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Spatiotemporality in the Anthropocene: Deleuzoguattarian Philosophy, Quantum Physics, and the German Netflix Series Dark

In: KronoScope

Hedwig Fraunhofer

Abstract

Crises alter our perception of time. For medical personnel faced with treating unprecedented numbers of critically ill patients under conditions of personal threat, COVID-19 has most recently accelerated the subjective perception of time. For millions of others, social isolation has decelerated our lives. For all of us, at least in the short term, the future has become more uncertain. Theoretical physicists tell us, however, that under any conditions, the human perception of the flowing of time is only a result of our blurred, limited, macroscopic vision. As the quantum physicist Carlo Rovelli writes, therefore, “[t]o understand ourselves is to reflect on time” (2018: 179). Potentially caused by humans’ failed interactions with wild animals, the contemporary global pandemic, as well as previous outbreaks such as SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome-related coronavirus) or the bird flu, has led to calls to reevaluate humans’ relationships with nonhuman life, with the natural environment that includes us, in the epoch that may soon be named for our very failure – the Anthropocene. In an era in which our usual, day-to-day certainties and desire for human control have been upended, not only by the current medical crisis but also by the continuing existential threat to terrestrial life that is climate change, a rethinking of the category of the human, a new conceptualization of the entangled (human and nonhuman) material relationships on our planet and beyond, requires reflecting on time. This article engages in such reflection through a conversation with the philosophical writings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.

Keywords: time; Anthropocene; posthuman; materiality; quantum; Deleuze; Dark; contagion

In The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh wonders if “science fiction is better equipped to address the Anthropocene than mainstream literary fiction.” In the end, however, Ghosh comes to the conclusion that

cli-fi is made up mostly of disaster stories set in the future, and that … is exactly the rub. The future is but one aspect of the Anthropocene: this era also includes the recent past, and most significantly, the present … the Anthropocene resists science fiction: it is precisely not an imagined ‘other’ world apart from us (2016: 72).

For Ghosh, climate change, along with the threat of mass extinctions that humans pose to multiple forms of life, is a problem set in the present and on this planet, not in an imagined future or in space. The first German Netflix series, Dark (2017–2020) enacts a staple of science fiction, namely time travel, putting it in intra-action with such physical or theoretical phenomena as black holes, wormholes, quantum leaps from one energy level to another, light, and lunar and solar cycles. In dialogue with our contemporary scientific understanding of quantum physics and spacetime as well as with the uncanniness of the horror genre, Dark enacts one of the global threats marking the Anthropocene, a threat widely discussed in Germany in recent years: the very real dangers of nuclear energy that link past, present and future on our planet.

Asked recently why time travel is so in vogue in popular culture these days, Jantje Friese, one of the creators of Dark, responded: “we live in uncertain times, we fear what is coming in the future and we have a nostalgic thing about the past, about going back to how it used to be …, to better times” (Robinson and Ashurst 2020). As in the current global pandemic, in which time has found a new rhythm, in Dark an endless succession of catatonic episodes or flashes sweep away subjective interiorities in a strong common affect. As ‘we’ shelter in place, in a physical interiority, this exteriority – the velocity of this exteriority – nevertheless dominates everything.1

1 Space-Time: Science and Philosophy

A year before the pandemic threat caused by the new coronavirus, on April 10, 2019, the news exploded with a different sensation, of not only global, but cosmic, dimension. Astronomers had captured an image of what Dennis Overbye, in that day’s New York Times, called “the unobservable”: a black hole. By definition, black holes are matter that “has collapsed upon itself and has disappeared from our view” (Rovelli 2016: 45) and thus from any sense of human control. Black holes are created when too much matter accumulates in one place and the force of gravity becomes so overwhelming that no matter or radiation in its proximity can escape its pull. Matter, time and space are profoundly altered near black holes.2 A black hole is thus a “major disruptor of cosmic order” (Overbye 2019). Such a major disruption of cosmic order marks the events enacted in Dark. Black holes are also an example of what the philosopher Timothy Morton calls “hyperobjects,” i.e. “things that are massively distributed in space and time relative to humans” (Morton 2013: 1). As Michael Cronin notes, hyperobjects change our perception of time: “The future … is no longer in the future. It informs the here and now” (2017: 3). We are confronted “now” with an uncontrollable object, an existential threat somehow hurtling towards us.

