tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-40781988319684955892024-03-13T17:20:37.109-04:00culturemonkeyGerry Canavanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12821256718713645033noreply@blogger.comBlogger56125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4078198831968495589.post-33277884053957492692008-10-06T00:18:00.004-04:002008-10-06T00:46:17.735-04:00'Nature has the right to exist'<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3A90xkzCAQz8rpaViOHiRWIkcq5S0_d3ldWVfdS4h4CbyNY2Va-VZY5gortKmhsYJfC4T4jZkdqIpKpeixqMtBVtCVystb8PQThEcQD57N8pFWeF24iwKV4ihyphenhyphen-nNo8NZeYRYe2t6iN5w/s1600-h/Galapagos-bartolome-island.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3A90xkzCAQz8rpaViOHiRWIkcq5S0_d3ldWVfdS4h4CbyNY2Va-VZY5gortKmhsYJfC4T4jZkdqIpKpeixqMtBVtCVystb8PQThEcQD57N8pFWeF24iwKV4ihyphenhyphen-nNo8NZeYRYe2t6iN5w/s400/Galapagos-bartolome-island.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5253884308426285010" /></a><blockquote><b>Art. 1.</b> Nature or Pachamama, where life is reproduced and exists, has the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution.<br /><br /> Every person, people, community or nationality, will be able to demand the recognitions of rights for nature before the public organisms. The application and interpretation of these rights will follow the related principles established in the Constitution.</blockquote><b>With</b> <a href="http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/29/ecuador-constitution-grants-nature-rights/">the public ratification of its new constitution</a> last week, Ecuador has for the first time anywhere in history <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/sep/24/equador.conservation">granted inalienable rights to nature</a>. The new constitution also includes strict egalitarian provisions about <a href="http://us.oneworld.net/article/357819-new-constitution-recognizes-food-sovereignty-ecuador">food production</a>, <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601086&sid=asGB2FjVM84A&refer=latin_america">water access</a>, and <a href="http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=42235">protection for indigenous peoples and uncontacted tribes</a>.<br /><br />As the <i>Guardian</i> link makes clear, this unprecedented act stems in part from Ecuador's custodianship of the Galápagos Islands and in part from its long history of abuse at the hands of multinational corporations:<blockquote>The origins of this apparent legal tidal shift lie in Ecuador's growing disillusionment with foreign multinationals. The country, which contains every South American ecosystem within its borders, which include the Galapagos Islands, has had disastrous collisions with multi-national companies. Many, from banana companies to natural gas extractors, have exploited its natural resources and left little but pollution and poverty in their wake.<br /><br />Now it is in the grip of a bitter lawsuit against US oil giant Chevron, formerly Texaco, over its alleged dumping of billions of gallons of crude oil and toxic waste waters into the Amazonian jungle over two decades.<br /><br />It is described as the Amazonian Chernobyl, and 30,000 local people claim that up to 18m tonnes of oil was dumped into unlined pits over two decades, in defiance of international guidelines, and contaminating groundwater over an area of some 1,700 hectares (4,200 acres) and leading to a plethora of serious health problems for anyone living in the area. Chevron has denied the allegations. In April, a court-appointed expert announced in a report that, should Chevron lose, it would have to pay up to $16bn (£8.9bn) in damages.<br /><br />Chevron, which claims its responsibilities were absolved in 1992 when it handed over its operations in Ecuador to the state-owned extraction company, Petroecuador, immediately set about discrediting the report. A verdict on the case is still thought to be a long way off, and Ecuador's government could face US trade sanctions for its refusal to "kill" the case.</blockquote>It remains somewhat unclear what this law will mean in practice, especially in the context of a country <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Ecuador">whose economy is so heavily dependent on petroleum extraction</a>. However things shake out, though, this should be a fascinating test case for protection of the environment outside the failed paradigms of <a href="http://www.celdf.org/Default.aspx?tabid=548">property rights</a> on the one hand and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Securitization_(international_relations)">"securitization"</a> on the other.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7K_fpk8CGJAFfMEQ7ety2L2_-QyCHs1NoxKCVul7yoU2Nj8sRDdOBNPliWLgbBaAwUKgb3djnyZhjONJsKlXmAvCwUpZeR_5sX8ErL8pGZ0ncjhFp9rIxvB_zceEEck8Huq6HPta7n8LS/s1600-h/galapagos-tortoise.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7K_fpk8CGJAFfMEQ7ety2L2_-QyCHs1NoxKCVul7yoU2Nj8sRDdOBNPliWLgbBaAwUKgb3djnyZhjONJsKlXmAvCwUpZeR_5sX8ErL8pGZ0ncjhFp9rIxvB_zceEEck8Huq6HPta7n8LS/s400/galapagos-tortoise.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5253890120874306786" /></a>Here's the <a href="http://www.greenchange.org/article.php?id=3104">full text</a> of the relevant articles, including an intriguing bit of commentary that suggests a codified right to <a href="http://climateprogress.org/2008/09/25/gore-calls-for-civil-disobedience-to-stop-coal-but-will-he-lead-like-gandhi-and-king/">civil disobedience in defense of the environment</a>: <i>“Public organisms” in Article 1 means the courts and government agencies, i.e., the people of Ecuador would be able to take action to enforce nature rights if the government did not do so.</i><br /><br />There's <a href="http://www.metafilter.com/75251/Ecuador-has-a-new-constitution">still more</a> at MeFi. This has received almost no press in the States, but it's an amazing and very important development, definitely worth keeping your eyes on.<br /><br /><i>(cross-posted at <a href="http://gerrycanavan.blogspot.com/2008/10/ecuadors-new-constitution-grants.html">gerrycanavan.blogspot.com</a>)</i><div class="blogger-post-footer"><br/><a href="http://culturemonkey.blogspot.com">http://culturemonkey.blogspot.com</a></div>Gerry Canavanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12821256718713645033noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4078198831968495589.post-13120346790708135692008-08-03T13:28:00.036-04:002008-08-06T20:29:29.750-04:00Heroes We Deserve<a style="font-family: arial;" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivGGhCfqveoN3yYCJYAWsOyUrP0_qPTj4N0iLDohAv0jpzGUfYKNYy7b1reKazPh270o5k0gknjVQnSVghKBwYCy9qRLku7oBhA6qBT_h8fKuaW1fqIk9ejUISa6a9HgYnVaXqxYi5QoYb/s1600-h/batman_13.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivGGhCfqveoN3yYCJYAWsOyUrP0_qPTj4N0iLDohAv0jpzGUfYKNYy7b1reKazPh270o5k0gknjVQnSVghKBwYCy9qRLku7oBhA6qBT_h8fKuaW1fqIk9ejUISa6a9HgYnVaXqxYi5QoYb/s400/batman_13.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5231557031288769954" border="0" /></a>As the <a style="font-family: arial;" href="http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080804/howard">critics</a><span style="font-family:arial;"> </span><a style="font-family: arial;" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/24/movies/24supe.html?_r=3&ref=movies&oref=slogin&oref=slogin&oref=slogin">note</a><span style="font-family:arial;">, </span>we are currently at what seems to be a peak in the production of high-grossing, critically acclaimed superhero blockbusters -- a saturation point, perhaps, of a longue durée that dates from 1989 with Burton's Batman.*After one notable lapse in major studio backing following the humiliating failure of the first Batman franchise, Hollywood figured out something important: the former objects of camp no longer presuppose the<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;font-family:arial;" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal; line-height: 19px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: normal;"> <a href="http://interglacial.com/%7Esburke/pub/prose/Susan_Sontag_-_Notes_on_Camp.html">camp</a> </span></span></span>sensibility<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;font-family:arial;" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal; line-height: 19px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: normal;">.</span></span></span> Scanning the reviews for the Burton/Schumacher series as its latent eccentricities blossomed into a hornier, MTV version of the '60s television show, one finds a rising chorus of demands for something "darker," "edgier," "more adult," a resistance and even revulsion for the franchise's aestheticized distance from its material. Overreacting to complaints from parents over excessive violence, Warner Bros. amped up the camp in spite of agonized critics and fanboys, who at the time were reading a lot of Frank Miller and Alan Moore. Even in that first film, the "darkest" of the four, Jack's Joker was "too over the top," Beetlejuice as Batman too "weird" and "wimpy." <div><br /></div><div>Never say Hollywood can't learn from its mistakes. The producers have figured out how to please everyone: maintain earnestness regardless of the inherent absurdity of the genre, be 'topical' by way of empty allegory, be spectacularly violent, never stop moralizing. Meet these requirements, and a great deal of variety is possible: one has free reign to be jokey or serious, bright or gloomy, undisguisedly sexist, racist, homophobic, or none of the above, 'critical,' or 'wish fulfillment.' Or all of the above. These labels are simply not the creator's responsibility. Restore the superhero's propaganda function, in short, and in so doing prove Sontag's thesis that "pure camp" is always so for the future and not the present.** The comic book-loving nerds of my generation are now faced with the dubious realization of our pubescent dreams: the nerds have taken over Hollywood, and the responsibility thus falls to the Figure of the Superhero to 'teach us' something about the "<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal; line-height: 19px;font-family:arial;" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: normal;font-family:Georgia;" ><a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/reviews/movie/16155928/review/21477208/the_dark_knight">human condition.</a>"<br /><br /></span></span></span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhs8EqsXFNFlpTxjFz8CEL8IUxTXs2owQt1_9FDyx7f1EkKQ7t31NhuSDPClN6oSCFOUZ9FI4GmwwhAK2PUJoQ-pwTPzAopm4SUTJ1AXWLRCV6JZuLtHLGDXwTRYPYU5OicW9epoyaMxTN8/s1600-h/double.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhs8EqsXFNFlpTxjFz8CEL8IUxTXs2owQt1_9FDyx7f1EkKQ7t31NhuSDPClN6oSCFOUZ9FI4GmwwhAK2PUJoQ-pwTPzAopm4SUTJ1AXWLRCV6JZuLtHLGDXwTRYPYU5OicW9epoyaMxTN8/s400/double.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5231556295877087282" border="0" /></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal; line-height: 19px;font-family:arial;" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: normal;font-family:Georgia;" ><br /></span></span></span></div><div>Pairing up the summer's two most critically and commercially successful entries: <span style="font-style: italic;">Iron Man </span>and <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Dark Knight, </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="">is instructive. <a href="http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080602/turse">One</a> or <a href="http://www.nypress.com/21/29/film/ArmondWhite.cfm">two</a> </span>professional critics noticed the balls-out obvious apologies for the authoritarian, repressive 'excesses' of global capitalism, but the vast majority of the critical and popular response made me feel like I was in a bad parodic update of 1984 -- of the very few who bothered to address the films' unavoidable (or so I thought) pseudopolitics, the<span class="Apple-style-span" style=""> <a href="http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/film_review.asp?ID=3775">smart</a> </span>ones and the <span class="Apple-style-span" style=""><a href="http://online.wsj.com/public/article_print/SB121694247343482821.html">dumb </a></span>ones alike seemed generally pleased. </div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div>Neoliberal assumptions (avowed or disavowed) are typical for the output of most mainstream cinematic and critical output these days, and it's usually not even worth mentioning in the individual case. I bring up superhero movies in this context because they're just so open about it. And yet a liberal media that would spend half the day spitting on Bush and the evils of multinational corporations can spend the other half hyperbolically puffing a movie that shares, in exaggerated form, the contorted view of reality demonstrated every day by these institutions, some of which produced the films.<br /><br />What I suspect underlies the general tolerant attitude towards their content is the comforting but kind of really unlikely and unfounded assumption that corporate mass entertainment expresses <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">collective</span> desires -- even that it does so <span style="font-style: italic;">better </span>than a production financed independently. We are then able to rationalize objectionable content. The curiously archaic gender roles -- the women of <span style="font-style: italic;">IM</span> and <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">TDK </span>essentially spend the entire movie trying to decide who to screw -- are of a kind with the racial politics -- witness <span style="font-style: italic;">IM</span>'s moronic (and casually incinerated) Arab barbarians and their helpless Arab victims, <span style="font-style: italic;">TDK</span>'s Asian menace, its blacks whose humanity is dependent on their obedience to legitimate authority (the ferryboat prisoner's conscience is portrayed as spiritually profound while all the Joker needs to do to make two gangsters fight to the death, which we see them prepared to do on all fours, is drop a stick and say 'go'): they must be ironic, or 'really' a clever auto-critique. As chabert describes <a href="http://lecolonelchabert.blogspot.com/2008/08/culturecamp.html">here</a>, the meaning of what we see is deferred to a menu of metaphysical choices provided by the film itself -- positioning ourselves in relation to these ambiguously warring 'philosophies' is what gives the calculatedly shocking imagery its significance for us as individual viewers. But one need not approach the film in anything like an intellectual way, analysis is optional. Should one be unable or unwilling to process an image or <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0371746/quotes">line </a>of <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0468569/quotes">dialogue</a>, an alibi is always in play for shrugging it off as a completely meaningless special effect: "it's just a comic book movie, man."<br /><br />Superhero movies are ideal for this sort of operation because they are what we might call post-genre. As A.O. Scott writes in the second linked article at the top of this post, their 'laws' are <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjA0JPpRIInotvI737iMx-Qo-n1toFRmHoPM27dx4oyrzKvhoQIFIbVsBPSp5l-xyfimqpvIRz9AE9RwwKtTiDjnpEfYHwB4y32sZlu1v4Wgppc6eLweppL1uSGVeiCwrrZ9u9KLKD7Gm2v/s1600-h/ironmaskzzj4.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjA0JPpRIInotvI737iMx-Qo-n1toFRmHoPM27dx4oyrzKvhoQIFIbVsBPSp5l-xyfimqpvIRz9AE9RwwKtTiDjnpEfYHwB4y32sZlu1v4Wgppc6eLweppL1uSGVeiCwrrZ9u9KLKD7Gm2v/s320/ironmaskzzj4.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5231558836934912002" border="0" /></a>the abstract ones of the corporate PG-13 'blockbuster.' A hero is born, develops into an ideal self-image, inherits fortune along with an inevitable enemy who must be defeated via increasingly lengthy, bloodless explosions, etc. Given those requirements, all existing genres are fair game. <span style="font-style: italic;">IM</span> is a little bit science fiction, a little bit <span style="font-style: italic;">Top Gun/Iron Eagle</span>, visual borrowings from mecha anime, splash of romcom patter, pinch of <span style="font-style: italic;">Jackass</span> (in a couple faux-amateur handicam shots of Stark hurting himself while testing his military hardware). These elements are not so much blended as they are thrown together, so that the film shifts around spastically in tone and style despite the grinding forward motion of its 3-act machine. <span style="font-style: italic;">TDK </span><span style="">labors under</span><span style=""> a more consistent directorial hand, but its plot structure is similarly incoherent. About the only stabilizing force available for readings of either film comes from its foregrounded ideological formulas, which are both horrendous, but as I said earlier, optional, the films keeping themselves 'open' for more 'complex' interpretations.</span> They're for kids <span style="font-style: italic;">and</span> adults.<br /><br />The apparent openness of interpretation is more true of <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">TDK</span> than <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">IM</span>, since most of the latter's<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhT_Bz2r9kHqP4tiGiSoUvVezovUBR6p1nBiQRXRXQKnuhdJJnmpxJvPtKODW45Q0QoH1_3hjIwcRuNexr6p7jFSR2WR9JMDTBNvC4FoIYEp9cabkZVvE8pLPMlr6Z_4qoGcojzyutEli5h/s1600-h/ironman3.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhT_Bz2r9kHqP4tiGiSoUvVezovUBR6p1nBiQRXRXQKnuhdJJnmpxJvPtKODW45Q0QoH1_3hjIwcRuNexr6p7jFSR2WR9JMDTBNvC4FoIYEp9cabkZVvE8pLPMlr6Z_4qoGcojzyutEli5h/s320/ironman3.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5231555901134434050" border="0" /></a> appeal is predicated on us being charmed by Robert Downey Jr. We watch him progress from bad-boy pop star captain of the military industrial complex to good corporate citizen, with a heart of liquid fusion (or something like that). In the comments of the post above, chabert remarks on the unreconstructed '40s era mores assumed without irony by a number of recent mass entertainments. I would have said '50s, as it seems clear to me that fantasy today is determined by its reaction to crisis; that decade's tropes, the power of technology despite (and even because of) recognized dangers, the insecure overstatement of moral and political superiority over monstrous enemies, the total subordination of women and 'minorities,' have been cropping up all over the place, from the queasy nostalgia of David Lynch to their seamless blend with 'realism' in <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">IM</span> and <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">TDK</span>. As <a href="http://blog.voyou.org/2008/07/27/our-other-1950s/">Voyou</a> writes, we seem to be experiencing a "repetition-as-farce of the '50s" in a number of areas, an experience perhaps of the failed realization of an older dream of the future.<br /><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">IM </span>views the War on Terror and the energy crisis through 1950s-colored glasses, much like the original '60s character did for Vietnam and the rise of multinational corporations; its solution is to take the heroic-yet-faustian scientist figure out of his lab coat and literally meld him with the product of his alienated labor, only conceivable if he is also a capitalist. The film never stops playing up his <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">personal </span>power, making him out to be a hip pop mogul a la Steve Jobs. We see, however, that this flashy, superficial power is predicated on some major blind spots in his consciousness (i.e. his weapons are used to kill people). His path to true power (and moral vindication) is to master his personal limits. He builds his own Iron Man outfit, he completely binds his company to himself by rooting out the Jew-Arab conspiracy initiated by his co-CEO (not kidding, also his name is Obadiah), he shifts his company's business away from weapons (which can be 'misused') to privatized renewable energy (which clearly can't). He ends in a position of absolute control of his much-enlarged personal effects, the power journey going hand-in-hand with the moral journey, a necessary connection demonstrated by Stark scrupulously avoiding 'collateral damage' while blowing up Genghis Khan-quoting Arab terrorists, generating clean energy (the same substance that powers his heart!), and resisting the urge to pull a Mr. B on Gwyneth Paltrow's ingenue secretary. Once all these trials are completed, we get the basic difference between <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">IM</span> and <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">TDK</span> -- Stark can 'come out' as Iron Man. Maximum power=<a href="http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1828069,00.html">maximum accountability</a> -- though retaining secret paramilitary backup just in case -- in other words, the old Clintonian boom years restored.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5UYuVIMpNk7dRTtrdCdqraQF0FIfiDYWAa-2Xheh61rTnPek6fgkcj6jGb5B-5xuYlSsMZEdPKnNrsGO9sKm4H-vb7haWqTxQFpYKVt5lXT8ANrngy1e2o9dNHhb8TnJ0G5sF52VVP_nM/s1600-h/yearone.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5UYuVIMpNk7dRTtrdCdqraQF0FIfiDYWAa-2Xheh61rTnPek6fgkcj6jGb5B-5xuYlSsMZEdPKnNrsGO9sKm4H-vb7haWqTxQFpYKVt5lXT8ANrngy1e2o9dNHhb8TnJ0G5sF52VVP_nM/s400/yearone.