Towards the end of Terminator 2 the boy who is to lead the human resistance against the domination of the machines in the future ponders out loud how strange it is to know that his father has not yet even been born.
Let us be very clear about this strange development in the story: it involves a logic of causality that exceeds the mechanistic model we still carry in our heads. The shortsighted mechanistic model drove Newton to figure out the laws governing the motion of masses—their acceleration and transfer of force. Similarly, standard paternity can be seen under conventional mechanics in so far as a father (who necessarily precedes his son) comes together with a mother to produce an offspring.
But in the case of Terminator II, it is John Connor himself – already a veteran commander who selects his own father from among the ranks of his troops to go back and time and become his father so that he himself might exist. Thus, what we have here is a narrative which seems self-contained to such extent that its own Event governs the past and runs through past present and future with its Being and Becoming.
Here we come to understand that it is not so much that the effect is caused by a prior cause, but rather that an effect retroactively protects its own cause. In the case of John Connor, he retroactively determines his own conception. Thus it would seem that his own strength overruns the conventional status of the hero as a character who can protect others but not himself. In this case, it would seem that John Connor is the knot of contradictions who protects his own conception and stands over and beyond his own father. John Connor outlives his father in both temporal directions: both in that he is older (was born before his father), and survives his death. Thus, when the machines journey back into the past to try to murder John Connor’s mother, Sarah – not only do they fail, it is their very attempt to destroy him which allows John Connor to send back a soldier to protect his mother. This soldier becomes his father.
What we have here is a diagram of Development: a narrative unfolding such that the very struggles of the agents to defeat the other reveal the extent to which fate at once will not be bested, yet it only comes into being as a direct result of the attempts of the factions to change it.
John’s mother, Sarah – is similarly thwarted when, after a horrible nightmare in which she sees herself as a young mother and an infant John in a playground incinerated to shreds from a nuclear blast she decides to murder the man who is to develop the new microchip processor that shall enable the machines to achieve self-awareness. She hunts him down, riddling his home office with bullets. By chance, he finds cover, so Sarah tosses the machine gun aside and makes her way to shoot him at point-blank range. She finds his shoulder with her handgun and he is thrown to the ground, but his wife and small son interfere before she lands the coup de grace. She loses her resolve and falls to the floor shocked just as the terminator and her son rush in and take control of the situation.
After telling Dyson – this man most directly responsible, how he is at fault for 3 billion lives, they learn that his abandoning the project will not be enough to stop the development of the deadly technology. This is because Dyson mentions something about some super advanced chip kept locked away in the company’s vaults. Something of whose origins no one would ever speak. Sarah and the terminator immediately know that it must be the damaged microprocessor of the vanquished enemy terminator in the first movie. The incredible irony of course is that Dyson is responsible for very little – the event has produced its own architects: Dyson himself admits that this chip is the source of his innovations and their rapid progress. Meaning that both the attempts of the machines to change fate so much as the struggle of the humans is already inscribed into the story. They are just finding this out as they go along.
This means that the genesis of the terminator defies mechanistic cause. It is almost as if the necessity of judgment day retrospectively engineers the past to make the moment inescapable. Thus, the rule of the linear narrative is defeated – and linearity becomes a mere effect of human perception. Thus it is something we must transcend, going beneath the apparent sequential causality to the underneath which is texture bending towards some sublated moment which acts upon the fabric of space-time as the ripple effects of a stone tossed into water.
The Event of Judgment Day as a Model for the Event of Life
Can we not extend this model of causality to the supreme event – the genesis of life and the coming-into-being of humanity. Is this not analogous to the terminator – whose fateful moment is that of achieving self-awareness?
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