Giving expression to our ensuing sense of apprehension, Overbye (2019) described the black hole observed as “an eternal trap,” “a smoke ring framing a one-way portal to eternity,” or “the doughnut of doom.” Tinging scientific optimism with awe, such verbal images link physics and metaphysics, nature and the supernatural. A similar link also contributed to the recent success of Dark. Infusing from the start a transcendental dimension that gives this cinematic fiction about the quantum entanglements of the physical universe its affective power, Dark, at the very beginning of the first episode, sets the tone of the series by characterizing black holes as the “Höllenschlund des Universums” (“the hellish pit of the universe”).3 It is exactly this supernatural but also deeply human dimension, involving questions of good and evil, that provides Dark with its specific affect of fear.

While Dark establishes a conversation between science and philosophy, the present article aims as well to move beyond a one-sided analysis that sees representation/meaning/the human, on the one hand, and more-than-human materiality, on the other hand, as two incompatible sides of a dualistic opposition. Taking the popular Netflix series as a starting point and illustration, the article specifically focuses on Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s philosophy as a key to temporality in the Anthropocene. Deleuze’s and Guattari’s process philosophy and quantum physics share many insights; Dark, as well, draws on this conversation.

The TV series starts with a quotation from Einstein: “the distinction made between past, present, and future is nothing more than a persistent, stubborn illusion” (S1: E1, also quoted by Rovelli, 2016: 60). In contrast to Newtonian physics, the theory of general relativity taught us that space and time are not inert boxes, that they are, instead, dynamic (Rovelli 2016: 42). As the British cosmologist Stephen Hawking explains, “the theory of relativity forces us to change fundamentally our ideas of space and time. We must accept that time is not completely separate from and independent of space but is combined with it to form an object called space-time” (2005: 33).

According to Overbye, Einstein’s general theory of relativity “led to a new conception of the cosmos, in which space-time could quiver, bend, rip, expand, swirl like a mix-master and even disappear forever into the maw of a black hole” (2019). While the theory of black holes emerged from his equations, Einstein himself remained reluctant to accept their existence, remaining a life-long sceptic of this aspect of the quantum revolution (Barad 2007: 104). Einstein’s general theory of relativity – the theory of gravity, space and time – does not account for the uncertainty principle4 and is thus itself not a quantum theory (Hawking 2005: 122). According to the general theory of relativity, one cannot travel in time. The world enacted in Dark, however, is a universe based on quantum entanglement. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between two kinds of science. They speak of an “eccentric science,” a “nomad science” that is different from the sciences “in the royal, imperial, or legal sense.” It is a science of flows, flux, and a different kind of consistency: “The model in question is one of becoming and heterogeneity, as opposed to the stable, the eternal, the identical, the constant” (1987: 361, 362). It is this kind of science, quantum physics, that asserts itself in Dark – a science of phenomena or events rather than a science of stable properties or stable substances.

Both in the cosmos and in Dark, spacetime is not a pre-existing, Newtonian, stable container; it is iteratively produced in the dynamic making and remaking of boundaries and exclusions. Dark meets the physicist-philosopher Karen Barad’s description of “intra-actions” as “the dynamics through which temporality and spatiality are produced and iteratively reconfigured in the materialization of phenomena and the (re)making of material-discursive boundaries and their constitutive exclusions” (2007: 179). In Dark, topological questions of boundaries, connectivity, interiority and exteriority abound. For the understanding of time, the issue is not merely that time and space are relative in Einstein’s sense, but rather that intra-active relations iteratively reconfigure space and time. This material reconfiguration is part of the fearful suspense and mystery of Dark, posing questions of acute contemporary relevance – questions about identity, denial, agency, responsibility and accountability – in an ongoing reconfiguration of the real and the possible, the visible and the invisible.