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5231557816991293634" border="0" /></a><br /></div><div>Padraig notes in the comments <a href="http://leninology.blogspot.com/2008/08/i-dont-believe-in-harvey-dent.html">here</a> that Bruce Wayne's buyout of his own company (his repression of finance capital) makes him an old-school conservative, not a neoliberal. Stark does the same thing. So they are both, in a reactionary way, skeptical about capitalism (aren't we all). <span style="font-style: italic;">IM</span> is organized around the fantasy that military power and accountability (and personability, charm) can and indeed must be seamlessly blended through a reassertion of natural and ethical limits, but <span style="font-style: italic;">TDK</span> is structured by a series of interlocking thought experiments, the universalization of predetermined binary 'choices.' The film's much-vaunted 'shades of grey' are an effect of the complex 'moral calculus' needed to function in such a constrained environment, where you can't even blow up one little apartment building without elaborate justification, a challenge which mirrors the intellectual effort necessary to take this movie as seriously as its critics seem to. That it is considered more "serious" than <span style="font-style: italic;">IM</span> -- <span style="font-style: italic;">IM</span> is a "guilty pleasure" or an "entertaining romp," <span style="font-style: italic;">TDK</span> is a "pulp epic" of "boundless imagination" -- is evidence of the stronger cultural cache of deterministic 'pessimism.' We're presented with a bunch of high-powered decision-makers with entertainingly conflicting and destructive worldviews, not necessarily as points of identification (we're shown that Batman, the Joker, and Two-Face are all irresponsible assholes) but as points of departure for our own analysis. I'm reminded of a wikiquote from Slavoj Žižek colonizer of academia for the pop culture machine:<br /><b></b><blockquote><b>Žižek:</b> Yes, and the age of philosophy in the sense again that we are confronted more and more often with philosophical problems at an everyday level. It is not that you withdraw from daily life into a world of philosophical contemplation. On the contrary, you cannot find your way around daily life itself without answering certain philosophical questions. It is a unique time when everyone is, in a way, forced to be some kind of philosopher.</blockquote>Beyond the 'entertainment value' of things blowing up on huge IMAX screens, beyond the collector's appeal of the pop cultural references, the only value of these movies is equivalent to their ideological function: that we can use them to think about the world. The Batman film especially gives us the 'tools' to believe that we are 'some kind of philosophers.' We're supplied with easily digestible nuggets pulled from headlines and pop filosofy with which to examine and 'problematize' our lives with the dilemmas and theories of Great Men: the ethics of extralegal power, chance vs. anarchy, the surveillance state, "what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object" (another romcom setup!), all products of the clash of concepts. Any complicating factors which might come from a different engagement with reality are removed. One could say I'm being fussy, as this is all pretty standard convention for the creation of fairytales, but then, "why so serious" if it's assumed we all know better?<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJ7IwsKEHOxq0-URO3KqM4f1A3wAsgm4TgSsyT8ANfOUZwmI0sbX8OzSomO0v2v2kdcQOqls8gYR2fB2gncBcGU0gJ-EpKs8XDZO8BhWeD04oHa05ul9H47TZnyUTT718VPnn_QXM8nNR4/s1600-h/Joker_1.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJ7IwsKEHOxq0-URO3KqM4f1A3wAsgm4TgSsyT8ANfOUZwmI0sbX8OzSomO0v2v2kdcQOqls8gYR2fB2gncBcGU0gJ-EpKs8XDZO8BhWeD04oHa05ul9H47TZnyUTT718VPnn_QXM8nNR4/s400/Joker_1.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5231557397251654242" border="0" /></a><br />As always, the way to understand ideology is not to ask 'what does the film think,' nor 'what can I think through the lens of this film,' but 'what does thinking 'with' the film prevent me from thinking.' They are not interested in making 'arguments' (that's our job), their job is to <a href="http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2008/07/the-dark-knight-hollywood%E2%80%99s-terror-dream/">reinforce premises</a>. Not because their creators have malicious intentions, but because it is important for their financial backers and consequently for them to ensure that those premises remain profitable. For example, the baseline pessimism and dependency that supports big-screen violent fantasies along with the notion that it is "easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism" is comforting, enabling to all kinds of fantasies, and serves as ground zero for a set of trained assumptions about the world, along with the opinions, laudatory, apologetic, or critical, derived from them. This is one definition of 'popular.'<br /><br />Movies featuring Batman and Iron Man are art in the same sense that <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/multimedia/archive/00025/Jeff_Koons_25138b.jpg">this </a>is art, with the important exception that Jeff Koons really exists. They are carefully planned and promoted media events; the buzz is the art, the actors' personal lives are art, the criticism is art, the advertising is art. The profit is art. Everyone's opinion is potentially valuable. Discussing the 'object itself,' relying on the tools it provides us with, is sort of quixotic in this context, inescapably minor and cliquish no matter if the critical lens is in the high culture modes of philosophy, psychoanalysis, and political theory or the sewers of fanboy mythography (not to mention the middle ground, allegorizing with headlines). Doing so just identifies the speaker with their discursive order: nerd, cult studs academic, movie critic, political moralist, etc., and helps establish a system of exchange between these 'fields' and the Hollywood production line. Given the increasing 'popularity' and 'purity' (openness/emptiness) of the object, what more can one reasonably expect?<br /><br />Corporate cinema has pushed the superhero, a product of a genuinely popular (though not universal) culture, beyond the limits of what it can encompass. As an entirely derivative studio subgenre the superhero movie seems about to commence its very own fake self-deconstruction phase, repeating a cycle that had already run its course in the comics world by the time <span style="font-style: italic;">Batman</span> came out in the late '80s. What it needs is its <span style="font-style: italic;">Don Quixote</span>, what it's getting is its <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4blSrZvPhU"><span style="font-style: italic;">Unforgiven</span></a>. That's what they're selling: who's buying?<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFiZdnV1sLjRV2Uc1JdIhWA8SHcgAT_gl7VLRf8OKfSQxmIyVsd7S3T86av1gAe9z8WSLLqmHjkLOwWrYjDmYQMd37kPQjOuRRgswnQ7sFNOjC78G7KXL7LiD1w7PYcVlA_fFd7eFLBdA3/s1600-h/Frank_Miller_dksa3.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFiZdnV1sLjRV2Uc1JdIhWA8SHcgAT_gl7VLRf8OKfSQxmIyVsd7S3T86av1gAe9z8WSLLqmHjkLOwWrYjDmYQMd37kPQjOuRRgswnQ7sFNOjC78G7KXL7LiD1w7PYcVlA_fFd7eFLBdA3/s400/Frank_Miller_dksa3.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5231558054538033634" border="0" /></a><br /><br /></div><div><span style="font-size:85%;">*1978's </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;font-size:85%;" >Superman, </span><span style="font-size:85%;">aside from its inevitable (and like Phase 1 Batman, increasingly campy) sequels, didn't really start a trend, and so I count it as more pioneer than progenitor. Evidently there were still more than enough <a href="http://www.ruthlessreviews.com/site_backup/80saction/80saction.html">non-comic book, but equally homoerotic/phobic superheroes</a></span> <span style="font-size:85%;">for Hollywood to entertain us with.</span></div><div><span style="font-size:85%;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size:85%;">** OTT, </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;font-size:85%;" >300</span><span style="font-size:85%;"> is going to be </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;font-size:85%;" >amazing</span><span style="font-size:85%;"> in 12 years or so, if any of us are still alive.</span></div><div><br /></div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><br/><a href="http://culturemonkey.blogspot.com">http://culturemonkey.blogspot.com</a></div>traxus4420http://www.blogger.com/profile/05083641650092543902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4078198831968495589.post-45321316434769697402008-07-23T17:49:00.007-04:002008-07-23T17:57:47.592-04:00Apes, legal personhood and the plight of Nim Chimpsky<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzbPik9TUp1rIbNzSgDKtEak97RtU42dFehdzoVXGYiLCmB9DFGvOyHkfoeFBu5QfVPeyYn_lYDEQrFFeBt4w4LA3E7ZnwiliSPo0iO2icdt6Udyd-Fe_ieUugC8O0xxfwJox-7S4Sqbyq/s1600-h/monkey_astronaut.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzbPik9TUp1rIbNzSgDKtEak97RtU42dFehdzoVXGYiLCmB9DFGvOyHkfoeFBu5QfVPeyYn_lYDEQrFFeBt4w4LA3E7ZnwiliSPo0iO2icdt6Udyd-Fe_ieUugC8O0xxfwJox-7S4Sqbyq/s400/monkey_astronaut.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5226328408569401794" /></a><a href="http://www.abc.net.au/rn/allinthemind/stories/2008/2290721.htm">Apes, legal personhood and the plight of Nim Chimpsky.</a><blockquote><b>Eberhart Theuer:</b> A legal person would be something like a company or a certain society that in itself, or a fund that has certain rights without being a natural person.<br /><br /><b>Anita Barraud:</b> This is similar to the US in common law notion of a juristic person that can apply to corporations and organisations that they're artificial persons created by the law.<br /><br /><b>Eberhart Theuer:</b> Exactly.<br /><br /><b>Paula Stibbe:</b> It's not talking about the rights for non-human animals to go and vote or be able to go to university, that would clearly be inappropriate and ridiculous. This is about recognising that non-human animals share with us sentience, which means that they have the ability to suffer, and that they have interests which can be damaged.</blockquote>In sci-fi-philosophic terms, this is the distinction between <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapience">sapience</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience">sentience</a>; while apes likely cannot "think" in the human sense, they and other animals can certainly feel pain, and that capacity is something we are morally obliged to respect.<br /><br />I say <i>likely</i> because I am by nature extremely wary of the anthropomorphistic tendency to project human emotions and consciousness into animal behavior that is actually instinctual or learned—in general I'm impressed with Daniel Dennett's theory in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Kinds-Minds-Understanding-Consciousness-Science/dp/0465073514/gerrcana-20"><i>Kinds of Minds</i></a> that our dogs appear to "love" us <a href="http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&id=wNFE2yH7ujwC&dq=%22daniel+dennett%22+dogs+%22kinds+of+minds%22&printsec=frontcover&source=web&ots=8qDARgOh_r&sig=F-Q8bfeclh52cgClM1dCiSqjtyw&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=5&ct=result#PPA165,M1">precisely because we've selected for just that impression over millenia of canine domestication</a>. But as an anecdotal matter I must admit this is really evocative:<blockquote><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvV_3oSDX68hmDhZo7WaP1gmnINTcgOv15GHbwIWVDjdsP1tJ1ghff00VExyqTY_PvPlx7tMZCogWTKNstj43qc1B8hhBLPqvWzfONnv4pY4Mznx-Zhhh9IjXiRIS31utOgKKKyN_qfrue/s1600-h/planet_of_the_apes.jpeg.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvV_3oSDX68hmDhZo7WaP1gmnINTcgOv15GHbwIWVDjdsP1tJ1ghff00VExyqTY_PvPlx7tMZCogWTKNstj43qc1B8hhBLPqvWzfONnv4pY4Mznx-Zhhh9IjXiRIS31utOgKKKyN_qfrue/s400/planet_of_the_apes.jpeg.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5226329256243853538" /></a><b>Paula Stibbe:</b> I've learned what he likes to do most, what food he likes to eat most, though that would include some games. He likes to use charcoal with paper sometimes to draw, or chalk.<br /><br /><b>Anita Barraud:</b> What does he draw?<br /><br /><b>Paula Stibbe:</b> They are kind of abstract angular kind of works and he takes the paper and the chalk and he leans against the wall, he bites his bottom lip and concentrates really hard on what he's doing. He won't let himself be distracted while he's drawing.</blockquote><i>(cross-posted at <a href="http://gerrycanavan.blogspot.com/2008/07/apes-legal-personhood-and-plight-of-nim.html">gerrycanavan.blogspot.com</a>)</i><div class="blogger-post-footer"><br/><a href="http://culturemonkey.blogspot.com">http://culturemonkey.blogspot.com</a></div>Gerry Canavanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12821256718713645033noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4078198831968495589.post-70835598959800251512008-07-22T16:21:00.004-04:002008-07-22T16:52:28.316-04:00thoughts on zizecology - 2<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiEuDoJ724I3RRsFqeVP7QFBZkcqxHyCGmmu-79Iuz3YaLU3ApUODUqjo0yyMtzkzY-eRm-sbgBWBJ_aV6vSQewBe-RBq9ORTM4p69evPtJmpQ0sP2-FwMIWVMVME-idu3CVMYfUIsIFPX/s1600-h/mars.gif"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiEuDoJ724I3RRsFqeVP7QFBZkcqxHyCGmmu-79Iuz3YaLU3ApUODUqjo0yyMtzkzY-eRm-sbgBWBJ_aV6vSQewBe-RBq9ORTM4p69evPtJmpQ0sP2-FwMIWVMVME-idu3CVMYfUIsIFPX/s400/mars.gif" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5225868450461147858" /></a>There are two primary axes of political conflict in Kim Stanley Robinson's incomparable <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_trilogy">Mars trilogy</a>: first, the expected (almost generically required) question of independence vs. interdependence with regard to the mother planet, Earth, which is really a question about <a href="http://culturemonkey.blogspot.com/2008/01/uses-of-mores-utopia.html">Utopia and enclavism</a> that is concretized in the fierce battles over the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator">space elevator</a>; and second and more relevant for my purposes today is the fierce break between the Red Martians and the Green Martians. The Greens believe the planet should be terraformed so as to inhabitable by humans without mechanical assistance, a technical problem that clumps around issues of surface temperature, atmospheric composition and density, and unpredictable climactic feedback mechanisms; the Reds believe the planet should be left as pristine as possible, whether because this is the only way it can be properly studied or because the otherwise dead rock is seen by some Reds to have a kind of mystical vitality all its own. <br /><br /><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3263/2693200172_b1fe84d512.jpg?v=0"><br /><br />Of course, Greenism and Redism both describe ideological spectra, not discrete sets of propositions: some moderate Greens propose to terraform only up to a level of 5 km, leaving <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mountains_on_Mars">Mars's huge mountains</a> relatively untouched, while others believe the planet should be maximally terraformed and still others believe it should be terraformed only to the light-facemask level—while for their part the Reds are divided between those who would only act as a partial brake on unchecked development and radical terrorists who bomb critical life-support equipment in an effort to force humans off the planet.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiG5qFQnC46JG8Slszc2-T8clls35NWKJVpLuH484VMIflhBuqTMeMYLmp1smdRKj5E-8Z4_QW70Rvu2I3AQERtFRsHpyZiESpECDVJ2Ofa2FzEwcGm3MyguMtmHVi-QegjG6ohfIuiXpEC/s1600-h/martian-1.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiG5qFQnC46JG8Slszc2-T8clls35NWKJVpLuH484VMIflhBuqTMeMYLmp1smdRKj5E-8Z4_QW70Rvu2I3AQERtFRsHpyZiESpECDVJ2Ofa2FzEwcGm3MyguMtmHVi-QegjG6ohfIuiXpEC/s400/martian-1.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5225876201366616258" /></a>And Redism is surely doomed, doomed from the moment of its first articulation on the <i>Ares</i> bringing the First Hundred colonists to the Mars—doomed by the decision to colonize the planet in the first place, if not by earlier manned missions, if not by bacteria carried over on the Viking landers. The originary, humanless Mars—the <i>natural</i> Mars—is in this sense a logical impossibility—in order to exist at all, in order to be a real place as opposed to some far-off speck of light in the sky, Mars must exist <i>for us</i>, which is to say Mars must enter into (human) history. It must be changed; it must be ruined.<br /><br />The Reds have always, necessarily, lost, though their recognition of this fact that doesn't dim their fervor.<br /><br />I bring this up as in attempt to return to <a href="http://culturemonkey.blogspot.com/2008/06/thoughts-on-zizecology-1.html">Žižek's critique of ecology</a>, specifically the radical reconsideration of finitude he ignites in the latter half of <a href="http://www.lacan.com/zizecology1.htm">the essay</a>. Žižek seeks to unmask liberal ecology as simply the latest ideological backing for the biopolitical structures of capitalism as a whole. “Today’s predominant mode of politics is post-political bio-politics,” Žižek writes, and accordingly ecology’s primary locus of action should be understood as an <i>ecology of fear.</i> Žižek does not deny the reality of the potential catastrophe we face but rather opposes the ends to which this potential disaster is rhetorically purposed:<blockquote>The lesson this ecology is constantly hammering is our finitude… This is why, although ecologists are all the time demanding that we change radically our way of life, underlying this demand is its opposite, a deep distrust of change, of development, of progress: every radical change can have the unintended consequence of triggering a catastrophe.</blockquote>What Žižek reveals, then, at the heart of liberal ecology is a deep-seated, unacknowledged conservatism that weakly opposes the status quo in appearance only to work to preserve it in reality. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPUQL_RPO3IvSGhvv6f66Qxaw2-Z5XBdIegkFJzqHjtIAwyWoYIbtrogJF4b8RnqEMA80hSlrfL0JT_LC5YBRvT1fM6u-kF300y5bpmpsA14sKc6xm4DHayyyk6bivEOBLhCf_ACKDFCOO/s1600-h/bush_devil.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPUQL_RPO3IvSGhvv6f66Qxaw2-Z5XBdIegkFJzqHjtIAwyWoYIbtrogJF4b8RnqEMA80hSlrfL0JT_LC5YBRvT1fM6u-kF300y5bpmpsA14sKc6xm4DHayyyk6bivEOBLhCf_ACKDFCOO/s400/bush_devil.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5225884418849842082" /></a>The ecology of fear’s recognition of our precariousness, of our absolute contingency, Žižek says, in fact induces us to cling to the devil we know:<blockquote><i>With regard to this inherent instability of nature, the most consequent was the proposal of a German ecological scientist back in 1970s: Since nature is changing constantly and the conditions on Earth will render the survival of humanity impossible in a couple of centuries, the collective goal of humanity should be not to adapt itself to nature, but to intervene into the Earth’s ecology even more forcefully with the aim to freeze the Earth’s change, so that its ecology will remain basically the same, thus enabling humanity’s survival. This extreme proposal renders visible the truth of ecology.</i></blockquote> And the problem goes still deeper. Given the Malthusian proportions of the current population of the Earth and the extreme, highly energy-dependent requirements for industrial agriculture alone, if the industrial civilization that is currently wrecking the planet were to suddenly stop, this <i>too</i> would be a disaster out of proportion with any ever experienced in human memory. We find ourselves trapped no matter which way we turn. “Nature,” as such, has in this sense already been entirely lost—an observation Žižek draws in part from <a href="http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com">Timothy Morton</a>, author of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Ecology-without-Nature-Rethinking-Environmental/dp/0674024346/gerrcana-20"><i>Ecology without Nature</i></a>, who writes that “it is very hard to get used to the idea that the catastrophe, far from being imminent, has <i>already taken place.”</i><br /> <br />I am reminded here of Norbert Weiner’s memorable depiction of the human race as “shipwrecked passengers on a doomed planet” in 1950’s <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Human-Use-Beings-Cybernetics-Paperback/dp/0306803208/gerrcana-20"><i>The Human Use of Human Beings</i></a>. In recognition of the essentially entropic nature of the universe, Weiner asserts, the proper response is not despair or catastrophic fatalism but rather resolve to meet our challenges head-on and keep the final catastrophe as far off as we may. Weiner, despite his scientistic and technocratic positivism, becomes revealed as a proto-ecologist in this Žižekian sense, an ecologist aiming not at preservation but at utilization and manipulation.<br /> <br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6A5ISRWhjKJgFNxOMoSCOdbbAV1_uifkLrRITcEBRma5kpXe9RqIGgy7vDc_56bsOGczwPs2Neuj0LFZ-ycBBQ-eu3m0rP8tpbegsWOtcD9HM-N3ctXc8xbgBvrRoClHznKEI9J5nH7QU/s1600-h/geoengineering.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6A5ISRWhjKJgFNxOMoSCOdbbAV1_uifkLrRITcEBRma5kpXe9RqIGgy7vDc_56bsOGczwPs2Neuj0LFZ-ycBBQ-eu3m0rP8tpbegsWOtcD9HM-N3ctXc8xbgBvrRoClHznKEI9J5nH7QU/s400/geoengineering.