally the book, being the only remaining one of its kind—it isn't named until over halfway through the movie.


The film is occasioned by Eli's encounter with Carnegie, the ruler of a small town somewhere in California's sun-scotched central valley. Carnegie is our cacognostic villain and is interested in expanding his domain by acquiring a copy of the bible. "It's not a book," Carnegie explains to Eli, "It's a weapon aimed right at the hearts and minds of the weak and desperate. It will give us control of them." Carnegie has come to understand in theory that supplementing his Repressive State Apparatus with an Ideological State Apparatus would provide him with an economy of power enabling significant expansion of his domination, but he lacks the means to interpellate his subjects. "I don't have the right words, but the book does." Carnegie pursues his ends not through the code—the code having been eliminated with civilization's reservoir of knowledge—but by sending out gangs to bring him back every book they can find. Carnegie's name is an interesting hold over from the pre-apocalyptic world of symbology and mythognosis: the movie only refers to the possibility of a faux-subversive anti-capitalist message by naming its villain after an American industrialist, it does not follow through on the allegory in a the way a Dan Brown novel would. This kind of ideological recontainment of the potentially subversive has ceased to function and all that is left are bare names. 


When Carnegie meets Eli he immediately recognizes him as a fellow subject through Eli's unstoppable ninja powers and attempts to recruit him to his gang. Carnegie sends his virgin prostitute Magdalen to seduce Eli, but he refuses her advances and instead converts her by sharing a meal over which he says grace. Her conversion to Christianity is interesting insofar as it is completely empty. Eli doesn't explain why he says grace before dinner and refuses to discuss the book with Solara. Her conversion consists in her desire to follow Eli. Carnegie it seems is correct, the book does have the power to compel simply through rhetoric. When Solara returns from Eli's rooms Carnegie deduces that Eli must be in possession of the book when he sees Solara unsuccessfully attempting to say grace with her mother, a feat she cannot accomplish because she cannot remember the word "amen." Carnegie attempts to take the book by force and Eli slaughters another batch of his men before setting out across the desert.

Solara, compelled by the literal word of God, follows Eli against his wishes and is further converted through the beauty of the Lord's Prayer. Carnegie pursues them with yet more men and Eli gives up the book rather than let Carnegie kill Solara. As soon as he loses the book he is immediately deprived of his ninja powers and Carnegie shoots him. Power, it seems, is identical to the possession of the bible. Solara, having been converted enough to acquire some minimal ninja powers, escapes Carnegie and returns Eli. Together they travel to fucking Alcatraz where they join a heavily armed monastery equipped with a scriptorium and a printing press. There Macolm McDowell is attempting to restore civilization by restoring its books, but they don't yet have a bible. Meanwhile, Carnegie and Tom Waits are trying to pick the lock Eli placed on his bible, but when they are finally successful they discover—gasp!—it's written in brail which Carnegie can't read! Cut to Eli, who has memorized the bible, dictating it to McDowell before dying. The film ends with a triumphant montage of bibles being churned out by prison printing press and Solara taking up Eli's sword and sunglasses before going out into the world, her conversion completed in her transformation from a helpless prostitute into a zealous warrior of God. Knowledge is indeed something you collect in the way you collect baseball cards: it effects no internal changes in the characters, instead serving only to install them as subjects, "subject" in The Book of Eli meaning "brutal militant."

2. 

The sign is illegible.

The Book of Eli takes place in a strange post-cop-out universe where the injunction to disseminate facile wisdom has been complicated by the wholesale destruction of the symbolic order. The absence of the code has rendered mythognosis inoperative and with it the symbologist. What is left is a world of orthognostics, cacognotistics and the abject subjectless masses. The transcendental referent has been obtained, but all discourse around it has evaporated. What remains of the facile wisdom of the ancients is its material support, the physical book that Eli protects until such a time as the symbolic can be restored through the dissemination of "knowledge" in the forms of bibles and encyclopedias. For The Book of Eli the transcendental signified that grants unimaginable power is, surprisingly, the facile wisdom as such of the nonfunctional symbolic order. In order to go on, the orthognostic must reinstall the old order of things. The bible is last seen in the hands of the larval-mythognostic McDowell, who rather than reading from it simply places it on a shelf in a library where a space has been left for it, thereby restoring to the symbolic order the point de capiton that allows for its rational organization. The bible is still "the" book, but it has ceased to be so in an actual, physical sense and has returned to the status of master signifier.

In this world where neither orthognosis nor cacognosis can function normally, their respective attitudes toward the code having lost their point, they are differentiated by their attitude toward the violence that makes them possible. Cacognosis wants power for power's sake and so makes violence its end. Orthognosis uses power in order to restore the code, though it cannot comprehend its own actions or methods. The Book of Eli could not be clearer about its understanding of Christianity. When Solara asks Eli how he knows where to walk, he explains that he "Walks by faith, not by sight."

"What does that mean?" asks Solara.

"It means you know something even if you don't know something."

What appears to be a distinction between faith and reason is frighteningly close to Zizek's Rumsfeldian formula for the unconscious functioning of ideology as "unknown knowns." "Faith" means unconscious, unquestioned action. Added to this striking scene is the fact that Eli's initial explanation of "walking by faith, not by sight" turns out at the end of the film to not have been a metaphor at all: Eli is blind and walks automatically. He not only walks by "faith", he kills by faith. Violence for Eli is completely unconscious.

The only apparent discussion of the content of Christianity is both brief and impotent.

"I got so caught up in keeping [the bible] safe, I forgot to live by what I learned from it."

"What's that?"

"Do for others more than you do for yourself."

This is a curious distillation of the essence of Christianity for a man who has memorized the bible and within the movie it is logically incoherent. The fundamental aporia that gives the lie to the movie's "Christian message" is here in the contradiction between the basic message of Christianity as one of charity and God's transformation of Eli and Solara into invincible warriors. By no stretch of the imagination is the endless and needless dismemberment of strangers "doing more for others." The result is clear: "Faith" is another word for "ideology" and the content of Christianity is a contradiction coextensive with the contradictions that inspire symbology in the first place. "Christianity" in The Book of Eli stands in for the existing order of things that the symbological narrative functions to maintain while absorbing anything subversive. Here is no "turn the other cheek" but the successful containment of whatever in Christianity demands change through the equation of Christianity with the existing order of the world.