2 Haecceities: Rain, Hail, Wind and Pestilential Air

Both Deleuze and Guattari, as well as Dark, are interested in the creative potentialities of black holes.5 The former speak of black holes as “keys that open or close an assemblage, a territory” (1987: 334). In Dark, black holes allow time travel and thus form the catalysts for an assemblage of years and space. Questioning the Western epistemological tradition’s binary distinction between material and semiotic components,6 between (nonhuman) nature and (human) culture, as well as conventional notions of causality, Dark enacts an ongoing flow of agency and a making of spacetime that cyclically links and iteratively reconfigures four different time periods or related “events” (from 1953 to 2052), each 33 years apart. Each of the years featured in Dark is a milieu in Deleuze’s and Guattari’s sense, “a block of space-time constituted by the periodic repetition of the component.” For Deleuze and Guattari, “one milieu serves as the basis for another,” a process that they refer to as “transcoding” or “transduction” (1987: 313).7

The topology of connected years in Dark: the howling winds and the rain, the forest and caves of Winden, along with nuclear radiation, are more than mere metaphors, more than merely supplementary, decorative backgrounds that situate human subjects. Instead, the multiple nonhuman and human actants in Dark are haecceities or events in Deleuze’s and Guattari’s sense. (The term haecceitas is borrowed from medieval philosophy; it concerns, among other things, the question of what we call ‘identity’.) Their description warrants quoting at length:

There is a mode of individuation very different from that of a person, subject, thing, or substance. We reserve the name haecceity for it. A season, a winter, a summer, an hour, a date have a perfect individuality lacking nothing, even though this individuality is different from that of a thing or a subject. They are haecceities in the sense that they consist entirely of relations of movement and rest between molecules or particles, capacities to affect and be affected. When demonology expounds upon the diabolical art of local movements and transports of affect, it also notes the importance of rain, hail, wind, pestilential air, or air polluted by noxious particles, favorable conditions for these transports. Tales must contain haecceities that are not simply emplacements, but concrete individuations that have a status of their own and direct the metamorphosis of things and subjects (1987: 261, emphasis in original).

One could well take this passage from A Thousand Plateaus, in which Deleuze and Guattari propose a posthuman and post-substantialist conceptualization of individuation, as a description of Dark. Haecceities enter into conjunction with each other in assemblages on what Deleuze and Guattari call the plane of consistency or composition. This plane “holds together” heterogenous elements (establishing consistency between disparate elements that were previously co-present or succeeded each other – 1987: 323, 330); it frees “variations of speeds and slownesses between movements in composition” (1987: 267). Dark is such an enactment of variations of speeds and slownesses between heterogeneous elements. According to Deleuze and Guattari, “[an] haecceity has neither beginning nor end, origin nor destination; it is always in the middle … It is a rhizome” (1987: 263). In Dark as well, time is rhizomatic. While the narrative starts in 2019, it soon intra-acts with other years, in an ambulant8 model that constitutes and expands space and time, a zigzagging in which the direction of the narrative varies endlessly. With its “gaps, detours, subterranean passages, stems, openings, traits, holes, etc.,” the cave system in Winden meets Deleuze’s and Guattari’s description of a rhizome (1987: 415).

3 The Unpredictability of Smooth Spaces: from Radioactivity to COVID-19

“Everything is connected” (“Alles is miteinander verbunden”) is the leitmotif of Dark. But is Dark unequivocally a multilinear system in Deleuze’s and Guattari’s sense, where “everything happens at once,” where “the line breaks free of the point of origin,” where “the transversal breaks free of the diagonal as a localizable connection between two points” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 297)? On the one hand, given its references to Greek tragedy and its emphasis on inevitability or its allusions to Christian predestination, Dark provides a “striated” space where movement-matter is organized on a linear, chronological timeline, “produc[ing] an order and succession of distinct forms” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 478). Deleuze and Guattari quote the French composer Pierre Boulez, who “says that in a smooth space-time one occupies without counting, whereas in a striated space-time one counts in order to occupy” (1987: 477). The intertwined, but “fixed” years in Dark help occupy, territorialize, a striated space-time, a “long-distance vision.” The 33-year cycles arguably establish what Deleuze and Guattari call an “invariance of distance through an interchange of inertial points of reference” that is typical of striation. These points of reference or years are inertial because they – the past, present or future – ultimately cannot be changed. In striated spaces, these points are “interlink[ed] by immersion in an ambient milieu,” here the city of Winden and its caves. In addition to this central location, the protagonist, Jonas, provides the central perspective required by a striated space (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 494).