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5225883501890793714" /></a>Felix Guattari, too, comes to make essentially the same claim in his “The Three Ecologies”:<blockquote><i>There is a principle specific to environmental ecology: it states that anything is possible—the worst disasters or the most flexible evolutions. Natural equilibriums will be increasingly reliant upon human intervention, and a time will come when vast programmes will need to be set up in order to regulate the relationship between oxygen, ozone, and carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere.</i></blockquote>We can add to this <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_engineering">a whole host of possible geoengineering projects</a>, including <a href="http://gerrycanavan.blogspot.com/2008/07/saved-not-saved.html">the new proposal to add lime to the oceans to combat climate change</a> that I blogged about just this morning. Guattari’s vision of a “machinic ecology” is positively Weinerian in scope, if not utterly Promethean—he goes on to argue that the <i>telos</i> of humankind is in part “to dare to confront the vertiginous Cosmos so as to make it inhabitable,” not simply to keep equilibrium or stasis but indeed to bend all of nature to our will (if with the proper ecosophic respect for life at all levels).<br /><br />If all this is true, why then does contemporary liberal ecology present itself in opposition to technological civilization and progress as such? How does ecology resist the recognition of its own central contradiction? Žižek attributes ecology’s conservative blindness to a kind of childish denial, a refusal to accept emotionally what one knows to be the case intellectually, a psychological inability endemic to the modern age to reconcile cold scientific appraisal with common sense. Žižek—perhaps not unexpectedly—relates this fundamental divide between scientific knowledge and the Wisdom (“the basic trust in the background coordinates of our world”) we need to “unlearn” to Lacan’s notion of the “big Other,” the Symbolic figure whom we believe will “guarantee the harmony between the levels, to guarantee that the overall interactions will be satisfactory.” There is, of course, no big Other—we are flying blind, with no co-pilot—and the first solution to our predicament is the old Lacanian one of recognizing this uncomfortable fact: “And the lesson of ecology is that we should go to the end here and accept the non-existence of the ultimate big Other, nature itself with its pattern of regular rhythms, the ultimate reference of order and stability.” <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2C2bXPLSgBbRl6qsEtqJFPIf5bap0_hihLrxWagwIHRRJIOCRTKtMUfM2qeaDx3dJPyqA1ya3MQQnP5V6Rh30PBn7GisGSrIayNdkcp9Y0cIWNyT2uoH5bN3hXDVRcj6h0djg7_Zswqcr/s1600-h/lady_justice.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2C2bXPLSgBbRl6qsEtqJFPIf5bap0_hihLrxWagwIHRRJIOCRTKtMUfM2qeaDx3dJPyqA1ya3MQQnP5V6Rh30PBn7GisGSrIayNdkcp9Y0cIWNyT2uoH5bN3hXDVRcj6h0djg7_Zswqcr/s400/lady_justice.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5225884824804855714" /></a>What Žižek rejects here is any notion of <i>equilibrium</i> (to use the Club of Rome’s preferred term) or <i>sustainability</i> (to use the one currently in vogue). But this, it would seem to me, is in the end a too-wide application of the category of denial that itself amounts to an act of denial in the end. In the end, the fact must be admitted: All this—technological civilization, even one that is ecological in the Žižekian/Guattarian sense—simply cannot go on forever. There is, in the end, a limit point, some point past which it is simply impossible either to grow and expand on the one hand or perfect and regulate on the other. The laws of physics—the laws of Weiner’s entropic universe—are in the end a kind of actually existing big Other, a big Other of a sort that cannot be dispelled through Promethean know-how, or through the infinite adaptability of the market, or through a position of Lacanian self-knowledge. In the end, they are final, including and especially the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_law_of_thermodynamics">first</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics">second laws of thermodynamics</a> (<i>You can’t get something for nothing,</i> and <i>Things fall apart.</i>) There is, in the end, reality, such as it is.<br /><br />Given this, it seems prudent to inculcate some capacity to recognize and respect the limits to growth. In this sense Guattari and especially Žižek seem to get their infinities tangled up—the flexible recombination of the market is of a very particular and limited kind, and should not be confused with the actual ability to do anything. Žižek is wrong, too, to argue that finitude <i>necessarily</i> leads to a hopeless conservatism, because the recognition of our finitude is <i>also</i> the prerequisite for effective ecological knowledge and environmental policy in the first place. There could be no ecology without finitude—what need would there be for it?—and in this sense finitude <i>cannot</i> ever be tossed out; it must rather be acknowledged, and assented to, even as we seek to do what we can for ourselves within that frame. It is only in first studying and understanding nature as “the ultimate reference of order and stability” that ecologists can come to know what they can and cannot do, what is and is not possible—and therefore it is only in first recognizing and respecting natural patterns and regular rhythms that the ecologist can begin to do anything at all. <br /><br />Finitude, this is to say, is better understood as an immanent principle of existence rather than as some transcendent imposition from above. The finitude imposed by entropic nature is as much the playing field as it is a barrier or limit point. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaZxENwVrzoPmKpuJRjngkSSomjyi2eHeSDkPEpRjcVdXmTJ3Jnyyug9WQXvzC3-D0PeGY_thHilsNxOrDofiCtZq4N1HHju5rym_gdP-x4ZMCF730ZIAxuemociEb2tUO1P41pTCVTr4D/s1600-h/dollar-sign.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaZxENwVrzoPmKpuJRjngkSSomjyi2eHeSDkPEpRjcVdXmTJ3Jnyyug9WQXvzC3-D0PeGY_thHilsNxOrDofiCtZq4N1HHju5rym_gdP-x4ZMCF730ZIAxuemociEb2tUO1P41pTCVTr4D/s200/dollar-sign.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5225886437156492098" /></a>There is, of course, every reason to think that capitalism is uniquely unprepared to recognize either version of finitude, or to approach its production capacity with anything resembling rational growth—if, that is, we have not in fact already and unknowingly flown past it. Rather, as Foster continually reminds us through his invocations of Marx, capitalism itself is the primary accelerant towards our own immolation. The problem is not merely the ceaseless, unchecked drive towards accumulation—though this of course is crucial—but also the ways in which there is no ability under capitalism to regulate the desires of <i>consumers</i> except by sudden (and in this case likely irreversible) scarcity: a crisis. John Bellamy Foster writes in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Ecology-Against-Capitalism-Bellamy-Foster/dp/1583670564/gerrcana-20"><i>Ecology Against Capital</i></a>:<blockquote>For Marx, the very nature of capitalist society from the very beginning had been built on a metabolic rift between city and country, human beings and the earth—a rift that has now been heightened beyond anything he could have imagined…. There is an irreversible environmental crisis within global capitalist society. But setting aside capitalism, a sustainable relation to the earth is not beyond reach. To get there, we have to change our social relations.</blockquote>Evoking John Kenneth Galbraith’s famous <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_economics#John_Kenneth_Galbraith">dependence effect</a>, which reverses the classic economic relationship between commodity and need to understand capitalism as first producing needs for consumers which its products then step in to fulfill, Foster concludes that the relations of production within capitalism will simply never be capable of generating “a society governed not by the search for profit but by people’s genuine needs, and the requirements of socio-ecological sustainability.” In line with his understanding of Marx as a proto-ecological thinker, as elaborated at length in his 2000 book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Marxs-Ecology-John-Bellamy-Foster/dp/1583670122/gerrcana-20"><i>Marx’s Ecology</i></a>, Foster calls this state of affairs socialism. <br /><br />First and foremost among the things such a socialism will require, in part, is a ideology—really, an ethos—that would allow us to imagine a future for humanity that is neither radically Utopian or radically dystopian/apocalyptic, but rather in continuity with the present. The language of sustainability that Foster uses is one such paradigm—but I find myself attracted instead to what Kim Stanley Robinson has called <i>permaculture</i>. In a <a href="http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2007/12/comparative-planetology-interview-with.html">recent interview with the Web site BLDGBLOG</a>, Robinson defined permaculture in this way:<blockquote><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgn1jtHoD_Pt53Hq7i9SxqsicUTFSHXQzF4c5s9iVV4ldsvSHrSMpafMJiljNJbxc0dNbCmT_FIGg52Mt_mhOJjiinG1hOpfAHPaU5DNqzgnxxm2ccdisljV5jpaPGXY6u97PQa5MVxZzXF/s400/longnow-explain.png"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgn1jtHoD_Pt53Hq7i9SxqsicUTFSHXQzF4c5s9iVV4ldsvSHrSMpafMJiljNJbxc0dNbCmT_FIGg52Mt_mhOJjiinG1hOpfAHPaU5DNqzgnxxm2ccdisljV5jpaPGXY6u97PQa5MVxZzXF/s400/longnow-explain.png" border="0" alt="" /></a>But if you think of yourself as terraforming Earth, and if you think about sustainability, then you can start thinking about permaculture and what permaculture really means. It’s not just sustainable agriculture, but a name for a certain type of history. Because the word sustainability is now code for: let’s make capitalism work over the long haul, without ever getting rid of the hierarchy between rich and poor and without establishing social justice.<br /><br />Sustainable development, as well: that’s a term that’s been contaminated. It doesn’t even mean sustainable anymore. It means: let us continue to do what we’re doing, but somehow get away with it. By some magic waving of the hands, or some techno silver bullet, suddenly we can make it all right to continue in all our current habits. And yet it’s not just that our habits are destructive, they’re not even satisfying to the people who get to play in them. So there’s a stupidity involved, at the cultural level.<br />…<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjaxtoOAI71TXRyPH9xXDPFm1Rdgqjzc9ptDJc7LbpZnGr3IrvuX4RB6kn31FfhNEj9jKbh_vWy6cuqSN_wQrYIvLcrB4_oW-YsfKJvrlVSm69c1bZ94sZZmXMGDsuzaM_hQCQ7daA0BJe/s1600-h/utopia.png"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjaxtoOAI71TXRyPH9xXDPFm1Rdgqjzc9ptDJc7LbpZnGr3IrvuX4RB6kn31FfhNEj9jKbh_vWy6cuqSN_wQrYIvLcrB4_oW-YsfKJvrlVSm69c1bZ94sZZmXMGDsuzaM_hQCQ7daA0BJe/s320/utopia.png" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5225885701905675794" /></a>We should take the political and aesthetic baggage out of the term utopia. I’ve been working all my career to try to redefine utopia in more positive terms – in more dynamic terms. People tend to think of utopia as a perfect end-stage, which is, by definition, impossible and maybe even bad for us. And so maybe it’s better to use a word like permaculture, which not only includes <i>permanent</i> but also <i>permutation</i>. Permaculture suggests a certain kind of obvious human goal, which is that future generations will have at least as good a place to live as what we have now.</blockquote> Permaculture, in this way, weds the techno-optimism of Žižek and Guattari with the eco-pessimism of Foster in a way that accounts for the rightness of both. It rejects the paradigm of sustainable growth in favor of what it is essentially raw futurity, the ethical imperative not only that there should be a future but that the people in it deserve a decent world in which to live. This, Robinson says, is closely tied to his career as a science fiction writer, which he imagines speaking both <i>from</i> and <i>for</i> the future: <blockquote>And you try to speak for them by envisioning scenarios that show them either doing things better or doing things worse – but you’re also alerting the generations alive right now that these people have a voice in history.<br /><br />The future needs to be taken into account by the current system, which regularly steals from it in order to pad our ridiculous current lifestyle.</blockquote><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgz_WF7QAMhlToXQaWiOSpb5HAaaUPN7K4LugaW-WvNIm4WxcQwI3jIvcgH5FM1NwSjhX5onabYATva-GmECn3xOyQpEV_cXYqYrNztXgRLXqzFpi0pk1V5tDqBORVTXu4uHGzWVBTOGgFc/s1600-h/thawing+permafrost.preview.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgz_WF7QAMhlToXQaWiOSpb5HAaaUPN7K4LugaW-WvNIm4WxcQwI3jIvcgH5FM1NwSjhX5onabYATva-GmECn3xOyQpEV_cXYqYrNztXgRLXqzFpi0pk1V5tDqBORVTXu4uHGzWVBTOGgFc/s320/thawing+permafrost.preview.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5225882683674725426" /></a>For there is a third, unspoken suggestion in permaculture, too, beyond permanence and permutation, and that of course is <i>permafrost</i>, that permanently frozen tundra of the Arctic and sub-Arctic that is now for the first time in human history beginning to melt as a result of anthropogenic climate change. The future is indeed under genuine threat; the crises are indeed real, and perhaps the catastrophes as well. And as these things happen, and we continue to do nothing, our chances at permaculture, and a livable, better future, slowly melt away.<br /><br /><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3133/2692485763_f6e07b7229.jpg?v=0"><div class="blogger-post-footer"><br/><a href="http://culturemonkey.blogspot.com">http://culturemonkey.blogspot.com</a></div>Gerry Canavanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12821256718713645033noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4078198831968495589.post-2885681955576080542008-06-16T12:56:00.012-04:002008-06-17T23:45:22.392-04:00Extinction level event<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-style: italic;">Love then screams in my own throat; I am the Jesuve, the filthy parody of the torrid and blinding <a href="http://www.greylodge.org/occultreview/glor_010/solar.htm">sun</a>.</span><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://traxus4420.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/sunshine.jpg" mce_href="http://traxus4420.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/sunshine.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-133" src="http://traxus4420.wordpress.com/files/2008/06/sunshine.jpg" mce_src="http://traxus4420.wordpress.com/files/2008/06/sunshine.jpg" alt="" height="252" width="450" /></a></p> <p>Let's consider Danny Boyle's <i>Sunshine</i> as both a characteristically exaggerated response to environmental crisis and an extended visual pun on the term 'Enlightenment.' The genre is easily the one most in tune with my lizard brain, sci-fi horror, combining an alien menace, cosmic scale, and the latent erotics of the military-industrial complex. The premise is suitably elegant: an elite crew of astronauts have to rejuvenate the dying sun by penetrating it with a huge bomb, thus saving the human race from extinction. There's a jingoism to this film that is no less present for its lack of national identification or corresponding ideological threat. It delivers the jingoism of crisis, its stance resolutely 'post-ideological,' a fantasy wherein the reactionary instincts of the nation-state are subordinated to the non-negotiable reality of impending destruction (though memorialized, aesthetically, by the pretty faces of the globalized cast). Humanity can then be reduced to its more cinema-friendly, individual-universal 'weaknesses,' such as lust for power, envy, moral feeling, and susceptibility to the sublime. All of which prove themselves to be liabilities in the crisis situation, if forgivable as sources of dramatic suspense, bathos, etc. A more 'objective,' classier...right, the UK, post-9/11 version of <i>Armageddon</i>.</p> <p style="text-align: center;" mce_style="text-align:center;"><a href="http://traxus4420.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/200742102491930704.jpg" mce_href="http://traxus4420.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/200742102491930704.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-134" src="http://traxus4420.wordpress.com/files/2008/06/200742102491930704.jpg?w=210" mce_src="http://traxus4420.wordpress.com/files/2008/06/200742102491930704.jpg?w=210" alt="" height="300" width="210" /></a></p> <p>So do we then say <i>Sunshine</i> belongs with the recent spate of non-U.S. westerns, the parent genre to a certain dominant mode of science fiction? Naught Thought thinks so, in <a href="http://naughtthought.wordpress.com/2007/09/04/skeletal-ontologies/" mce_href="http://naughtthought.wordpress.com/2007/09/04/skeletal-ontologies/">this </a>piece understanding the already post-national history of the European Enlightenment as one with the history of colonial expansion and imperial violence. The obvious touchstone in contemporary philosophy is with Jean-FrançoisLyotard's essay "Can Thought go on without a Body?" where the extinction of the human body is equated with the death of the sun, the absolute limit of thought. Bodiless thought is not without material conditions, but is also not reducible to preserved remains or combinatoric repetitions, the recorded memories which might manifest in, say, a satellite that outlasts the collapse of the solar system. Artificial intelligence, Lyotard claims, cannot be reducible to a program. It must be able to transgress its own limits, must carry some immanent differend, a complex, a libidinal motor for drives, desires, will. It must <i>suffer</i>. Thought, like the marauding cowboy, must have spurs.</p> <p>Lyotard's philosophical myth can be read as a gnomic restatement of the question of 'late capitalism' -- how does expansion continue in a post-ontological (post-national) universe? More or less rhetorical, its function is to reinforce the truth of its presuppositions. Post-American westerns and western-infused sci-fi serve as good popular counterparts: anti-heroes slay evildoers in spectacular fashion despite existential ennui. But the intrusion of horror complicates things somewhat. The inversion of the western, horror consists of variations on home invasion rather than the quest. Its villains tend toward the abstract. Like obvious influences <i>2001</i>, <i>Solaris</i>, and <i>Alien</i>, <i>Sunshine</i>'s setting is a 'haunted house in space,' a seemingly familiar structure infected by its vast, unfamiliar outside.</p> <p>Though the sun's five billion years premature decrepitude is never explained within the film, on the DVD commentary we're informed that an invisible force of matter gets trapped by the mass of the sun and begins to eat its way out. We're also told that because of our sun's relatively middling mass, this could never actually happen. Despite the realism of the hardware and the performances, then, the film is really closer to a thought experiment with set parameters, one of those '<a href="http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=10126" mce_href="http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=10126">push the fatty or pull the lever'</a> things, than to traditional 'speculative fiction.' And unlike conventional horror there is little mystery even for the characters -- the premise is, not exactly established, but <i>asserted </i>beforehand: "If the sun dies, so do we." Lyotard's question is answered with a simple "no."</p> <p>Aesthetically <i>Sunshine </i>is wonderful when the sun is front and center -- CGI actually works in space -- and enjoyable in that modern, overbearing way when its not. Though like many movies these days it demands you think it intelligent for quoting the 1970s, and in the end a third-act slide into <a href="http://www.dvdverdict.com/reviews/eventhorizonce.php" mce_href="http://www.dvdverdict.com/reviews/eventhorizonce.php"><i>Event Horizon</i></a> territory ruins all hope for respectability. After a series of moral dilemmas where the crew makes increasingly irrational blunders deviating from 'the mission' (trying to save the crew of the previous vessel is the first fateful misstep), they find themselves stalked by a crazy speechifying Romantic villain, in the Kurtz/Pinhead vein:</p> <blockquote><p>I am Pinbacker, Commander of the Icarus One. We have abandoned our mission. Our star is dying. All our science. All our hopes, our... our dreams, are foolish! In the face of this, we are dust, nothing more. Unto this dust, we return. When he chooses for us to die, it is not our place to challenge God.</p></blockquote> <p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://traxus4420.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/1129304735_3838-1.jpg" mce_href="http://traxus4420.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/1129304735_3838-1.