The anxiety that pervades Dark, however, indicates that the flows and variation of matter persist in the series, that they have not been completely warded off by the “constancy and eternity” of a striated space (Deleuze 1987: 496). In fact, during the first two seasons of Dark, the central characters in Dark arguably all struggle in their own ways against smooth spaces/change. In addition to elements of striation, however, Dark also enacts a “smooth” or nomad space, a space of non-subjectified, depersonalized affects, events and haecceities “occupied by intensities, wind and noise, forces, and sonorous and tactile qualities,” a patchwork where we follow the flow of cosmic energy-matter through “local linkages between parts” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 496), in a movement or process that is “alive as a continuous variation,” constantly changing direction, becoming “perpetual, without aim or destination, without departure or arrival” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:497–8). In Dark, the local linkage between parts is provided by the underground Gate that allows time travel. The series’ affect is co-created and reinforced by the production of disturbing sounds reminiscent of the French playwright Antonin Artaud’s synesthetic theatre of cruelty. Not only is Dark a series about (nuclear) energy; it also enacts a related, affective energy or contagion, one could say as its method, bridging the gap between perception/experience/expression and representation.

Recalling Artaudian atmospherics as well as the convergence in Romantic literature of cosmic elements (the weather) and events affecting humans, it is raining heavily and constantly in the fictional German town of Winden, where Dark is set. The series’ title, of course, also pre-announces the material-discursive (physical and metaphorical) importance of light and darkness and of their impact on the series’ tonality. In the summer of 1986, a half-year after Chernobyl, an accident at the nuclear facility in Winden, while covered up by its directors, sets off the gravitational wave impulses9 that cause a black hole/wormhole, setting in action the central plot of Dark. This gravitational effect on nearby objects or on light passing by explains why flashlights will not function dependably in the proximity of the caves of Winden, which include areas of the local nuclear plant where radioactive waste was stored. The “violent jet of energy” and the “intense pressures and magnetic fields” (Overbye 2019) unleashed on all sides by matter’s falling into black holes could also explain the winds’ howling through the forests and caves of Winden to much atmospheric effect. The nuclear warning signs visible everywhere in the forest around Winden co-produce the ominous tonality of the series.10

In Dark, space-time is both striated and smooth, a Deleuzoguattarian body without organs,11 “always swinging between the surfaces that stratify it and the plane that sets it free” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 161). In the body without organs, Deleuze and Guattari write, “life tears itself free from the organic by a permutating, stationary whirlwind” (1987: 499). The winds that spring up when the Gate in the caves beneath Winden is opened, the passage or flow of matter between years, is what creates a smooth space12 in Dark. Does the series then “sufficiently change the general conditions of space and time perception,” to the extent that characters and viewers “can succeed in passing through the holes in the world and following … lines of flight” (French fuite, fleeing) in Deleuze’s and Guattari’s sense (1987: 286)?13 Does Dark meet the scientific requirements of quantum physics as well as those of Deleuzoguattarian philosophy?

Deleuze and Guattari remind us that “the air, the sea, or even the earth” are smooth spaces, open spaces with vortices, movements that have nothing measured or cadenced, where variation can arise at any moment (1987: 363–4). The radioactive spaces of Dark and the air carrying a deadly virus in the current global pandemic are smooth spaces in this sense. The unpredictability of the vortical movement – a vortex that marks both Dark and our world in the times of COVID-19 – contributes to its affective impact. While Deleuze and Guattari are interested in the creative, expressive possibilities of smooth spaces, they remind us that, as is evident in our current predicament, “smooth spaces are not in themselves liberatory … Never believe that a smooth space will suffice to save us” (1987: 500). As Deleuze and Guattari point out, lines of flight (escape, leaking, vanishing into the distance – rather than flying), “always risk abandoning their creative potentialities and turning into a line of death, being turned into a line of destruction pure and simple (fascism)” (Deleuze 1987: 506).14 The threat of fascism and destruction is also present in Dark.15 What we were witnessing in the U.S. in 2020 and early 2021 – in the combination of an acute medical crisis and ineffective, tendentially totalitarian political leadership – was a smooth space potentially turning into a line of destruction pure and simple.

4 The Eternal Return: Deleuzian Contagion

Dark presents spatiotemporality as a circle, explicitly in reference to Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence of the same, in which the present and the future seem to be able to mutually influence each other. The series’ characters are able to move forward and back on a processual network of interconnected years. In Einstein’s theory as well, “[t]he single quantity ‘time’ melts into a spiderweb of times … The world [is] a network of events affecting each other” (Rovelli 2018: 16). The German-Austrian logician Kurt Gődel as well realized that “advancing always toward the future, one can return to the same point in spacetime … In this way, a continuous trajectory toward the future returns to the originating event” (Rovelli 2018: 53).

Dark is centrally structured around a 33-year cycle, the lunar-solar cycle in which “everything repeats” (“dass sich alles wiederholt”) (S1: E5). A lunar year has approximately 354 days. A solar year has 365 days. Over the course of 33 years, there will thus be a difference of one year between solar and lunar calendars. In purely lunar calendars like the Islamic calendar, the lack of intercalation causes the lunar months to cycle through all the seasons of the Gregorian year over the course of a 33 lunar-year cycle (Lee 2018). After 33 years, the seasonal change then starts to repeat again. At this point, as Charlotte explains in Dark’s S1: E8, all stars are again in the same position.

In Nietzsche and Philosophy, however, Deleuze argues that Nietzsche in fact denies (in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 1883) that “the eternal return is a circle which makes the same return” (Deleuze 1983: ix–xii, 4, 15, 151). In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze writes: “The ultimate element of repetition is the disparate [dispars], which stands opposed to the identity of representation” (1994: 57). Rather than identity or sameness, Deleuze argues, Nietzsche’s return embraces the disparate. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari furthermore reference Nietzsche’s idea of the eternal return as “a little ditty, a refrain, but which captures the mute and unthinkable forces of the Cosmos” (1987:343). Dark is driven by disparate cosmic forces, forces that include time and space.

Spatiotemporality, or what Deleuze and Guattari call “speed(s),” becomes the major actant in Dark, a force that sweeps up the human characters and everything else. Deleuze associates Nietzsche’s work with the time modality aeon. In contrast to chronos (“the time of measure that situates things and persons, develops a form, and determines a subject”), this impersonal mode of temporality is also enacted in Dark:

the indefinite time of the event, the floating line that knows only speeds and continually divides that which transpires into an already-there that is at the same time not-yet-here, a simultaneous too-late and too-early, a something that is both going to happen and has just happened (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 262).

The plane enacted in Dark is a desubjectified, depersonalized plane of “nonvoluntary transmutation,” “[a] strange machine that is simultaneously a machine of war … and contagion-proliferation-involution [involution as dissolution of form – opposed to evolution]” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 269, 270). Contagion, in other words, is more than a thematic element or representation in Dark; it is a material process of agency, a “style” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 318–9) that enters into conjunction with a nonlinear mode of temporality, with “speeds and slownesses, movement and rest” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 270) on the plane of consistency of variation.

The two planes that Deleuze and Guattari discuss, the immanent plane of consistency and the “stratified” plane of organization or development/ transcendence, are in constant interaction; in spite of Deleuze’s and Guattari’s preference for the former, both planes are necessary:

so much caution is needed to prevent the plane of consistency from becoming a pure plane of abolition or death, to prevent the involution from turning into a regression to the undifferentiated. Is it not necessary to retain a minimum of strata, a minimum of forms and functions,16 a minimal subject from which to extract materials, affects, and assemblages? (1987: 270)

Not held in check by striation, the plane of consistency can regress into undifferentiation and death. Is the antagonist Adam’s goal in Dark – his goal of halting human suffering and time – an excess of striation, or is it located on a plane of abolition or death, a regression to the undifferentiated? Would this regression stop the process of desire that is Deleuze’s and Guattari’s “becoming”?17 Or is it Adam’s goal to simply uproot feelings from the interiority of a subject, to leave nothing but a “pure exteriority” (Deleuze 1987: 356), a depersonalized affect? Although the viewer identifies with the characters’ (and in particular the protagonist Jonas’) fears, Adam’s goal is a depersonalization of emotions and the complete stoppage of time to the point of every character’s death (S2: E8). In Dark, Adam wants to do away with human desire and end the flow of time and pain. Deleuze, on the other hand, it is important to note, associates the biblical Adam with quantum flows, deterritorialization, decoding and lines of flight (1987: 223).

In contrast to the materials, affects and assemblages that flow in Dark on a plane of consistency of variation, the “subjects, forms, resemblances between subjects” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 272) are on the plane of organization or development. Dark refers to the inevitability that typifies Greek tragedy and that also marks the proximity of a black hole. Once matter is inside the black hole’s horizon, moving into the hole becomes inevitable. In contrast to the temporal modality that is aeon, chronos, a temporality that seems anything but random, is also present in Dark’s highly developed, often symmetrical formal structure, in its geometrical proportionalities and analogies. The structural repetitions in the series are a human imposition of order/striation onto the cosmic forces of chaos.