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-141" src="http://traxus4420.wordpress.com/files/2008/06/1129304735_3838-1.jpg?w=300" mce_src="http://traxus4420.wordpress.com/files/2008/06/1129304735_3838-1.jpg?w=300" alt="" height="167" width="251" /></a><br /></p><p>Pinbacker's God-given task is to 'enjoy,' once and for all, the limit that the crew is determined to transgress. This limit, the border between the human world tamed by Enlightenment reason and its conditional beyond, is transcendentalized, the products of the former -- organized life, technoscience, the 'modern world' -- understood as a gnostic veneer over the Truth. After all, death, the horizon of experience, makes life itself intrinsically unknowable regardless of what form it takes. "<i>Resembles <a href="http://etext.virginia.edu/stc/Coleridge/poems/What_Is_Life.html" mce_href="http://etext.virginia.edu/stc/Coleridge/poems/What_Is_Life.html">Life </a>what once was held of Light, / Too ample in itself for human sight?</i>" But the significance of the 'beyond's' effect on the 'here' is reversible: plenitude or negation of meaning. In Lyotard's understanding, if thought dies with the sun, then "<a href="http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/005341.html" mce_href="http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/005341.html">everything is dead already</a>." Pinbacker, on the other hand, aims to preserve the dialectic of human and inhuman knowledge by halting its progress, thus sacrificing the human species in exchange for an eternal moment of personal transcendence.</p> <p>Pinbacker's wish for 'totalitarian' transcendence is countered by the moments of selfless, hopeful transcendence experienced by (some members of) the heroic crew. A moral lesson: being obliterated by the sun while saving people is just as awesome as being obliterated by the sun while exterminating them. Quite apart from the romance of Enlightenment, the film's obscure <a href="http://etext.virginia.edu/stc/Coleridge/poems/Constancy2Ideal_Object.html">object </a>of desire, is the persistence of a certain ethical code, staged here as logical responses to objective facts. If the crew had stuck to the mission parameters (if they hadn't been swayed by moral sentiment to try and save the previous crew) they would have all survived. We are reminded over and over again that 'transcendence,' a category which seems to encompass more and more each day, is theft, from man and reason. A delusion, a drug trip, a private spectacle. A luxury. The last shot is the homestead on Earth, saved by what they will never know. In a time of certain crisis, an elect is permitted to live like heroes so that we don't have to. For us the sensible thing is to follow orders. 'They' will never know, but we will, all for the price of a ticket. <i>Certain</i> crisis. Would extinction matter if there were no one there to enjoy it?</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://traxus4420.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/sunshine-boyle-intro.jpg" mce_href="http://traxus4420.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/sunshine-boyle-intro.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-137" src="http://traxus4420.wordpress.com/files/2008/06/sunshine-boyle-intro.jpg" mce_src="http://traxus4420.wordpress.com/files/2008/06/sunshine-boyle-intro.jpg" alt="" height="181" width="400" /></a></p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><br/><a href="http://culturemonkey.blogspot.com">http://culturemonkey.blogspot.com</a></div>traxus4420http://www.blogger.com/profile/05083641650092543902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4078198831968495589.post-46823960147696236682008-06-06T02:01:00.017-04:002008-06-06T03:17:02.266-04:00thoughts on zizecology 1<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkd1TBj6kRMpEi_h-uur91fvlGA7-ghu5B8LVdLCWUkJsTph19GcugYnakKkHxSc3S06PtwSrevgJPScM6gzb8GmbXMsO69v83X9XZrpVJEhyphenhyphen5X2nKQo7RYOMVJZ3rkyfmgSyTeYKuOH6Q/s1600-h/bottled+water-jj-001.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkd1TBj6kRMpEi_h-uur91fvlGA7-ghu5B8LVdLCWUkJsTph19GcugYnakKkHxSc3S06PtwSrevgJPScM6gzb8GmbXMsO69v83X9XZrpVJEhyphenhyphen5X2nKQo7RYOMVJZ3rkyfmgSyTeYKuOH6Q/s320/bottled+water-jj-001.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5208654686466126210" /></a><i><a href="http://gerrycanavan.blogspot.com/2008/06/water-news.html">Lord Stern</a>, the World Bank's former chief economist, said governments had been slow to accept the awful truth that usable water is running out. Fresh rainfall is not enough to refill the underground water tables.<br /><br />"Water is not a renewable resource. People have been mining it without restraint because it has not been priced properly," he said.</i><br /><br />If Slavoj Žižek is Theory’s official contrarian, it still surprises to find him taking aim at what is surely among the most widely held shibboleths of the contemporary left, environmentalism—and yet this is exactly what Žižek has done in <a href="http://www.lacan.com/zizecology1.htm">recent lectures published on his Web site, lacan.com</a>, and popularized on the video site <a href="at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3h4HHT1b">YouTube</a>. His critique of ecology centers around a series of interrelated claims regarding late capitalism and ecology’s functioning within it, central among them what he describes as today’s <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Last_Man">“Fukuyamaian”</a> consensus: the unacknowledged majority view that history did in fact end with the fall of Soviet communism, that “liberal-democratic capitalism is accepted as the finally-found formula of the best possible society, all one can do is to render it more just, tolerant, etc.” Ecology, then, becomes simply the latest set of technologies and practices through which we can “perfect” capitalism; the possibility that ecology might function as an operative challenge to the market is always already proscribed by the Fukuyamaian assumption that ecology (like anything else) can only operate within and through the market. This is to say that we understand ecological correctives to capitalism as in some sense needing to pay for themselves: we will change our consumptive practices only when the price of oil becomes high enough to so induce us, just as the market will encourage the development of alternative energies and more efficient engines at such a time as they become profitable—and so on and so forth, while the planet burns.<br /><br />Subsuming ecology to the logic of the market, Žižek says, has a number of pernicious consequences. First, the belief that the market’s “invisible hand” will operate as a kind of Hegelian “Substance” that dominates the individual subject is unsettled by the newfound potential of individual actors to effect world-historical change:<blockquote>What looms on the horizon today is the unheard-of possibility that a subjective intervention will intervene directly into the historical Substance, catastrophically disturbing its run by way of triggering an ecological catastrophe, a fateful biogenetic mutation, a nuclear or similar military-social catastrophe, etc. No longer can we rely on the safeguarding role of the limited scope of our acts: it no longer holds that, whatever we do, history will go on. For the first time in human history, the act of a single socio-political agent effectively can alter and even interrupt the global historical process, so that, ironically, it is only today that we can say that the historical process should effectively be conceived ‘not only as Substance, but also as Subject.’</blockquote>The market, that is, can no longer be trusted to intervene and “course-correct” the destructive behavior of individual actors, precisely because a single wayward individual can impact, unsettle, or even destroy entirely the market itself. (Notably, even the Catholic Church has suggestively adapted to this new post-Hegelian reality, with its recent announcement of a new set of <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7287071.stm">7 Deadly Sins for the modern age</a>, including among them pollution, genetic manipulation, participation in morally debatable experiments, and amassing excessive wealth.) To imagine global capitalism standing unchallenged as the end of history, then, is to ignore Substance’s newfound subjectivation at our collective peril—it may well be that we shall all be destroyed before the logic of history is able to right itself, or, indeed, that the logic of history actually now points catastrophically towards our own doom. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmy0Jm60wSTRgsvDghqEZskwqgsmE8GGasZoyj4YafndzoF7DhIR90yLehb-N3ypY7wif9O1X5W0P7Cz_r8xz6bJcq5nqkFqJQ0BgIPn6RvXYLU-1sSesl3gDvV2pHL87hPkyS0zWSw9A-/s1600-h/new_wfm_logo_vert_green_1_.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmy0Jm60wSTRgsvDghqEZskwqgsmE8GGasZoyj4YafndzoF7DhIR90yLehb-N3ypY7wif9O1X5W0P7Cz_r8xz6bJcq5nqkFqJQ0BgIPn6RvXYLU-1sSesl3gDvV2pHL87hPkyS0zWSw9A-/s320/new_wfm_logo_vert_green_1_.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5208654999832893490" /></a>Next, Žižek writes that the logic of the market obscures the individual’s role in second sense: thinking and acting ecologically becomes equated with a certain set of consumer practices that in many cases have, at best, only a tangential relationship with what actual ecology would look like. Liberals, even those fancying themselves environmentalists, happily shop at <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/05/15/060515crat_atlarge">Whole Foods</a> and Starbucks because these corporations “sell products that contain the claim of being politically progressive acts in and of themselves”—obscuring not only the dubiousness of many or all of these claims of “good consumption” but also allowing the anti-union and otherwise exploitative practices of these companies to fade harmlessly into the background in the face of an often-misplaced, self-satisfied sense of “ecological awareness.” (Proclaimed environmentalism becomes in this way a type of free P.R., allowing such companies to effectively buy good-will on the cheap.)<br /><br />These two points, if anything, actually fail to take us far enough. Žižek writes of “the infinite adaptability of capitalism which, in the case of an acute ecological catastrophe or crisis can easily turn ecology into a new field of capitalist investment and competition”—but such glib if backhanded praise of the market only works to obscure the fact that the efficient functioning of the market system <i>is</i> the ecological catastrophe already in process. Nowhere is this fact made clearer than in John Bellamy Foster’s first book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Vulnerable-Planet-Economic-Environment-Cornerstone/dp/158367019X/gerrcana-20"><i>The Vulnerable Planet</i></a>, which is a grim guided tour of the history of ecological degradation from the start of the industrial age to the present, a process that began with primitive accumulation’s lassoing of the environment and has only accelerated during the period of revolutionary technological expansion following World War II. Such destruction, Foster says, is essential to capitalism’s structure, and thus unchangeable:<blockquote><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtl1uQbNpEkYqb_WH8-cmkySkk6IayMpnEunNGP-5m418dKp80joPY_oQCoz6BY_XSz8LQzlXJrEiNtGg4zI1cBNqmPqgi-HTGRPRbgze1jHeYOaJ-3kvwwU-RKKtTd3t16EZH3FUNA4Xu/s1600-h/s_lorax6.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0px 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtl1uQbNpEkYqb_WH8-cmkySkk6IayMpnEunNGP-5m418dKp80joPY_oQCoz6BY_XSz8LQzlXJrEiNtGg4zI1cBNqmPqgi-HTGRPRbgze1jHeYOaJ-3kvwwU-RKKtTd3t16EZH3FUNA4Xu/s400/s_lorax6.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5208655870180353330" /></a>[Capitalism] is a system of creative destruction, in which the creative drive is the seemingly infinite ability to produce new commodities by combining materials and labor in new ways, and the destructive drive is the systematic degradation, transformation, and absorption of all elements of existence outside the system’s own orbit.</blockquote>The so-called “infinite adaptability” of the market therefore should be understood to <i>necessarily require</i> environmental destruction of some form or another for its own creative functioning—and therefore the destruction is not some potential or theoretically correctable side effect of the market’s functioning but its very engine. <i>Contra</i> Žižek, the supposed newfound power of individual actors to affect History by degrading the biosphere only masks the extent to which capitalism has <i>always</i> demanded widespread and irreversible environmental degradation in order to function in the first place.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_QOuqvfeelBwyTpKXYoQEexflNWeLoGy8qENb5GGjdKzVaT073O7tmtvYpmc2blBt_LasVSYjRKhKXsNT7Y0FbXE9fKApoKE2duK7O0h9mWFPY7sTcsvKgglS37OC_0e0tSnOv7_Y-M7o/s1600-h/bagger288.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_QOuqvfeelBwyTpKXYoQEexflNWeLoGy8qENb5GGjdKzVaT073O7tmtvYpmc2blBt_LasVSYjRKhKXsNT7Y0FbXE9fKApoKE2duK7O0h9mWFPY7sTcsvKgglS37OC_0e0tSnOv7_Y-M7o/s400/bagger288.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5208655161976754498" /></a>Later in the same book we find Foster aptly describing the way that nature is figured dialectically as both inside and outside capitalism’s orbit, a position that allows it to be drawn from for capital without ever being allowed to fully become capital itself (and, as capital, therefore be deemed worthy of protection). <br /><br />Against <a href="http://emilymorash07.tripod.com/id12.html">Barry Commoner’s four laws of ecology</a>, Foster offers the four counter-ecological laws of capital:<blockquote>(1) the only lasting connection between things is the cash nexus; (2) it doesn’t matter where something goes as long as it doesn’t enter the circuit of capital; (3) the self-regulating market knows best; and (4) nature’s bounty is a free gift to the property owner.</blockquote>Understanding these four counter-ecological laws demonstrates a second way that that Žižek’s backhanded praise for the market’s adaptability is importantly misplaced: the logic of the market violently draws the material for capital <i>from</i> nature but on a structural level cannot respect nature except insofar as nature can be commodified.<br /><br />We can see now why a method of “environmental accounting” like the one Lord Stern suggests, which takes nature “into the balance sheet” and "prices" resources "properly," would be unlikely to solve the problem of environmental degradation. This is a judgment Foster shares and argues in a number of places, most effectively in an essay on “ecological reductionism” reprinted in his 2002 anthology <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Ecology-Against-Capitalism-Bellamy-Foster/dp/1583670564/gerrcana-20"><i>Ecology Against Capitalism.</i></a> Though the logic of environmental accounting suggests the incorporation of “externalities” such as pollution and environmental degradation might be brought into the actual costs of commodities, such a process would in actuality have precisely the opposite of the desired effect by bringing nature fully and finally into the logic of capitalism, into “the cash nexus.” <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYyV8V4aJNu8-y7HnFn1Y0wXdy6CdNCpKMz_xfG52H0Z2JKy_xhgHv0P-9Sezp_SJZkEENb0bluKbs27oS4ndZsRX9gicBx4QGih8Iazmbwm8gqsAk__xAH_F0G8RoCtPpAbL21WPPS-0p/s1600-h/redwood-trees.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYyV8V4aJNu8-y7HnFn1Y0wXdy6CdNCpKMz_xfG52H0Z2JKy_xhgHv0P-9Sezp_SJZkEENb0bluKbs27oS4ndZsRX9gicBx4QGih8Iazmbwm8gqsAk__xAH_F0G8RoCtPpAbL21WPPS-0p/s400/redwood-trees.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5208655409037578434" /></a>The protections promised by such a scheme can quickly be seen as illusionary. Foster chooses to expose this logic through the example of redwood forests in the Pacific Northwest, which has long managed its forests through a lens that views forests as factories whose production must be optimized, and which views aged trees and biologically diverse forests as “unproductive assets” to be made maximally efficient through their immediate destruction and replacement with an arboreal monoculture that is easier to harvest and sell. That the original, untouched forests might have a value other than cash value is anathema to the four counter-ecological laws, especially the first and the fourth; the “nature” protected under the logic of capital would always be nature-for-capital, not nature-in-itself.<br /><br />When nature is capital and capital is nature, then, there would at last be nothing outside capitalism at all. We can trust the market even less than Žižek thinks: it is, in fact, completely incapable of even ascertaining the actual gravity of the environmental crisis, much less of recognizing its causes or beginning to offer some solution. There will never and could never be a "market solution" to a crisis caused by the market itself.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMAt_XiBzgUYYZD3JK3RrCkf_8OfLVEIPGZOF9KBjp2Ohqszv1eeluxpfiJaTl0lMljAojfiuOlWDEdPY_pw-H2HVtRkJajMGpsNp50k9Ok9IrM1h5WYOscsFnZGusERgVHTYqNhKGUnBQ/s1600-h/garbage+truck.gif"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMAt_XiBzgUYYZD3JK3RrCkf_8OfLVEIPGZOF9KBjp2Ohqszv1eeluxpfiJaTl0lMljAojfiuOlWDEdPY_pw-H2HVtRkJajMGpsNp50k9Ok9IrM1h5WYOscsFnZGusERgVHTYqNhKGUnBQ/s400/garbage+truck.gif" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5208656929674559938" /></a><div class="blogger-post-footer"><br/><a href="http://culturemonkey.blogspot.com">http://culturemonkey.blogspot.com</a></div>Gerry Canavanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12821256718713645033noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4078198831968495589.post-39627802243371816902008-05-29T22:16:00.003-04:002008-05-29T22:22:23.940-04:00monkeypocalypseWhile we were <strike>sleeping</strike> writing our papers, monkeys executed the first stage of their three-pronged plan to take over the world: <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/29/science/29brain.html?_r=1&oref=slogin">learn to control robotic arms with their thoughts</a>.<br /><br />I don't need to tell you about stage two.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYaYfLVShYiOsqz3EPzW7TUsP6e_JKY1NCQllyRw0iaF8ogK9dTxkUQgE5EyxgvXc_17Wukjva7FrRrUc7iCskjJ7dXgx6QGzqNVoIA5Zb3PApt69x_0soQlFMD6yKFDL9le4nzPjusRWT/s1600-h/12.png"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYaYfLVShYiOsqz3EPzW7TUsP6e_JKY1NCQllyRw0iaF8ogK9dTxkUQgE5EyxgvXc_17Wukjva7FrRrUc7iCskjJ7dXgx6QGzqNVoIA5Zb3PApt69x_0soQlFMD6yKFDL9le4nzPjusRWT/s400/12.png" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5205990373445244418" /></a><br /><br />Thanks to <a href="http://alexandergreenberg.blogspot.com/2008/05/so-my-friends-ovhttpwww.html">Alex Greenberg</a> for the shout-out.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><br/><a href="http://culturemonkey.blogspot.com">http://culturemonkey.blogspot.com</a></div>Gerry Canavanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12821256718713645033noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4078198831968495589.post-36044019348185429002008-05-16T23:00:00.004-04:002008-05-16T23:23:18.797-04:00Polygraph 22: Call for Papers<strong>Polygraph 22—Call for Papers</strong><br /><a href="http://www.duke.edu/web/polygraph/cfp22.html">http://www.duke.edu/web/polygraph/cfp22.html</a><br /><br /><i>Special Issue: Ecology and Ideology</i><br /><br />The contemporary moment abounds with speculation concerning our ecological future. Specialists in a variety of fields forecast immanent catastrophe, stemming from a combination of climate change, fossil-fuel depletion, and consumer waste. The recent bestowal of the Nobel Peace Prize on a group of scientists studying climate change indicates the degree to which "peace" has come to signify ecological balance; even the declaration by the Vatican of a new set of "7 Deadly Sins for the modern age" includes pollution in an attempt to grapple with the potential of individuals to inflict ecological damage on a global scale.<br /><br />In the name of an impending crisis felt to be collectively shared, new political, cultural, and intellectual alignments are being forged, just as seismic shifts in the flow of global capital once again threaten to "redistribute" the world's resources and people. Ecological crisis has become a 24/7 media event, canvassing the planet in the imagery and rhetoric of disaster. From the halls of research and policy to activist documentary and apocalyptic fantasy, at the news desk, podium, pulpit, classroom, and computer monitor alike, all channels are united by a single underlying conviction: the present ecological catastrophe has humanity as its cause.<br /><br />Precisely because the answer seems so obvious, we want to know: why now? Where are the points of antagonism in the midst of such apparent consensus, and what is at stake in their difference? <br /><br />The Polygraph Editorial Collective invites papers concerning any aspect of ecology's relationship to ideology, both interrogating ecology as a location for critique of global capitalism and analyzing the ways in which ecology functions as an ideology in its own right.