Replacing traditional notions of causality with “the richness and complexity of causal relations in physics” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 431), Dark also cuts between years in a non-linear, associative manner. Quantum mechanics is based on the uncertainty principle, which stipulates that “events cannot be predicted with complete accuracy: there is always a degree of uncertainty” (Hawking 2005: 134–5). The interplay between inevitability and uncertainty is central to Dark.

The physicist Rovelli states: “The difference between past and future, between cause and effect, between memory and hope, between regret and intention … in the elementary laws that describe the mechanisms of the world, there is no such difference” (2018: 21). Trained in quantum physics, Barad similarly writes: “The past matters and so does the future, but the past is never left behind, never finished once and for all, and the future is not what will come to be in an unfolding of the present moment; rather the past and the future are enfolded participants in matter’s iterative becoming” (2007: 181). In Dark, there is no linear causality moving only in one direction. Past, present, and future are enfolded in a common iterative becoming.18

5 Anthropocentrism and Beyond

Human characters are central to Dark, foremost among them the protagonist, Jonas Kahnwald; but Dark is also driven by nonhuman “characters” or actants, including most prominently spacetime itself and time travel through wormholes. First theorized in 1916, wormholes or Einstein-Rosen bridges are hypothetical/calculable shortcuts across the universe directly through curved spacetime.19 One of the drawings on a character’s, the Stranger’s, walls in his hotel room shows a wormhole. But we also learn in the series that Einstein and Rosen have “overlooked something” (S1: E8). As the series’ scientist, Tannhaus, tells us, they have overlooked the co-extensiveness of past, present and future (S1: E8). Enacting the theme of symmetry, the Introduction to Dark consists entirely of visual symmetries, and the series centrally enacts plot and character symmetries. Characters look alike; they lead double lives; motifs and images recur.

As a human illusion, time as we know it, however, is “inherent to subjectivity” (Rovelli 2018: 186–7). Limited human perception and memory – our anticipation, our weak attempts at changing the course of time or at keeping change at bay – are the source of our suffering (Rovelli 2018: 190–1). Not only can our limited human vision not accurately perceive that there is no inherent difference between past, present and future; in the physical world, space and time are not things: “ours is a world of events rather than of things” (Rovelli 2018: 195). By necessity, a philosophy of phenomena and events replaces the physics and philosophy of static substances. While the spiderweb of interconnected years and time travel are the result of a nuclear accident in Dark, an objective indeterminacy and indistinguishability of past, present and future seem in fact part of the fundamental functioning of the universe.

Dark also enacts the close physical link between energy and spacetime and the second law of thermodynamics. According to the second law of thermodynamics, when energy changes from one form to another form, or when matter moves freely, entropy (disorder) in a closed system increases. The history of the cosmos is characterized by an increase in entropy. Rovelli explains this “halting and leaping cosmic growth of entropy” by using the image of opening a door. The slow, cosmic growth of entropy only occurs “when something opens a door upon a process that finally allows entropy to increase. The growth of entropy itself happens to open new doors through which entropy can increase further” (2018: 163–4). Rovelli includes nuclear fission – the central problem of Dark – in this cosmic history: “The ignition of nuclear fission opens the door that allows the further increase in entropy: Hydrogen burning into helium” (2018: 164). These “doors,” whether Rovelli’s or the fictive door (the Gate in the Winden caves) that allows time travel in Dark, establish a relationality, a network of processes, that create change and disorder. The characters in Dark try in various ways to reverse this entropy and to (re)create order.

The only difference between the past and the future thus has to do with the lower entropy of the past. Events only leave traces, that is, stop moving, in a process that is in fact irreversible: the degradation of heat into energy (Rovelli 2018: 167). Since this process is irreversible, the past can then ultimately not be changed. In Dark, Ulrich cannot prevent his son’s fate, and Jonas cannot change the future (by helping Mikkel return) without erasing his own future. The fact that, after the end of Season 1, fans of Dark were eagerly awaiting the second season (which started on June 21, 2019) to flesh out what would exactly happen in 2052, kept certain conceptualizations of futurity, continuity and direction alive. The German Trailer for Season 2 ended with: “Die Apocalypse muss kommen” (“The apocalypse must come,” cf. also S2: E1). As we have seen, however, perspectival perceptions or impositions of temporal (linear) order have more to do with humans’ physical limitations and limited interaction with the world (Rovelli 2018: 196) than they do with the processes and forces of the universe.