<br /><br />Potential areas of interest include:<br /><br /><strong>Political Ecology</strong><br />Globalization and ecology<br />Marxism and ecology<br />"Environmental accounting" as a challenge to the free market<br />Ecology and capital / consumerism<br />Ecology as growth market<br /><br /><strong>Eco-Disaster</strong><br />Peak oil and climate change<br />Biofuels and the food crisis<br />Overpopulation and Neo-Malthusianism<br />Ecology as a rhetoric of control<br />Figurations of eco-disaster in popular culture<br /><br /><strong>Religion and Ecology</strong><br />Green apocalypticism and green evangelism<br />Ecology and world religion<br /><br /><strong>Ecology and gender</strong> <br />Recent articulations of eco-feminism<br />Eco- & transnational feminisms<br />Women's work and the global chain of production<br />Agricultural work and reproduction<br /><br /><strong>Ecologies against ecologies</strong><br />"Light" vs. "dark green" environmentalism (i.e. deep ecology)<br />Primitivism and technofuturism<br />The status of international Green movements<br /> <br /><i>Polygraph</i> welcomes work from a variety of different disciplines, including critical geography, cultural anthropology, political economy, political theology, science studies, and systems theory. We also encourage the submission of a variety of formats and genres: i.e. field reports, surveys, interviews, photography, essays, etc.<br /><br /><strong>SUBMISSION DEADLINE</strong><br />December 31, 2008<br /><br /><strong>ISSUE EDITORS</strong><br />Gerry Canavan<br />Lisa Klarr<br />Ryan Vu<br /><br /><strong>CONTACT</strong><br /><a href="mailto:polygraph22cfp@gmail.com">polygraph22cfp@gmail.com</a><div class="blogger-post-footer"><br/><a href="http://culturemonkey.blogspot.com">http://culturemonkey.blogspot.com</a></div>Gerry Canavanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12821256718713645033noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4078198831968495589.post-60315361486035149942008-05-08T01:29:00.025-04:002008-05-09T09:37:41.226-04:00heterotopia and the myth-science of sf, pt.2<span style="font-style: italic;">Sorry for the intense lag time -- like Gerry said we should be back on regular schedule shortly (ha!).</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"></span> <a href="http://culturemonkey.blogspot.com/2008/03/heterotopia-and-myth-science-of-science.html">part one can be found here</a><br /><br />Like the rest of the world, science fiction went through some major changes leading up to and following '68. I'm talking about what is now known as 'New Wave SF,' a loosely defined subgenre of science fiction which had the British magazine <span style="font-style: italic;">New Worlds</span> as its flagship journal, under the editorship of Michael Moorcock from '64 to '71 (and again, though with less concentrated success, from '76 to '96). The 'experimental' work that came out of this period can perhaps best be defined by its deconstruction of the idea of outer space. This was carried out by a concerted attack on the older sf's representation of science and technology (its 'mode of production' so to speak), which tended either to the Gernsbackian -- technoscience as source of readerly edification enabling and regulating the pure entertainment of the hackneyed romance plots -- or the Campbellian, where science served as a medium for cosmic speculation. After Moorcock, Dick, Ballard, Pynchon, Ellison, LeGuin, Delany, Russ, Disch, Aldliss, and others, science fiction underwent a twin revolution of both form and content: it could violate all semblance of verisimilitude (always a contentious issue for the genre) and approach the terrain of pure fantasy, it could appropriate the stylistic techniques of literary modernism, and it could openly address 'social issues': radical politics, the war, feminism, sex, drugs, 'culture,' etc. People who were neither white nor male could write it. In short, it could find acceptance as 'serious literature.'<br /><br />Fascinatingly, in the midst of worldwide opposition to imperialism, Man finally realized the oldest science fiction fantasy of all time by landing on the Moon.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9vZQOmbbq9aAdnfEFRshkL1RJVgCzD7vXEeQiZmQ22EkYXf0YYMu3uFz8sHBdmpbjPAOM_uR_12c5TkavIsfG7o7FFyMWQjCrTxS38punfvgJW-d3EUCg4r33kISbeZR_woJNWwNbNqOV/s1600-h/moon.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9vZQOmbbq9aAdnfEFRshkL1RJVgCzD7vXEeQiZmQ22EkYXf0YYMu3uFz8sHBdmpbjPAOM_uR_12c5TkavIsfG7o7FFyMWQjCrTxS38punfvgJW-d3EUCg4r33kISbeZR_woJNWwNbNqOV/s320/moon.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5197870408314447858" border="0" /></a><br />(A more complete narrative of the New Wave's rise and fall can be found <a href="http://www.verysilly.org/lethem/lethems_vision.html">here</a>.)<br /><br />In an amusing historical convergence, there are at least two points where the post-'68 tradition of French philosophy intersected with Anglo-American New Wave sf. The first is Jean Baudrillard's treatment of J.G. Ballard in<span style="font-style: italic;"> Simulacra and Simulation</span>. The other is Samuel Delany's 1976 novel <span style="font-style: italic;">Triton</span>, which also quotes liberally from renegade figures in the analytic and ordinary language schools, Quine, Spencer Brown, and Wittgenstein. It's a brief mention, probably too much made of, of Michel Foucault's cryptic remarks on '<a href="http://foucault.info/documents/heteroTopia/foucault.heteroTopia.en.html">heterotopia</a>' (themselves probably too much made of). Heterotopia refers to the places with the power of "juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible," space here indicating an order or governing logic, of which there are always many. A heterotopia is a place where deviance flourishes in the midst of an external norm, potentially working to counter that norm. The examples he gives -- brothel, cemetary, ship -- are not archetypes, but singular instances. The existence of any particular heterotopia suggests a heterotopian analytic, a critical praxis: "As a sort of simultaneously mythic and real contestation of the space in which we live, this description could be called heterotopology."<br /><br />This is what ultimately differentiates heterotopia from utopia. Utopia is a projection. If it isn't pure fantasy it has to be speculative, why it lends itself so well to 'speculative fiction,' the mainstream's pseudo-respectable title for sf. What I tried to argue last time was that speculation advances the will to a single, coherent universe, beginning from a given situation. Possibilities are considered to the extent that they are <span style="font-style: italic;">probable</span>, and pursued to the extent that they are <span style="font-style: italic;">desirable</span>. Within the realm of speculation we are talking about the relations between past, future, and an incomplete present.<br /><br />Heterotopia has nothing to do with such things. Heterotopology recognizes heterotopias as sites<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitU_PnMbAkuB4Tlr-MxR65tDOkCw7LAl6Ik0XJadlnAvi6kkFzPkcmTjFEGfDvo_GE-H8XXOYJMZKZCphnTh07TLfQXQgduRChrstU-1eFdX8G_4kV_-2auTm4jA_T_8x1x8zI5tDY6Sfd/s1600-h/sant_fig5.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitU_PnMbAkuB4Tlr-MxR65tDOkCw7LAl6Ik0XJadlnAvi6kkFzPkcmTjFEGfDvo_GE-H8XXOYJMZKZCphnTh07TLfQXQgduRChrstU-1eFdX8G_4kV_-2auTm4jA_T_8x1x8zI5tDY6Sfd/s320/sant_fig5.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5197872865035741186" border="0" /></a> that can be noticed, built, or brought forth from what already exists. They do not not judge, compile, or evaluate existing possibilities, but prepare new ones. <span style="font-style: italic;">Triton</span> takes place across multiple worlds, amongst the moon-based libertarian-socialist societies against a post-apocalyptic Earth and the capitalist dystopia of Mars. On the moon Triton, there is a representative government that allows a high degree of individual freedom. During elections, everyone wins (each governing those who voted for them). Work is optional. People live in communes according to their preference of gender and sexual orientation. 'Preference' is the key term here; the society is organized around satisfying individual needs and desires, which tends to select out antisocial needs and desires (the enforcers, "e-girls," take care of the violently antisocial). Through advanced genetic and neurosurgery, even one's preferences can be tweaked. But the twist: there are "unlicensed sectors" in every city, where no laws apply. Ironically, violent criminals stay away, since the enforcers are also permitted in the unlicensed sectors, where they have carte blanche. Otherwise the "u-ls" serve as the exception to the regime of preference, though for this very reason some prefer to live there. There, where 'anything can happen:' religious cults, deviant sex acts, heavy drug use, non-consensual hallucinations, and general unhealthiness.<br /><br />And yet for Bron, the protagonist, this is not a paradise. He's from Mars, where sex (along with all other relationships) is mediated by credit, which has made him into an immature misogynist with no self-awareness. His innocent bumpkin act fails again and again with the independent, annoyingly self-actualized people of Triton. This basic antagonism inserted between foreground and background grants the novel freedom from its own ideals (and their shortcomings); without it Triton would risk appearing simply as a fantasy, or at least an improvement, but not a problem. The frisson of multiple active fantasies serves as the terrain through which the story navigates while Bron's antipathetic perspective serves as its vehicle. The novel thus includes its own interpretative topoi, positions from which various interpretations, criticisms, and distortions can be tested.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcYFo-paH7ufeZNr1EE-pppSB8XJbB5_EHve4nZ65QC2rjelK5c81rWVQOiIR3WHnE2wsKNz5HyKtuo0vzHPkDTpQFm-NIAypWCrFIY7fChWB874C70ncwr21fdT_Ga5nPIxRv92KlniZF/s1600-h/delany_l.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcYFo-paH7ufeZNr1EE-pppSB8XJbB5_EHve4nZ65QC2rjelK5c81rWVQOiIR3WHnE2wsKNz5HyKtuo0vzHPkDTpQFm-NIAypWCrFIY7fChWB874C70ncwr21fdT_Ga5nPIxRv92KlniZF/s320/delany_l.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5197874243720243218" border="0" /></a>In a revealing <a href="http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/interviews/delany52interview.htm">interview</a>, Delany argues that there is an antinomy of sorts between an interpretation that takes the 'bad things' in a given situation to be justified or not by 'good things' (or more precisely, The Good Thing), and one that doesn't. <span><a href="http://culturemonkey.blogspot.com/2008/03/heterotopia-and-myth-science-of-science.html"><span>My take on</span><span style="font-style: italic;"> Star-Maker</span></a></span> was in terms of option A. Most science fiction authors assumed option B, taking a moment or image from the novel and blowing it up into a novel of its own, or breaking down its formal rules of invention and closure and reconfiguring them to create new aliens, new worlds, etc. Option B leads us out of assumed conventions into something like a logic of genre, opening up a field for 'heterotopology' as well as a certain way of thinking about modal logic (see the philosopher <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Lewis_%28philosopher%29">David Lewis</a> for the most extreme form this can take, a logical defense of many-worlds theory), where many possibilities are always criss-crossing one another, denying the possibility of closure. B's critique of option A, the utopian/dystopian mode of interpretation (and it should be clear by now that I'm not only talking about reading literature), is that it begins from a position that doesn't exist, that of completion, to judge what does exist, which is always incomplete.<br /><br />Before going on I want to mention that Fredric Jameson, whose <a href="http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&id=sPBad_aN0i0C&dq=Jameson+Archaeologies+of+the+Future&printsec=frontcover&source=web&ots=3ZAygmK_xT&sig=4T86nKk0BBNCbsYvxj6mq1J84bw">recent work</a> we keep coming back to on the question of science fiction and utopia, is <span style="font-style: italic;">not </span>a utopian, option A-style reader in the sense I've been sketching out. He is not interested in figuring out which utopias are 'correct,' or in compiling the elements necessary to any fully realized ideal socialism. Jameson's utopian hermeneutic can be best understood as roughly analogous to heterotopology but with one major difference: it treats utopian projections as themselves critical sites or 'free zones,' but while reading them in the service of a deferred judgment. As with Marx, a <span style="font-style: italic;">formally </span>messianic temporality (open not to the grace of God but to collective social desire and action -- provided my readers can still see the difference), gives Jameson's writing its urgency while in his case permitting criticism of the present to take place within and/or from the realm of literature and culture. The utopian critic writes for a reader in need of a location, something it is argued present reality and its discourses of power are able only to provoke without ever truly satisfying. In something of a minor masterpiece of deceitful self-aggrandizement reversing itself into self-refutation, Bron inadvertently demonstrates the circuity of legal ontology:<br /><blockquote>"'The fantasy/reality confusion...it's just marvelous in her work. I mean, there, it's practically like what <span style="font-style: italic;">we</span> do, the fantasy working as a sort of metalogic, with which she can solve real, aesthetic problems in the most incredible ways -- I was actually <span style="font-style: italic;">in</span> a few of her productions last year, a sort of ersatz member of the company. But finally I just had to get out. Because when that fantasy seeps into the reality, she just becomes an incredibly ugly person. She feels she can distort anything that occurs for whatever purpose she wants. Whatever she feels, that's what <span style="font-style: italic;">is</span>, as far as she's concerned. But then, I suppose...' Bron laughed at the ground, then looked up: they'd just left the Plaza -- 'that's the right we just fought a war to defend. But Audri, when someone abuses that right, it can make it pretty awful for the rest of us.'" (<span style="font-style: italic;">Triton</span>)<br /><br /></blockquote> 'She' is the Spike, his ex-girlfriend, a performance artist who earlier on dumps him after realizing that he is, in our Earth terms, a typical heterosexual male. Throughout the novel, Bron <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgr4Xwdx_IPDY0e9yHp8Iga2oOc317XNyXn6a48xk30W8fC4jx6Ro9nZ2GsrRdDtUPETvjJ3Io41vnmN4lTZKUT7ZdnuHUWNZL8Kx4GzzV0GN2URvat8JhZZIncqHxIXC-2sACNLX0Qyza3/s1600-h/s3-modalities.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 306px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgr4Xwdx_IPDY0e9yHp8Iga2oOc317XNyXn6a48xk30W8fC4jx6Ro9nZ2GsrRdDtUPETvjJ3Io41vnmN4lTZKUT7ZdnuHUWNZL8Kx4GzzV0GN2URvat8JhZZIncqHxIXC-2sACNLX0Qyza3/s320/s3-modalities.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5197877245902383154" border="0" /></a>encounters the liberated desires of others first with fascination, then with a desire to contain them in a hierarchy, to organize them in terms of classical, ordinal logic rather than modal (Delany's 'metalogics'). Bron's anxieties are triggered when fantasy moves from possibility to actuality. Once those fantasies move beyond logic into aesthetic expression, they become more fascinating, but more alienating to him once their motivating desires are more concretely actualized, when he can no longer pretend they exist for his pleasure. For Bron, "Whatever she feels, that's what <span style="font-style: italic;">is</span>" is the ultimate affront. In the language of rights, he expresses his desire to meet the other on terms of abstract equality only, which in his mind includes the right not to have his deficiencies pointed out. Elsewhere he cries out for legal recognition of his own repression: "What happens to those of us who have problems and don't know <span style="font-style: italic;">why</span> we have the problems we do?" Here the political logic of the archetypal capitalist state is folded into traditional ontology: both are exposed as attempts to define (and therefore justify) one's lack. Against the algebraic openness of the right <span style="font-style: italic;">to</span> x, Bron yearns for the negative freedom promised by rights <span style="font-style: italic;">in defense of</span> the other. The right not to know, not to struggle, not to think, not to feel, not to love, finally <span style="font-style: italic;">not to be bothered</span>.<br /><br />Aesthetics and imaginative storytelling appear in <span style="font-style: italic;">Triton</span> not only as counterfactuals, methods for 'solving problems' (as Bron would have it), but as restaging the situation that produced the abstract problem in the sensory 'language' of art. <span style="font-style: italic;">Triton</span> claims 'heterotopology' for art -- and especially imaginative, extra-mimetic, <span style="font-style: italic;">theatrical</span> art -- over critique, precisely by having most of the novel progress through a series of philosophical dialogues which float Platonic speculation over a stage teeming with Aristophanic grotesquerie.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPiiQLhQ13GQxdhOPKwri6WEbP8Xlj0gIihdRRUfYKrXFjnbYNe0-VQvn6FMMMSL2iFP0Omwe5J2xgnq-pCe4IIIMfDnncrbTX94A1A_r9FxslRFQjqzSKOwR6BxYjAOg9NtXA0T-GSE6h/s1600-h/n4077.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPiiQLhQ13GQxdhOPKwri6WEbP8Xlj0gIihdRRUfYKrXFjnbYNe0-VQvn6FMMMSL2iFP0Omwe5J2xgnq-pCe4IIIMfDnncrbTX94A1A_r9FxslRFQjqzSKOwR6BxYjAOg9NtXA0T-GSE6h/s320/n4077.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5197876605952256034" border="0" /></a><br />New Wave sf characteristically refuses the realist conventions accepted by earlier writing either for reasons of professional necessity or a simple lack of interest in form. In doing so it opened up the present for the same kind of speculation traditional science fiction reserved for the future, as well as the sort of quasi-future one finds in <span style="font-style: italic;">Triton </span>and the earlier <span style="font-style: italic;">Dhalgren</span>, more interested in merging aesthetic with social experimentation than technical details or high adventure. Doing so brought it dangerously close to sf's major antagonists, self-consciously 'literary' fiction and fantasy, and further away from the future as a space for either rational speculation or irrational hope. The idea of the future was imaginatively employed (or not) as just another space for experimentation, along with genre, gender, race, and politics, to exploit the possibilities immanent in human relationships <span style="font-style: italic;">now</span>. Its constitutive wager was to deliberately treat imaginative writing as a material practice with which to examine (and intervene in) the present.<br /><br />Like its distant counterparts in film, this 'New Wave' would be aestheticized into oblivion, but one can't say it never had its moment.<br /><br />The negative theology of <span style="font-style: italic;">Star-Maker</span> can now be read as the last gasp of traditional utopianism projected in advance, accomplished by meticulously running out all the genre's possible outcomes and representing them, from the POV of cosmic time, as just so many returns of the same. The Star Maker then exists to satisfy a lack that <span style="font-style: italic;">should not be</span>, the irrational hope it spurs in the narrator experienced as a reassuring, even invigorating feeling of emptiness, overlaid with anticipation.<br /><blockquote>"One antagonist appeared as the will to dare for the sake of the new, the longed for, the reasonable and joyful, world, in which every man and woman may have scope to live fully, and live in service of mankind. The other seemed essentially the myopic fear of the unknown; or was it more sinister? Was the cunning will for private mastery, which fomented for its own ends the archaic, reason-hating, and vindictive passion of the tribe.<br /><br />It seemed that in the coming storm all the dearest things must be destroyed. All private happiness, all loving, all creative work in art, science, and philosophy, all intellectual scrutiny and speculative imagination, and all creative social building; all, indeed, that man should normally live for, seemed folly and mockery and mere self-indulgence in the presence of public calamity. But if we failed to preserve them, when would they live again?"</blockquote>This is the nihilism from which Nietzsche extracted the promise of the overman, framing the future in terms of a binary choice: fear or praise. Of what? What could there be after we've seen the pitiless destruction of every hope, by a being totally indifferent to suffering? 'After' is inconceivable: we're confronted with inevitable dispossession, of something much more abstract than material objects or territories -- the future's promise. We're asked to believe that even this constant anticipation of dispossession can be revalued, through "yes-saying" (in Nietzsche's words), to become the 'preservation' of a daring without purpose or meaning beyond itself.<br /><br />Combine these two impulses -- aestheticization of the present as its critique + affirmation of our doomed future as its preservation -- and you get cyberpunk, the sci-fi appropriate to Reaganism, the simulacra, and the golden age of finance capital.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Next, maybe something on cyberpunk and Afrofuturism. Maybe.