Another key discovery accomplished by the quantum revolution, a discovery that connects to our contemporary situation in the Anthropocene and in the midst of the current pandemic, is indeterminacy. It is not possible to predict exactly where any event – including spacetime, as event – will take place. Like a contagious virus, in other words, spacetime has no precise position and fluctuates between different probable configurations. As a result, Rovelli states, “an event may be both before and after another one” (Rovelli 2018: 88). In Dark, the Stranger unintentionally creates the wormhole that is then already present in previous years; the building of the time machine, as well, is a paradox undoing any sequentiality between original and copy. Instead of being pre-given, an event becomes concrete, is realized only in relation to the other events with which it is intra-acting. In quantum mechanics, a focus on processes and temporary events and forces thus replaces a physics and philosophy based on pre-given substances and determined attributes (Rovelli 2018: 87–91).20 Does Dark ultimately enact this most radical discovery of quantum physics? The question that all the characters in Dark try to answer is: Is reality malleable or does it coalesce from the past according to unchangeable laws?

Representing time as entangled in an agential material environment that reverberates with many insights of Deleuzian, new materialist philosophy, Dark presents not only humans but also nonhuman materiality as agential forces. Like the novel coronavirus, the physical phenomena enacted in Dark are nonhuman actants in a material universe. The central nonhuman threat (in Dark, nuclear contagion) is, like climate change, correctly identified as having been ultimately caused by humans, however, as the material price humans pay for their Faustian pacts.

During its first two seasons, Dark does run the risk of not going beyond an anthropocentric problematic. Although it represent humans’ self- or subject-based attempts to change fate as ultimately fruitless, the very suspense of the series is nevertheless based on the hope that they will be able to do so after all (and defeat a supernaturally-tinged “evil”). Although everything is connected and continuous in Dark, the portrayal of Jonas Kahnwald as an heroic human character (with Christ-like traits) ultimately remains within the identity/ subject confines of anthropocentrism. It seems that what the new materialist, posthumanist philosopher Rosi Braidotti calls “an ethics of eco-philosophical empathy and affectivity which cuts across species, space and time” (2006: 156) ultimately still eludes Dark.

Nevertheless, Dark offers us much to think about. What we witness in Dark is indeed close to what Braidottti describes as “the recurrence of difference in successive waves of repeated, successive and excessive becomings, in which ‘I’ participates and gets formatted, whereas Zoe acts as the motor” (2006: 157). Like zoe, the impersonal life force, spacetime is not just a setting, but indeed an actor, a motor in Dark. The series’ main question remains, however: “Was ist der Mensch? Woher kommt er?” (S1: E9) (“What is man? Where does he come from?”) What are the characters’ true identities and what is the role of humans? Do humans retain freedom of choice, or are we utterly subject to the inevitable circularity of time? Rather than simply echoing this false dichotomy (a dualism in fact resolved, together with all other dualisms, in the third season of Dark), the present article poses a different question: Is the philosophy that structures Dark an epistemology based on human subjectivity or a process ontology in which forms are not produced by subjects and where phenomena in play “find their individuation in the assemblage of which they are a part, independent of the form of their concept and the subjectivity of their person” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 264)? Deleuze himself warns us that “no flow, no becoming-molecular escapes from a molar formation without molar components accompanying it, forming passages or perceptible landmarks for the imperceptible processes” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 303). The formal striations described and the years and characters that structure Dark are arguably such necessary, molar, territorialized landmarks. “But,” Deleuze and Guattari write, “these territorialized functions and forces can suddenly take on an autonomy that makes them swing over into other assemblages, compose other deterritorialized assemblages” (1987: 325). The imperceptible processes or molecular becomings that pass between coordinates or assemblages – effecting deterritorialization, change and continuous variation in a smooth space – are the impersonal, more-than-human driving force of Dark.

While Season 1 presents the inherent link between time and space (“The question is not where but when”), the ending of Season 2 opens up to the potential existence of different worlds. A woman who looks like Martha (the woman Jonas loves, tragically) returns after Martha’s death and says to Jonas (who asks her from which time she is): “Die Frage ist nicht aus welcher Zeit, sondern aus welcher Welt” (“The question is not from which time, but from which world”) (S2: E8). Season 3, released in June 2020, then takes us to a more-than-human, posthuman world, to a multiverse in the sense of quantum mechanics’ Many Worlds model, which theorizes the existence of parallel realities.