</span><div class="blogger-post-footer"><br/><a href="http://culturemonkey.blogspot.com">http://culturemonkey.blogspot.com</a></div>traxus4420http://www.blogger.com/profile/05083641650092543902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4078198831968495589.post-56464810292910212072008-05-05T11:24:00.003-04:002008-05-05T11:31:06.915-04:00where have all the culturemonkeys gone?<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigrph29_v9_PwKzIIEN69H_zpDFkQSEdCgJce6Kf59gJEMrx_Gm92Chhn5PCtEoVn9otocDZEwfNWrA6Uc2WJBotAtyZ_dtTWo9Oc39xgoMqRgTB_20n3sD1WsWXb_gRtRskwt0Stkyh7H/s1600-h/aaa_001.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigrph29_v9_PwKzIIEN69H_zpDFkQSEdCgJce6Kf59gJEMrx_Gm92Chhn5PCtEoVn9otocDZEwfNWrA6Uc2WJBotAtyZ_dtTWo9Oc39xgoMqRgTB_20n3sD1WsWXb_gRtRskwt0Stkyh7H/s320/aaa_001.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5196916148951922178" /></a>Where have all the culturemonkeys gone? Well, it's finals time and we're all trying to get our other work done. But culturemonkey isn't going anywhere—in fact I'm planning at least one more big post on futurity as a paper on environmental Marxism comes together, and then it will be back to more general-interest culturemonkeying from at least a few of us until we settle on a new topic for the fall...<div class="blogger-post-footer"><br/><a href="http://culturemonkey.blogspot.com">http://culturemonkey.blogspot.com</a></div>Gerry Canavanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12821256718713645033noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4078198831968495589.post-20677190659485709932008-04-27T11:07:00.000-04:002008-04-27T11:08:31.705-04:00Kunkel on Vonnegut<a href="http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/sciencefiction/story/0,,2276354,00.html">link</a><br /><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:100%;">Published a year after the Cuban missile crisis, Cat's Cradle is a classic of cold-war science fiction. Its hallucinatory quality made Kurt Vonnegut a hero to hippies and peaceniks, writes Benjamin Kunkel</span> <br /> <br /> <span style="font-family:Geneva,Arial,sans-serif;font-size:85%;"> <b>Saturday April 26, 2008<br /><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/">The Guardian</a></b></span><div class="blogger-post-footer"><br/><a href="http://culturemonkey.blogspot.com">http://culturemonkey.blogspot.com</a></div>Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4078198831968495589.post-110981420761194572008-04-11T08:55:00.002-04:002008-04-11T08:57:57.454-04:00White Noise<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_JOhj2THfSow/R_9gIt1VmRI/AAAAAAAAAAs/9DdXv23L9W8/s1600-h/White-noise.png"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_JOhj2THfSow/R_9gIt1VmRI/AAAAAAAAAAs/9DdXv23L9W8/s320/White-noise.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5187970998612629778" border="0" /></a><br />This is the first of two posts discussing how we might want to think about studying science fiction and how an approach that limits itself largely to "close reading" of (even a large number of texts) seems to miss a tremendous amount, at least insofar as we're interested in literary/cultural history. <p>Bear with me a bit as I work through a familiar example, the argument should become clear quickly. Gerry had what I thought was an insightful post way back in the beginning of the class when he addressed the possible <a href="http://culturemonkey.blogspot.com/2008/01/past-as-anti-future.html" class="external text" title="http://culturemonkey.blogspot.com/2008/01/past-as-anti-future.html" rel="nofollow">ways to read apocalyptic fantasy</a>. I'll quote them: </p> <blockquote> 1) The roller-coaster hypothesis: We are able to enjoy scenarios about radical destruction or the collapse of civilized society because we do not fear they will ever come to pass.<br />2) The survivalist hypothesis: We consume these scenarios precisely because we believe they will come to pass, because we know they must come to pass.<br />3) The recursive hypothesis: Apocalpytic fantasies succeed in the box office and the best-seller lists because these sorts of fantasies had succeeded in the past. In other words, consumer culture just keeps feeding us the forms that have already worked, over and over again.<br />[...]<br />4) The bare-life hypothesis: We enjoy apocalyptic fantasy because we have been primed by ideology to recognize the absence of civilization as a ultra-Hobbesian state of permaviolence and degradation, which is to say that the purpose of apocalpytic fantasy is to serve as reinforcement and justification for the biopolitical power structures that already exist.<br />5) The wish-fulfillment hypothesis: We persist in imagining the end of the world because we secretly (or not so secretly) long for the destruction of society in general and/or capitalism in particular. </blockquote> <p>After our meeting two weeks ago, I think we have to add yet another one (#6), that the apparently dystopian apocalyptic fantasies are actually <i>utopian</i> fantasies, a Malthusian dream for a society and a world free from the burdens of overpopulation. Maybe one could include this in the above typology under 5, but I think that would be a stretch. It seems that one could long for an end to the scarcity and ills brought about by overpopulation without necessarily wanting an end to capitalism (in general or in particular). </p><p>Yet I'm concerned that this proliferation of explanations amounts to a "white noise" of theories. Barring any additional exploration (i.e. by methods other than "close reading"), I think we end up with a case of underdetermination of theory by avaialble evidence (i.e. the diligent, anecdotal close readings). I think there are various ways around this, and I'll touch on one that I think is potentially promising in my next post. I think this is a serious problem, frankly, and I don't think it's answered by speaking of "overdetermination", i.e. that there are multiple things at play. Of course there are, but are there an <i>infinite</i> number of explanations, because I think that's what the list above leads to (#5, in particular). Saying something is overdetermined by a few factors is different than saying "they are lots of explanations." </p><p>Obviously this comes back to a point that I've already made, that there seems to be little in the way of argument about what makes one "close reading" (say, #2) better than any other. In the context of the other reading for the class, it seems that one might attempt to arbitrate between various readings by referencing a larger theory, say Bloch's, for example. But then his theory and his arguments seem to be in play as much as the claim that a reading of a text provides evidence for one or several theories of apocalyptic fiction. And examining his theories more closely hasn't been a priority, more close readings has. (I think that's a fair description, right?) </p><p>So as I recall there were some counterarguments. One was that it was putting the cart before the horse to ask that we do serious theorizing about methods before reading the texts. But when would be enough? How many texts would you have to read before you could start theorizing about methods? 10, 100, 1000? And what difference is there going to be between the 100th close reading and the 101th close reading? It seems like you need a pretty serious theory of close reading to justify the default assumption that you need to do it a lot before you start theorizing about method. That seems to be putting the theory cart before the horse, if anything is. </p><p>Remind me if there were other counterarguments so I can address them next time. </p><p>Oh, and I should add, I've always assumed that we were interested in literary history. I'm open to arguments that that's not what we're doing. For example, if someone wants to argue that we're having fun, enjoying reading fiction, doing interpretive work (along the lines of <a href="http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/%7Emyl/languagelog/archives/005323.html" class="external text" title="http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005323.html" rel="nofollow">Fish's NYT blog posts</a>), what I've just written wouldn't really apply. </p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><br/><a href="http://culturemonkey.blogspot.com">http://culturemonkey.blogspot.com</a></div>Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4078198831968495589.post-63782993945756739942008-03-28T14:19:00.052-04:002008-03-30T10:17:04.998-04:00Heterotopia and the Myth-Science of Science Fiction, pt.1When one takes imagination as a starting point, the habitual boundary between sense perception and rational (or irrational) thought becomes infinitely permeable. Like some industrial-strength acid, refusing to accept any natural limit, it seeps all the way down through the subcategories of both fields: memory, sensuous dreaming, and hallucination blur together along with ontology, epistemology, ethics, an all-encompassing uncertainty that at its height melts away even the logic by which such categories are given to us in the first fplace. Assuming, of course, that 'logic' is where they come from, and that some version of it ultimately serves as the proper medium of their relation.<br /><br />But where a certain sort of philosophy arguably must make such an assumption (and from this perspective Leibniz, Kant and their successors can be seen as fighting a rearguard battle against the accumulation of contrary evidence, though always in the guise of a preemptive strike) , fiction is under no such obligation. If it can at all be usefully differentiated from fantasy, then science fiction's distinguishing feature (now that, as Ballard and Gibson fans never tire of saying, the present reality is science fictional) is that it at least takes this metaphysical question seriously. One might even say that, far more than the practical forecasting of techno-scientific advancement, metaphysics marks science fiction's intellectual vocation as a genre, and its means for answering the question that concerns all fiction: the relationship between the imagination and reality.<br /><br />Which is why its forays into politics can't help but prove interesting -- and why, just when at its most extravagantly imaginative (when it's just shy of fantasy) it is at its most political. Perhaps more explicitly than any other work, Olaf Stapledon's <span style="font-style: italic;">Star-Maker</span> (1937) demonstrates that the political, biological, and technological imaginaries typical of science fiction are not only intertwined, but can be understood together as something like an applied metaphysics. Nor can this really be understood in terms of aesthetics, since its aim is always to go beyond volition and anything resembling human causality, even if, as we will see, this is perhaps doomed to failure. I would say that it is the compulsion to metaphysical speculation which drives the novel forward in the absence of a conventional suspense or romance plot (and why, from the perspective of <a href="http://culturemonkey.blogspot.com/2008/03/kidding-on-square.html">genre analysis</a>, it appears as a compendium of sorts).<br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRUqJCMZ1401B80QbMCSGh7sRpWMU6zzkK3oeyMJ5LZqGdybUMvEo795m2wS3YOLJIT2xpfoiig4QH4A6VUZL1p2QeXF-fm7ygmBEHe3P5EOV9yas8ohpO8st5sqECuvWYkfffAVBFBt4t/s1600-h/Starmaker.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRUqJCMZ1401B80QbMCSGh7sRpWMU6zzkK3oeyMJ5LZqGdybUMvEo795m2wS3YOLJIT2xpfoiig4QH4A6VUZL1p2QeXF-fm7ygmBEHe3P5EOV9yas8ohpO8st5sqECuvWYkfffAVBFBt4t/s320/Starmaker.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5183316644205153682" border="0" /></a>The novel's form is that of the travel narrative, as an everyday Englishman gets a free tour of the cosmos. He does so through the accumulation of other, alien individuals into a communal mind, a a narrative movement from individual, to collective, to cosmic <span style="font-style: italic;">bildungsroman </span>in which each earlier stage is subsumed without being lost on the road to enlightenment. It's a long road, populated by an astonishing variety of life forms, cultures, and civilizations, and we watch their struggles, their fleeting moments of utopia, and their horrific, agonizing collapses as they occur along the same temporal line. Travel narrative has been the political imaginary's preferred point of departure at least since <span style="font-style: italic;">The Odyssey</span>, and like the ancient epic, <span style="font-style: italic;">Star-Maker</span>'s peregrinations<span style="font-style: italic;"> </span>are finally rounded off by a desire for home. But like everything else in the novel, this desire occurs on multiple 'levels' -- the narrator's wish to return to his wife; the cosmic mind's desire for union with its creator, the dark other whose spectral presence is recurrently felt throughout the novel; and the eroticized scene of this union (between feminine universal soul and masculine creator of universes) which marks the novel's climactic regression into anthropomorphism. Unlike <span style="font-style: italic;">The Odyssey</span>, and more like More's <span style="font-style: italic;">Utopia</span>, the narrator of <span style="font-style: italic;">Star-Maker</span> plays no active role in the worlds he visits, but is condemned to passively observe (it's <span style="font-style: italic;">astral</span>, or dream travel, not physical). This is perhaps inevitable in a world where human action is seen to be dominated by an active force outside it, unknowable yet also the site of true knowledge which is the objective of the novel of discovery. Unlike either <span style="font-style: italic;"></span><span style="font-style: italic;">The Odyssey</span> or <span style="font-style: italic;">Utopia</span>, the end of the journey is motivated not only by yearning and not at all by satisfaction, but by the overwhelming terror experienced upon at last meeting the furthest reaches of the imagination, the end of the universe, an encounter immanent with a reflection on the unimaginable suffering that had been necessary to achieve it.<br /><br />There are neither gods nor any personal God to know for us, except in myth. And it is myth that the narrator must resort to in order to narrate the end, the moment when the force of creation force is finally personified as creative spirit: "All I can do is to record, as best I may with my poor human powers, something of the vision's strange and tumultuous after-effect on my own cosmical imagination when the intolerable lucidity had already blinded me, and I gropingly strove to recollect what it was that had appeared. For in my blindness the vision did evoke from my stricken mind a fantastic reflex of itself, an echo, a symbol, a myth, a crazy dream, contemptibly crude and falsifying, yet, as I believe, not wholly without significance" (412). The leap into myth (is it a leap forward or backward?) is cast as a reaction to the failure of the human imagination to comprehend its own limits, a futile projection into a void that is itself hypothetical. But this myth is hardly an escape -- it carries with it its own horrors, not least of which is the adulation it compels, since this sublime feeling, the satisfying conclusion necessary to end the novel, the completed circle, serves to justify all the agony and death that occurred within it, and without the narrator's consent. Finality is something inflicted upon the unknown in response to the limitations 'it' 'inflicts' on us, figured in the former instance as a kind of cosmic rape:<blockquote><br />"And now, as through tears of compassion and hot protest, I seemed to see the spirit of the utlimate and perfected cosmos face her maker. In her, it seemed, compassion and indignation were subdued by praise. And the Star Maker, that dark power and lucid intelligence, found in the concrete loveliness of his creature the fulfilment of desire. And in the mutual joy of the Star Maker and the ultimate cosmos was conceived, most strangely, the absolute spirit itself, in which all times are present and all being is comprised; for the spirit which was the issue of this union confronted my reeling intelligence as being at once the ground and the issue of all temporal and finite things.<br /><br />But to me this mystical and remote perfection was nothing. In pity of the ultimate tortured beings, in humane shame and rage, I scorned my birthright of ecstasy in that inhuman perfection, and yearned back to my lowly cosmos, to my own human and floundering world, there to stand shoulder to shoulder with my own half animal kind against the powers of darkness; yes, and against the indifferent, the ruthless, the invincible tyrant whose mere thoughts are sentient and tortured worlds.<br /><br />Then, in the very act of this defiant gesture, as I slammed and bolted the door of the little dark cell of my separate self, my walls were all shattered and crushed inwards by the pressure of irresistable light, and my naked vision was once more seared by lucidity beyond its endurance."</blockquote><br />In this passage theology is manifested through the personification of metaphysics, which philosophers in their professional capacity are supposed to resist lest their discipline tumble from its Archimedean heights down to the rather embarrassing idioms of science fictional mysticism and psychoanalysis. But giving in to this 'temptation' puts us inevitably in the realm of ideology ("invincible tyrant"), of misogyny ("his creature"), racism ("half animal kind," "powers of darkness"), alienation ("little dark cell of my separate self"), and the memory of shared suffering, figured here in the synechdochal form of the primal scene, but also distributed throughout the narrative as its very subject and content. It's everything that happens in the midst of metaphysics without ceasing to be metaphysics. And when we find that metaphysics is the author, how can we help but be disgusted? Nevertheless, according to a logic externalized as destiny or unconscious compulsion, we advance to final closure and its affirmation:<br /><br /><blockquote>"It was with anguish and horror, and yet with acquiescence, even with praise, that I felt or seemed to feel something of the eternal spirit's temper as it apprehended in one intuitive and timeless vision all our lives. Here was no pity, no proffer of salvation, no kindly aid. Or here were all pity and all love, but mastered by a frosty ecstasy. Our broken lives, our loves, our follies, our betrayals, our forlorn and gallant defences, were one and all calmly anatomized, assessed, and placed. True, they were one and all lived through with complete understanding, with insight and full sympathy, even with passion. But sympathy was not ultimate in the temper of the eternal spirit; contemplation was."</blockquote><br />The narrative's drive to this moment of total submission to the God's-eye perspective happens through episodes of wild inventiveness that critics, readers, and assorted fans of contemplation tend to prefer to its <span style="font-style: italic;">telos</span>. With good reason. But what if, from our late perspective, <span style="font-style: italic;">Star-Maker</span>'s status as the ultimate compilation of all science fiction's possibilities were no longer a testament to the inventiveness of the genre (as is usually claimed), but the exposure of its limitations? If there's one thing that is clear from the novel's conclusion, speculation as the attempt to think Being (whether political or metaphysical) in excess of reality -- but not, as is the case with fantasy, in spite of reality -- still demands closure, in whatever language happens to be available. One is forced to admit that in this context the uninhibited imagination of otherness which might result from the erasure or deferral of The End simply amounts to the infinite recombination of tropes. This is the true death of any genre, no matter how often it's spiced up through new scientific discoveries. Or even, dare I say it, new developments in politics or world affairs. Do we need another critical dystopia? A more detailed utopian fantasy? Another allegorical space opera? All of these forms are included in <span style="font-style: italic;">Star Maker</span>, a novel written at a time when the technology of today had only just been introduced and when politics still looked like the arbiter of human destiny, and yet they all end the same way.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvHWJa_SYE4EP2eYxeUT-v9V9en-JuUx_xYZJ-2DkJj_2hEwPb7ljV4PeSIrTuOP_lvgDPTkKNJz-yUId6F0NN4Fxbcwsiu4X93TwHRG1iz6_8ZDrzPIFoqK4C4zC_fXyYTGUvmILflOXO/s1600-h/071001-wildebeest_big.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvHWJa_SYE4EP2eYxeUT-v9V9en-JuUx_xYZJ-2DkJj_2hEwPb7ljV4PeSIrTuOP_lvgDPTkKNJz-yUId6F0NN4Fxbcwsiu4X93TwHRG1iz6_8ZDrzPIFoqK4C4zC_fXyYTGUvmILflOXO/s400/071001-wildebeest_big.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5183321854000483762" border="0" /></a><br />And at what cost! For perhaps the first time in history, the sheer <span style="font-style: italic;">price</span> of contemplation, of (re)producing the vantage point from which it is possible on a universal scale, had become readily apparent to anyone with a radio and some common sense. The view from the top only revealed just how high the bodies were stacked. Enough perhaps to drive any sensitive man to find solace in the vision of an infinite future. But in <span style="font-style: italic;">Star-Maker</span>, even new logics of Being, the possibility of which is examined in what I found to be the most hopeful section of the book -- the part chronicling the Star Maker's creation of multiple universes, each with its own distinct physical, temporal, and ontological laws -- fail to negate their negation. The novel's end<span style="font-style: italic;"> </span>is the horizon of speculation, not of satisfaction or knowledge, and by ignoring it the imagination must settle for spinning its wheels indefinitely. The terms given allow for no true escape.<br /><br />So what happens when the horizon of knowledge exceeds that of speculation? When the <a href="http://culturemonkey.blogspot.com/2008/02/survivability-and-thinkability.html">possibility of extinction</a> is not only imaginable but imminent, when we know what will happen after the end? After the Atomic Age, after the threat of global warming and resource depletion, we can in fact know this, probablistically, on a worldwide, species-level scale. Knowledge of our material limits has almost entirely surpassed our ability to imagine their transcendence (excepting a few lingering technofetishists and alien abductees). The death of God followed by the death of Man, etc. If this isn't simply the end of the speculative imagination, then don't we at least require a different approach? One not organized around some version of the progress myth or its ethical-messianic and nihilist-evolutionary critiques? For those who think imaginative fiction is still worth the indulgence, what are the alternatives to utopia, dystopia, or apocalypse?<br /><span style="font-style: italic;"><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Next time I'll consult the '70s answer to that question (I'll give you a hint, it has to do with human agency).</span><br /><br /></span><div class="blogger-post-footer"><br/><a href="http://culturemonkey.blogspot.com">http://culturemonkey.blogspot.com</a></div>traxus4420http://www.blogger.com/profile/05083641650092543902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4078198831968495589.post-9029762865636800112008-03-20T21:07:00.014-04:002008-03-20T23:18:07.497-04:00kidding on the square<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGoIOAHGPSxdBFciTPHMrRW4vA99iVvvZBiyxW7wtydYFMS-CN9LI8ivk-20A3nvG_VVxHCOGkWq52CmZDaEQyg6rWlzcYBCI5EmZBPiwgmJcmCwQdLUkqDnfkFH-0LBEeBh4HzmHUhSU6/s1600-h/starmaker-chart.gif"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGoIOAHGPSxdBFciTPHMrRW4vA99iVvvZBiyxW7wtydYFMS-CN9LI8ivk-20A3nvG_VVxHCOGkWq52CmZDaEQyg6rWlzcYBCI5EmZBPiwgmJcmCwQdLUkqDnfkFH-0LBEeBh4HzmHUhSU6/s400/starmaker-chart.gif" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5179995726244263154" /></a><i>Apologies for the slow posting—we culturemonkeys are just coming off our Spring Break. And preemptive apologies for the post that follows, as well, another public exercise in trying something on for size...</i><br /><br />The chart at right is Jameson's <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotic_square">Greimas square</a> for Olaf Stapledon's <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_maker"><i>Star Maker</i></a>, not only one of the finest science fiction novels ever written but a kind of overarching theory of SF, a compendium of all that is possible along a certain trajectory of recombinative imagination. In the case of <i>Star Maker</i>, as the square suggests, that trajectory is the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic">dialectic</a> of <i>the one</i> and <i>the many</i>, the interplay that informs all of the planetary social systems that the novel's narrator visits. The other diagonal represents the theoretical countermovement in the novel, dualism and nondualism, those places where the opposition between the individual and the community is represented as <i>non</i>dialectical (and usually reformulated as good/evil, progress/anti-progress, life/death, futurity/apocalypse, and so on).<br /><br />Mapping out the novel in this way we find its principal moments and various figurations nicely laid out.<br /><br />While discussing <i>Star Maker</i> the Futurity group found ourselves playing with a Greimas square of our own, a collaborative square I put forth now not because I believe it is right and complete but because I want to discuss the ways in which it might be wrong. <br /><br />I've modified the square slightly since we talked about it, which is something we can talk about in the comments. <br /><br />The square is an attempt to lay out the component subgenres of speculative fiction along these semiotic lines.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4uySFi-E3W_FULoSXZEI7lAUIyFTUFQxNlBNmZQqFFKC2EywcV7_AX4ZuLdfj-NNXnJ6GLrro0uOnlnduIMUUt98jqVELb4vQ2lgr0IiMAXVtJnZOCy0JQM1_ZZt5mxwebT5uEKsuuUB_/s1600-h/genre-greimas-chart.gif"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4uySFi-E3W_FULoSXZEI7lAUIyFTUFQxNlBNmZQqFFKC2EywcV7_AX4ZuLdfj-NNXnJ6GLrro0uOnlnduIMUUt98jqVELb4vQ2lgr0IiMAXVtJnZOCy0JQM1_ZZt5mxwebT5uEKsuuUB_/s400/genre-greimas-chart.gif" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5180028681528325442" /></a>We take as our first opposition the difference between science fiction and fantasy/eros, following Jameson's borrowing of Coleridge's distinction between <a href="http://www.wdog.com/rider/writings/wordsworth_and_coleridge.htm"><i>imagination</i> and <i>fancy</i></a> but aligning "imagination" as much with "the erotic" as with fantasy. Science fiction's theoretical extreme would in this sense be more a novel that is more <i>Star Maker</i>-esque than even <i>Star Maker</i> itself: this is the programmatic business of speculative engineering and genre combinatorics. This is <a href="http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/11/economics-the-final-frontier/">nerdonomics</a>, operating on a scientific-mathematic logic. The erotic, on the other hand, is pure arousal—affect. The relevant aesthetic example here is not the pornographic so much as poetry and myth: the idea of Camelot, outside any consideration of how many people should live inside or how tall the walls the should be. This is the dream logic of pure imaginative play.<br /><br />On the other axis, we map <i>horror</i> against <i>spectacle</i>, spectacle in the Debordian sense of a manifestation of pure positivity: <blockquote>The spectacle manifests itself as an enormous positivity, out of reach and beyond dispute. All it says is: “Everything that appears is good; whatever is good will appear.” The attitude that it demands in principle is the same passive acceptance that it has already secured by means of its seeming incontrovertibility, and indeed by its monopolization of the realm of appearances. (<i>The Society of the Spectacle</i> 15)</blockquote>Horror, then, is anti-spectacle—it promises us violence, real, raw, and uncontrolled. But as with science fiction and the erotic I mean to keep these two terms free from other valences or connotations outside the foundational distinction between positivity and negativity, for as we all know there can be an Dionysian ecstasy to violence just as surely as there can surely be a terrible unfreedom in spectacle. What I'm interested in right now is just the question of imaginative method, trying to identify the sorts of moves that can be made through speculative fiction.<br /><br />When science fiction combines with horror, we get <i>Frankenstein</i> and its many children; when it combines with spectacle, we get <i>Star Wars.</i> Likewise, when Eros and fantasy combine, we have the seductive myth of the vampire; when it's spectacle and fantasy, we have the pornographic, or, more accurately, the polymorphous perverse.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAiPET9WKeCM7B0ia5_bNPblmUI5sKBP-boH_u2DadATx6Nr8d0cwZ8TDJhGYv7_95IjmIK-mgjYXUYDaUI4I2UFQD8LjCI24bqKhBTAWTSnYo1EIbnjt6DjSQ01vAdwYC2lUI3fqS_SPG/s1600-h/starmaker.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAiPET9WKeCM7B0ia5_bNPblmUI5sKBP-boH_u2DadATx6Nr8d0cwZ8TDJhGYv7_95IjmIK-mgjYXUYDaUI4I2UFQD8LjCI24bqKhBTAWTSnYo1EIbnjt6DjSQ01vAdwYC2lUI3fqS_SPG/s400/starmaker.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5180007734972822818" /></a>Borrowing from the apocalyptic suprahistorical cycle of <i>Star Maker</i>, our group then flirted with an ambitious addition to the chart: an attempt to overlap a mapping of the Utopic and the apocalyptic in relation to these terms. We struck upon the notion that perhaps Utopia can be seen as the standpoint of eternity, the position which all the deviations and excesses of the four subgenres—each one trending in its own way towards the boundary condition of apocalypse—are read against...<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizVl64wNAO3soreXXMozlaMIDr_Pi4Kmu0QMkDQ5Z-fbVTujrEyBd7uxuYC2tMeIq3q1NhvDU62j3osIk6MykTn-GtAN6hhsMvaFNTu0Qv1AXJTH0qkBCG9JybLRLHVPJoqBjIVQtWohjV/s1600-h/utopia.gif"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizVl64wNAO3soreXXMozlaMIDr_Pi4Kmu0QMkDQ5Z-fbVTujrEyBd7uxuYC2tMeIq3q1NhvDU62j3osIk6MykTn-GtAN6hhsMvaFNTu0Qv1AXJTH0qkBCG9JybLRLHVPJoqBjIVQtWohjV/s400/utopia.gif" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5180028917751526738" /></a><div class="blogger-post-footer"><br/><a href="http://culturemonkey.blogspot.com">http://culturemonkey.blogspot.com</a></div>Gerry Canavanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12821256718713645033noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4078198831968495589.post-60103187254290427942008-03-15T23:22:00.002-04:002008-03-15T23:24:10.856-04:00the dickensian aspectIt's got nothing to do with futurity, but I've got <a href="http://gerrycanavan.blogspot.com/2008/03/dickensian-aspect-thoughts-on-wire.html">a post on my home blog about season five of <i>The Wire</i></a>, if anyone here is a fan of the show.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><br/><a href="http://culturemonkey.blogspot.com">http://culturemonkey.blogspot.com</a></div>Gerry Canavanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12821256718713645033noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4078198831968495589.post-81421504298555482362008-03-07T08:34:00.021-05:002008-03-15T12:04:24.871-04:00Time Travel: The Creation of A Temporal Ecology<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaZ-QspiUtO1j_YfERlnH3LAyraGO3O3Ta_LD3SYsVOjP6qyeCL2pb7-QbwqyiJymnegFdYqrFXqs2Fn_dr-4QyQX48-MLRdBXA20UDjSA5VzSSq9BzOoIjdAnMNdUjrn4Phfm5Bg9wU0/s1600-h/2763152.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaZ-QspiUtO1j_YfERlnH3LAyraGO3O3Ta_LD3SYsVOjP6qyeCL2pb7-QbwqyiJymnegFdYqrFXqs2Fn_dr-4QyQX48-MLRdBXA20UDjSA5VzSSq9BzOoIjdAnMNdUjrn4Phfm5Bg9wU0/s320/2763152.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5174994428454722994" /></a><br />One tends to mark the birth of time travel as a narratological device with the 1895 publication of Wells’ <span style="font-style:italic;">The Time Machine</span>. Along with a couple of earlier stories: "The Clock That Went Backwards" (1881), "El Anacronopete" (1887: the first to introduce a time machine), Wells' "The Chronic Argonauts" (1888), and Twain's "A Connecticut Yankee..." (1889), these tales form a cluster of literary experiments that one struggles to locate in earlier cultural fictions. The desire to travel back in time seems to be a uniquely cultural-historical formation. The question then arises as to what, exactly, prompts this particular form to emerge as does in the late 19th-C. To do Wells service, he was attending lectures in contemporary physics at the key transformational period between the Newtonian and Quantum eras when scientists began to posit the existence of a fourth-dimension of space which they identified as time. Questions about the possible multi-dimensionality of reality had been previously explored in E.A. Abott’s 1884 novella <span style="font-style:italic;">Flatland</span>, but Wells seems to be the first to illustrate what it could mean for one of those dimensions to be time. <br /><br />Making time a dimension of space—spatializing time—allows Wells' characters to visit the future <span style="font-style:italic;">as a place</span>. While this is an amazing imaginative tool in itself, providing authors of SF for generations to come with a means by which to manipulate the otherwise linear progression of the traditional fabula, time travel also gestures toward collective experiences of temporality at the turn of the century. Wells' fictional text--again inspired by a particular scientific discourse--illustrates a disjointed relationship to time where the future can be experienced only by overcoming the physical gap between present and future states. This occurs through the transplantation of characters from the fictive present, which might nevertheless be written in past tense, to the distant future. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizWWC5EuEeHyXae61DhAKfDJv38ELfRIiGCCjhO183gNolzEaiZDBkAwoCTjeukxOd8aMW08f6zKSyTjXM8eI3Zg5zABzIzpd7GBK-rGvAtdltswM1xXaOokUG0Xqwd2r2YClTESW6rfo/s1600-h/360px-Time_travel_hypothesis_using_wormholes.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:left;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizWWC5EuEeHyXae61DhAKfDJv38ELfRIiGCCjhO183gNolzEaiZDBkAwoCTjeukxOd8aMW08f6zKSyTjXM8eI3Zg5zABzIzpd7GBK-rGvAtdltswM1xXaOokUG0Xqwd2r2YClTESW6rfo/s320/360px-Time_travel_hypothesis_using_wormholes.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5174995364757593570" /></a><br /><br />Wells' innovation similarly opens up the past as a potential <span style="font-style:italic;">site</span> of discovery. Although in <span style="font-style:italic;">The Time Machine </span>,The Time Traveller can only return to three hours before his initial departure (a theoretical limit often outlined in scientific treatments of this subject), Wells' spatialization of time nevertheless makes the past <span style="font-style:italic;">physically</span> accessible to potential travelers. While 18th-century authors, by contrast, might have had their characters “travel” to the past through an encounter with that culture's inherited archive (thinking of Foucault), later writers achieve an "actual" (in the space of the text) transposition in time. Thus the limits of representation vis-a-vis the past seem to parallel similar limitations in the very experience of history itself where a decided discontinuity exists between the subject (collective or otherwise) of history and the past it seeks to experience; not to mention the Heraclitean/Parmenidean divide over whether or not the past actually continues to <span style="font-style:italic;">exist</span>. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAvLX6NfyEIIAfHusPz5Si4spXhZXdgZfIcD7OmQinJG6pvvl7X1jVDtBa59_uSdxmOcmBfbIO6Dwi42Fs11tY8tNVitUQin361WE96GQHiJr3csaFxQ_sJ_e1wVlJyu8Iple7YSwesws/s1600-h/time_machine.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:left;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAvLX6NfyEIIAfHusPz5Si4spXhZXdgZfIcD7OmQinJG6pvvl7X1jVDtBa59_uSdxmOcmBfbIO6Dwi42Fs11tY8tNVitUQin361WE96GQHiJr3csaFxQ_sJ_e1wVlJyu8Iple7YSwesws/s320/time_machine.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5174994626023218626" /></a><br /><br />Time travel, appearing as it does in the age of industrialism, might then function as a means to break out of a very particular temporal episteme inaugurated by industrial time and its ruthless march forward, very much in the spirit of Benjamin’s Angel of History. The latent desire of time travel might be to re-create a kind of temporal ecology lost in the industrial era, an ecology unearthed from the repressed cyclicality of “natural” temporal rhythms. In this iteration, time travel is an artificial means of undoing an imposition of mechanized time through, of course, the invention of a fabulous machine.<br /><br />This might account for the apparently gendered nature of particular types of time travel. In the presentation of time-loop paradoxes, for example in the <span style="font-style:italic;">Terminator</span> films and Heinlein’s “All You Zombies,” returning to the past allows the male protagonist to auto-engender himself either by orchestrating his conception or by actually impregnating his past self. The use of the time-loop paradox as an act of male auto-genesis which, in some cases, bypasses the womb entirely, seems to point to a particularly gendered tension arising out of these longings for temporal manipulation. This type of time travel also seems to artificially re-create a temporal ecology for the traveler, who experiences his life cyclically by affecting causality at either end of the loop. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOL75Qb-7_F4qMRLuwWKakyuCkZGjKIKJ7tW7_e4NRRl5cg9qcjwKJu1W5mjGGwDZ9nsAWPhCW9S9Fs2l5WNDRIxrwCYwRQtl-lbFuxq-_AUVLwurL9w9IplyTGmlGRHQ92mZFdRhyQ1I/s1600-h/time.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOL75Qb-7_F4qMRLuwWKakyuCkZGjKIKJ7tW7_e4NRRl5cg9qcjwKJu1W5mjGGwDZ9nsAWPhCW9S9Fs2l5WNDRIxrwCYwRQtl-lbFuxq-_AUVLwurL9w9IplyTGmlGRHQ92mZFdRhyQ1I/s320/time.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5174994965325635026" /></a><br /><br />Women writers who have evoked the time travel trope tend to treat the experience rather differently. In Octavia Butler’s <span style="font-style:italic;">Kindred</span>, the protagonist travels back to antebellum Maryland when a family member from her past “summons” her. Her actual travel occurs in the form of dream (she becomes dizzy and passes out), which suggests that there is already a continuity with the past that does not require mechanistic intervention to motivate. Marge Piercy’s <span style="font-style:italic;">Woman on the Edge of Time</span> similarly utilizes the space of dream as a means by which to travel. While this, in some ways, links these writers up to Proust and Bergson who did not subordinate time to space, it also gestures again toward the question of desire. To interject an eco-feminist perspective, women, despite the pressures of industrial temporality, have remained connected to cyclical experiences of time through both menstruation and gestation, both of which defy (often embarrassingly) the “stop-motion” Taylorism of early and late industry. This link, however, might account for the formal differentation of time travel between male and female writers of SF, with male writers seeking to rediscover a lost experience of time.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><br/><a href="http://culturemonkey.blogspot.com">http://culturemonkey.blogspot.com</a></div>Klarrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01103546973773360568noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4078198831968495589.post-67266108851423865722008-03-03T19:45:00.002-05:002008-03-03T19:49:01.295-05:00koolhaas<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/03/03/arts/Rem600.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 320px;" src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/03/03/arts/Rem600.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br />I swear, I'd think twice before becoming a science fiction writer these days. You never know when some inconspicuous feature of the distant future arrives early.... way early. Or I suppose one could settle for writing about a future five years away..<br /><br />What I thought of when I saw Koolhaas's<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/03/arts/design/03kool.html"> next project</a>.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><br/><a href="http://culturemonkey.blogspot.com">http://culturemonkey.blogspot.com</a></div>Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4078198831968495589.post-17531669564014220562008-02-23T21:26:00.001-05:002008-02-23T21:27:08.964-05:00Dystopia as Economic Indicator<i>We charted the number of dystopian movies in the U.S. for each of the last 30 years, against economic downturns, and found that dystopian movies are counter-cyclical. That is, <a href="http://io9.com/359488/when-the-economy-booms-dystopias-rule">dystopian films do best when the economy is booming</a>, and a fall in the number of dystopian movies may predict a recession.</i><br /><br />(Click for a full-sized version of the chart)<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjP3JlFxxxudvS-7rs9lVI5BuP9ykg65jkNBj-ud-8XWo0hbf0g_4K1XgjAOlnz3gPxhtb_6quxh4JMI6e58g4HckpbUS_rckXL5wfwtm3SWVdv6ZHKgJ0ymCfkVUB8_CiO9QuqIsV0Ro0y/s1600-h/dmovies-blue.gif"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjP3JlFxxxudvS-7rs9lVI5BuP9ykg65jkNBj-ud-8XWo0hbf0g_4K1XgjAOlnz3gPxhtb_6quxh4JMI6e58g4HckpbUS_rckXL5wfwtm3SWVdv6ZHKgJ0ymCfkVUB8_CiO9QuqIsV0Ro0y/s400/dmovies-blue.gif" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5170366461803557394" /></a><div class="blogger-post-footer"><br/><a href="http://culturemonkey.blogspot.com">http://culturemonkey.blogspot.com</a></div>Gerry Canavanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12821256718713645033noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4078198831968495589.post-19714407184087306322008-02-22T09:47:00.006-05:002008-02-22T10:41:03.727-05:00History and The Forever War (1974)<i>The Forever War</i> (1974), a work of science fiction written more than three decades ago? I'm aware this question carries with controversial assumptions--Must we have an orientation? Can we?