In the final, third season of Dark, different time scales, characters, worlds, good and evil, become entangled to the point of becoming indistinguishable. The “origin” lies beyond the two worlds known previously, in a third dimension that goes beyond dualistic divisions. A Deleuzian, posthuman process ontology inspired by quantum physics replaces the anthropocentrism of Cartesian epistemology. Adam says to his younger self, Jonas: “Was wir wissen ist ein Tropfen. Was wir nicht wissen ein Ozean” (“What we know is a drop. What we don’t know is an ocean”) (S3: E8). Human knowledge and human time scales are not at the center, but are only a minute part of a much vaster and diverse, more-than-human cosmos.

References

1Cf. Deleuze 1987: 356.

2“[T]he spacetime of the quantum collapse of a black hole passes through a phase in which time fluctuates violently, there is a quantum superimposition of different times, and then, later, a return to a determined state after the explosion” (Rovelli 2018: 127).

3All translations are my own.

4For an explanation of the uncertainty principle, see Hawking’s: “The principle, formulated by Heisenberg, that it is not possible to be exactly sure of both the position and the velocity of a particle; the more accurately one is known, the less accurately the other can be known” (2005: 153).

5In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari assert that “it may be necessary for the release of innovative processes that they first fall into a catastrophic black hole: stases of inhibition are associated with the release of crossroads behaviors” (1987: 334).

6Cf. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 334, 337.

7“… not only does the living thing continually pass from one milieu to another, but the milieus pass into one another; they are essentially communicating. The milieus are open to chaos, which threatens them with exhaustion or intrusion. Rhythm is the milieu’s answer to chaos. What chaos and rhythm have in common is the in-between – between two milieus, rhythm-chaos or chaosmos … There is rhythm whenever there is a transcoded passage from one milieu to another, a communication of milieus, coordination between heterogeneous space-times … rhythm is critical: … it ties together critical moments, or ties itself together in passing from one milieu to another. It does not operate in a homogeneous space-time, but by heterogeneous blocks. It changes direction” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 313).

8Cf. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 372.

9“Gravitationswellenimpulse,” according to the scientist Tannhaus in S1: E8.

10The resemblance between the tripartite structure of the nuclear energy symbol and the triquetra symbol (from the Emerald Table) that is central to the series also shows the clear link between physics and mythology in Dark.

11Cf. Deleuze and Guattari: “the BwO is all of that: necessarily a Place, necessarily a Plane, necessarily a Collectivity (assembling elements, things, plants, animals, tools, people, powers, and fragments of all of these; for it is not ‘my’ body without organs, instead the ‘me’ (moi) is on it, or what remains of me, unalterable and changing in form, crossing thresholds” (1987: 161).

12Cf. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 505.

13Ironically, while Deleuze and Guattari associate black holes with stasis, black holes make nomadic movement or time travel possible in Dark.

14Cf. also Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 510.

15In a reference that might remind a German audience of the country’s national-socialist past, Noah says that his bunker “creates order” (“schafft Ordnung;” S1: E9). In this “ark,” in 1986, Noah conducts scientific experiments with time travel, killing children in the process. Noah says to Bartosz, whom he is trying to recruit for his efforts, that the end justifies the means (“Sieg erfordert Opfer.” “Victory requires sacrifice.” S1: E10) – a statement with obvious, historical connotations for a post-1945 German audience.

16Cf. Deleuze and Guattari: “causalities, hierarchies, and framings” (1987: 335).

17“Starting from the form one has, the subject one is, … or the functions one fulfills, becoming is to extract particles between which one establishes the relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness that are closest to what one is becoming, and through which one becomes. This is the sense in which becoming is the process of desire” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 272, emphasis in original).

18Cf. Deleuze and Guattari: “all history is really the history of perception, and what we make history with is the matter of a becoming, not the subject matter of a story. Becoming is like the machine: present in a different way in every assemblage, passing from one to the other, opening one onto the other, outside any fixed or determined sequence” (1987: 347).

19In 1935, Einstein and the physicist Nathan Rosen used the general theory of relativity to elaborate on the idea (Redd 2017). Dark refers to Einstein-Rosen bridges by name (S1: E8).

20Cf. Rovelli 2018: 50ff. and 2016: 17–8.