--but I do think a questioning of initial orientation is useful, particularly when we write about it in public. <p>One approach I have mixed feelings about brackets the form and content and takes fictional works of the past as evidence of a particular sentiment, in the case of Haldeman, it would be opposition to the Vietnam War (which ended, of course, a year later in 1975). I suppose one might conceive of analogous approaches to other works of literature--Orwell's <i>1984</i> or even <i>Terminator</i> or <i>Terminator 2</i> (evidence of some fear about technology). In short, the narrative is taken as historical data, providing concrete evidence of some opinion or pointing in the direction of Zeitgeist. </p><p>Outside the academic context I'm familiar with, I think this approach/orientation is pretty widespread. "Oh, the novel is responding to X," would be the refrain. I'm not even quite sure how to name it. Is it naive cultural historicism? (Actually, I'm sure that "Oh, the novel is responding to X" could encompass countless interpretive orientations.)<br /></p><p>But let's continue with this provisional approach. There are countless problems with it, most notably that it brackets all considerations of form and most consideration of any content that conflicts with the interpretation. Yet I don't think the reductionism is necessarily bad. For one, being able to speak about novels and film in this way connects us up at least preliminarily with larger projects of social and cultural history. </p><p>So I'm attracted to the idea of beginning with this, shall I say "popular" approach, and, identifying some of its aporia and contradictions, proceed in an iterative, dialectical manner.<br /></p><p>So let's begin. What are the developments (political, social, technological, etc...) that this book provides evidence of? (I suppose I should say I'm not entirely clear on what kind of evidence I'm talking about. I suppose at a minimum, it provides evidence of some level of awareness of such developments, such as I (and others writing about Haldeman) recognize them.)</p><p><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_JOhj2THfSow/R77hFcFO79I/AAAAAAAAAAk/Pmd9JiRGn1w/s1600-h/TheForeverWar%281stEd%29.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_JOhj2THfSow/R77hFcFO79I/AAAAAAAAAAk/Pmd9JiRGn1w/s320/TheForeverWar%281stEd%29.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5169816905821646802" border="0" /></a> </p> <ul><li> Vietnam War (~1959 to 1975)<br /></li><li> Human Spaceflight to other Planets / Moons: Apollo Moon landing July 20, 1969. </li><li> Human Spaceflight: USSR: Yuri Gagarin (April 12, 1961). </li><li> Expanding Knowledge of Solar System: Pluto was only identified in 1930. Titan identified in 1944. Charon, Pluto's moon (not the Charon in the book), was identified in 1978. </li><li> Relativity: 1905? </li><li> Search for extraterrestrial intelligence: First SETI conference in 1961. </li><li> Wormholes: Term coined by physicist John Wheeler in 1957. </li><li> Relevance of countless cultural events and movements of the 1960s and 1970s. </li><li> nth wave overpopulation fears? Worldwatch founded in 1974... </li><li> Psychopharmacology: 1950s on.. </li><li> Computers doing probability calculations (See p. 200): Fourth generation Computers: November 15, 1971, Intel releases the 4004, first commercial microprocessor. </li><li> Laser weapons: First working laser in May 1960. Introduced to public in 1959. "The LASER, Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation" </li></ul> <p>No doubt we need more additions.. </p><p>There are so many problems with this approach. I think you can count several peaking out even from my description. </p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><br/><a href="http://culturemonkey.blogspot.com">http://culturemonkey.blogspot.com</a></div>Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4078198831968495589.post-73480541141978895132008-02-16T00:09:00.034-05:002008-02-17T11:51:32.240-05:00Digression: There Will Be BloodFinally got around to writing about this, this messy, occasionally brilliant, reckless like it doesn't matter anymore (it doesn't) mythography of capital. I mean this quite literally. Most discussion of this film assumes that it is about a fictional oil baron named Daniel Plainview, loosely based on the life of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_L._Doheny">Edward Doheny</a> and overplayed (either self-consciously and well or sloppily and poorly) by Daniel Day-Lewis. This is not accurate in any meaningful sense. Plainview is not really a <span style="font-style: italic;">character</span>, not a psychological or biographical portrait of a human being, but a mask. There is more than a void behind it (no existentialism here) but far less than a man. 'He' is simply capital embodied in the shape of a familiar archetype, the criminally ambitious Citizen Kane-style tycoon, perhaps more familiar to us as one of Coppola's or Scorsese's gangsters, Hollywood's favorite way (because it still involves a masculine hero) to critique the American Dream. Also misleading is that the film looks and is structured a lot like those '70s-era epics that have become our new classical <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/01/04/bfseventies104.xml">canon</a>. But while we may get their <span style="font-style: italic;">de rigueur </span>rags-to-riches-to-hubristic-decline narrative arc, Plainview undergoes no fall from innocence. He does not change or develop, except maybe to get a little meaner, a little more desperate, as the film drags on and his cover wears thin. His reaction to developments in the plot have the form of epiphany but not the content. The only glimpse we ever get beneath his skin is when he's covered in oil.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj92sBExlQE0-xy5oZokMdDVsQDOgedStxjBMe19GtWC9BlND1qr-h3U_q2feK-W_9eTe6Dg6luvudHrE-F-ISB0cyEInP-uhaTpkrQaGJ63F6Gp1CzkYe7BOq8w-rC5UMy5UL7Qgxh_I4S/s1600-h/1805742578_dee420cd62_o.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj92sBExlQE0-xy5oZokMdDVsQDOgedStxjBMe19GtWC9BlND1qr-h3U_q2feK-W_9eTe6Dg6luvudHrE-F-ISB0cyEInP-uhaTpkrQaGJ63F6Gp1CzkYe7BOq8w-rC5UMy5UL7Qgxh_I4S/s400/1805742578_dee420cd62_o.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5167459402131522706" border="0" /></a><br />And yet the camera never leaves him. For a film with such epic ambitions, it has a remarkably narrow focus, rarely leaving Plainview's face even when others are conversing in his presence. This is not so we can witness the reveal, Method-actor style, of an entire history bound up in a momentary grimace or facial tic, it is for us to stare long enough at a human-like visage that we are no longer fooled by the illusion it presents. One might expect his relationship with his adopted son is meant to 'humanize' him, but it does no more than prove the opposite. He relates to his child like an alien he was only briefly instructed how to interact with, when not simply using the boy as a tool to convince investors he runs a "family business." While the emotions and interests of others can be temporarily forced into him -- witness the forced baptism scene where Plainview is made to suffer something that appears to be guilt by the craven preacher Eli -- he can only relate to those who share his blood. By the end it is clear that no such person exists in the film.<br /><br />Nevertheless, we are constantly teased with the notion that Plainview has a past. And maybe -- maybe the archetype does, some string of banalities that would explain nothing. But every possible example we see turns out to have been a lie, and he is driven to murder any relationship that might accumulate the necessary substance to become part of a meaningful biography. Anyway we are watching him for other reasons, for the myth-history of capitalism, the occult specter whose logic 'speaks' his every action, subverts or destroys his every companion, dominates his environment by draining it dry (Anderson claims he was thinking of <a href="http://www.variety.com/blog/1390000339/post/960015096.html%22">Dracula </a>when writing the screenplay), destroys a community by turning it into a city, and eventually leaves his body a withered husk, to flake and die like a leaf in wintertime. "I don't like to explain myself." The film's trappings often resemble the Gothic, the genre of secret histories, but it's all appearance; there is nothing to explain.<br /><br />As many others have said, <span style="font-style: italic;">There Will Be Blood</span> belongs above all to horror.<br /><br />This is what truly makes it comparable to <span style="font-style: italic;">No Country For Old Men</span>, more so than a certain nostalgic '70s-era aesthetic and level of ambition. It's the fact that the monster at the heart of both is supernatural, though not in the usual sense. Chigurh too is just a generic mask, the relentless , invincible psychopath stalking countless horror thrillers, this iteration something like a south-of-the-border cross between Hannibal Lecter and Michael Myers. But he hides a secret ethical and perhaps metaphysical function, the entire narrative of the film structured around working out its derivation, victim by victim. Its rule, however, Chigurh's 'motive,' is impervious to unveiling by any mere story, which reduces us, literally, to guessing at the outcome of a coin toss.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqWSettSlx9XhQ3NWJpwfO6vGuwUynUNkbJxv7Sw9YsuFzMfFPCCdsPVedBG9iyPvYG6mR29yHYLkrIBRMT9xjhvU-l8cG8vDgotmvgAIGyEnlGLTOGKX4y76SEMVg0ZAeoqzu08N09bsg/s1600-h/sociopaths.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqWSettSlx9XhQ3NWJpwfO6vGuwUynUNkbJxv7Sw9YsuFzMfFPCCdsPVedBG9iyPvYG6mR29yHYLkrIBRMT9xjhvU-l8cG8vDgotmvgAIGyEnlGLTOGKX4y76SEMVg0ZAeoqzu08N09bsg/s400/sociopaths.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5167489346643510434" border="0" /></a><br />Though their secrets are different, the real horror is that there <span style="font-style: italic;">are </span>no secrets on the cause and effect level of narrative, that it is mystery and not truth which is constructed through the films' artfully cut withholdings of information; that the 'brute facts' and the logic connecting those facts is <span>artificially</span>, even demiurgically, rendered unclear -- mystified. It's a function traditionally reserved for <a href="https://wiki.brown.edu/confluence/display/MarkTribe/Visual+Pleasure+and+Narrative+Cinema">female characters,</a> but unless they are the victim/protagonist there is no place for them in horror. Chigurh and Plainview, the hollow monsters, as both engine and devourer of narrative, instead take its 'structural' lacuna inside themselves, and in so doing irresistibly draw the camera's gaze. Here the affect of horror, created subtly with lighting, soundtrack, the whole range of traditional cinematic technique (there are no Special Effects allowed) is all that is capable of concealing the underlying <span>absence </span>of mystery with <span style="font-style: italic;">something else</span>. What? Diegetically nothing happens which could not conceivably be explained, and yet somehow we emerge certain that a really<span style="font-style: italic;"> adequate </span>explanation is impossible. An invisible force (<span style="font-style: italic;">TWBB</span>) or axiom (<span style="font-style: italic;">NCFOM</span>) is evoked, secretly guiding events. That its repression is also made palpable to us, that it isn't merely a function of plot (Plainview and Chigurh's 'sins' 'acknowledged,' through redemption or punishment) but tied instead to the conventions of 1970s Hollywood realism, is at once the artistic achievement of the two films and, I suspect, their <a href="http://lecolonelchabert.blogspot.com/2006/04/phlogiston-mongering.html">ideological</a> core.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikODyL-3mPxsDaRG5JnUrozEmRMkOyTcCojHeZ7BejhI8HLKPjwSZGdoifsLuLbAxalsnruGiQdblnGyYrILlKR6xIyU1j0BCL8NjESbezFxwIc9kw0FlNnfuIfN7tH_xBncpgw3We-qNJ/s1600-h/oilwell.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 247px; height: 327px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikODyL-3mPxsDaRG5JnUrozEmRMkOyTcCojHeZ7BejhI8HLKPjwSZGdoifsLuLbAxalsnruGiQdblnGyYrILlKR6xIyU1j0BCL8NjESbezFxwIc9kw0FlNnfuIfN7tH_xBncpgw3We-qNJ/s400/oilwell.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5167515717742707890" border="0" /></a><br />In <span style="font-style: italic;">TWBB</span> one gets the impression from Eli, a grotesque parody of Christianity as both the paradigmatic model for non-capitalist politics and a type of show business, that stories can no longer be seriously invested in. Instead we learn to see Plainview the same way he sees others: "I see the worst in people. I don't have to look past seeing them to get all I need." In the much-criticized final showdown in the bowling alley, this impression of God and his earthly salesmen is rendered painfully concrete. It's the scene where the film's facade of realism, though always unsettled, is strained to the point of absurdity: the priest recants, he is made to suffer for his sins, and behold, his milkshake, it hath been drunk! But not even the grand narrative of entrepreneurial capitalism can survive past the last shot. The realization that has been building over the course of the film, in the form of Plainview's increasingly strained encounters with Standard Oil and the unstoppable expansion of monopoly power it represents -- that the individual capitalist is no longer a suitable vessel for the daemon of capital -- comes at last to fruition, and so with the resignation "I'm finished," the lights go out. The camera apparently hasn't the right to follow. But is it irrational hope to wonder if nostalgia for the end of a distant era can reflect <span style="font-style: italic;">any </span>light back on the <a href="http://www.monthlyreview.org/0305jbf.htm">end </a>of one still <a href="http://www.monthlyreview.org/0402editr.htm">present</a>? Or has Plainview eaten that as well?<div class="blogger-post-footer"><br/><a href="http://culturemonkey.blogspot.com">http://culturemonkey.blogspot.com</a></div>traxus4420http://www.blogger.com/profile/05083641650092543902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4078198831968495589.post-14541206845378799902008-02-15T09:11:00.011-05:002008-02-15T09:36:25.867-05:00the destruction of new york: an aesthetic on the wane?<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcFcooHJ3MjE9zcxICLBZ_EoxxGep5dD8El8_eLVh9g2hJ9YVZ4jHSZw0ydezv7jZN_6DSdjqMoughkkKPHx8pYu0MUY4qQxqwoICPNXVGjfTevPMfyiUg9WzZf3-xwQORKpZyrJ_WVLQ/s1600-h/10DBA0DC41.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcFcooHJ3MjE9zcxICLBZ_EoxxGep5dD8El8_eLVh9g2hJ9YVZ4jHSZw0ydezv7jZN_6DSdjqMoughkkKPHx8pYu0MUY4qQxqwoICPNXVGjfTevPMfyiUg9WzZf3-xwQORKpZyrJ_WVLQ/s320/10DBA0DC41.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5167211835668240290" /></a><br /><br />New York is the city most-often destroyed in American cinema. Why should this be so? <a href="http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/26-the-irresistible-urge-to-destroy-new-york-on-screen/">Explanations</a> abound: the dimensions of NYC make it a perfect “scale” by which to gauge the amount of destruction occurring in film; Conservative America secretly wishes to see this hotbed of liberal activity blown to bits; non-NYC-inhabiting Americans generally suffer from “edifice envy” (this is from former Mayor Koch); we enjoy (visually) tearing down what we have erected as much as we enjoyed erecting it in the first place (this seems to be the new aesthetic of “undoing” our built environment that we witness in shows such as “Life After People” where scientists exhibit a strange desire to predict how long it will take Asian-imported mollusks to grind the Hoover Dam to a halt); New York is one of few American cities with features distinct enough to set it apart thus making it worthy of filmic attention (of any kind); and one more—to stop this quickly proliferating list—NYC is the epitome of the “disgusting” and thus figures perfectly as a backdrop to any post-apocalyptic film since, in this version, it is already part-way there.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIdTMoAzQ5gXGVVzMNKXUxvg2eQh9i1W7Q1NMf-IbDttfp14eAjFiiHqGlRyY_i7ZnedQgTtFQU_M3tLhJFDZlnSc-Psryi0vQz0K3H-9ZYDlMkEoNsxl-7KFX_Xft9vEBMP7K9cKjdTE/s1600-h/Day+After.gif"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIdTMoAzQ5gXGVVzMNKXUxvg2eQh9i1W7Q1NMf-IbDttfp14eAjFiiHqGlRyY_i7ZnedQgTtFQU_M3tLhJFDZlnSc-Psryi0vQz0K3H-9ZYDlMkEoNsxl-7KFX_Xft9vEBMP7K9cKjdTE/s320/Day+After.gif" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5167214047576397794" /></a> <br /><br />9/11 initiated an unofficial moratorium on films depicting the destruction of NYC. Two films that broke this visual “truce” (if a war of the imagination is indeed being waged) were “The Day After Tomorrow” (2004) and the recently-released “Cloverfield” (2008). In an interesting <a href="http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/12/15/welcome_back_king_kong/">Op-Ed piece</a>, architectural historian Max Page hails the return of the fictive destruction of NYC as a sign of the nation’s good health. It seems that only psychologically healthy countries attack their cities on film; and—to push his argument further—the actual dismantling of the WTC, rather than its virtual undoing, most likely trumped the imagination in terms of visualizing disaster. This also accounts for the slew of reality-based tribute films (<span style="font-style:italic;">Flight 93</span> (TV 2006), <span style="font-style:italic;">United 93</span> (2006) <span style="font-style:italic;">World Trade Center</span> (2006)) produced in the years following the event; although, as the release dates of those films make clear, both 9/11 films and “back-to-destroying-NYC” films circulate concurrently. Apparently, the nation “heals”—to continue with Max Page’s analysis—in uneven ways; some sectors of the film industry arrive at the end of this process, which here entails a re-engagement with disaster—more quickly than others. To quote Max Page:<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;"><blockquote>New York has been destroyed for so long -- since the early 19th century when it came to be America's first city -- that it is somehow reassuring to see the tradition continue. When New York is no longer destroyed, on film, in flight simulator software, video games and paintings -- that will be a sign that the city no longer dominates America's, and the world's, imagination. And if New York is no longer the setting of our worst fears, then it may also no longer be the home of our greatest hopes.<br /><br />And that would be the beginning of the city's end.</blockquote></span><br /><br />While acknowledging the power a “tradition of destruction” potentially wields in any cultural imaginary, I think Page begins to steer us into another dimension of this aesthetic which warrants attention; namely, that in a kind of Dorian Gray twist, the end of NYC’s destruction on film heralds the end of its potency/prowess in “reality.” What this “reality” consists of—a mélange of the physical, economic, and political—will be taken up next.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwLKZFvWvNz_PB-bxhjKh815Y32gyo3qBVUKYFr-GDaASsAUGBDCSd2hLmDFdihKtsAZ2wrvoJ67uphKGpiB8VGVAZuANQvgn4DAOK86kKizPWfITy13VJHviOSX4tuPHwtn9zG8hvhts/s1600-h/sjff_01_img0269.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwLKZFvWvNz_PB-bxhjKh815Y32gyo3qBVUKYFr-GDaASsAUGBDCSd2hLmDFdihKtsAZ2wrvoJ67uphKGpiB8VGVAZuANQvgn4DAOK86kKizPWfITy13VJHviOSX4tuPHwtn9zG8hvhts/s320/sjff_01_img0269.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5167212664596928466" /></a><br /> <br />First, let’s detour quickly through a consideration of NYC as a spatial form. It’s important to remember that it was the first truly industrial city in the US. Capitalism, in its early industrial form, called the urban center into existence and dictated the spatial logic of its becoming. As early industrialism required the concentration of capital—and thus of people—into large factory systems, the city became a means by which to achieve ultimate concentration. This explains NYC’s verticality; the orgiastic hunger for a slice of its real estate; the stacking of persons on top of, around, and underneath one another; the rise of the “tenement” and “project”; the congestion, overcrowding, and always-threatening lack of sanitation (garbage strikes loom large in the urban imaginary; if a city of its magnitude cannot remove its own excretions, it is must suffocate under the weight of its own excess). Further, the built environment of the city confronts the viewer/inhabitant, whether they consciously engage with this realization or not, with the congealment of hundreds of thousands of man-hours that remain “entrapped” (sort of) in the structures. When De Certeau, in his “Walking The City” looks down from the 109th floor of the WTC, what he reads in the giant texturology laid out below is a “rhetoric of excess” of which the buildings are the letters that spell out this decadence. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoCovZMGLcsLnFofQk1W24v0BT0XgN-5CUS3pyEMzvYiqAYLtSQfS6c4gYE8db27FSZNomAHL_X-qd-POPROFCBg16Q9gxGFCKrgRw6R4tfv4Uy1NcgiSEx7JJRxsBzSVW3APPqeN2oHo/s1600-h/cloverfield-poster-thumb.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoCovZMGLcsLnFofQk1W24v0BT0XgN-5CUS3pyEMzvYiqAYLtSQfS6c4gYE8db27FSZNomAHL_X-qd-POPROFCBg16Q9gxGFCKrgRw6R4tfv4Uy1NcgiSEx7JJRxsBzSVW3APPqeN2oHo/s320/cloverfield-poster-thumb.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5167212454143530946" /></a><br /> <br />The destruction of New York City in film might just be a collective death wish, as has been suggested on the internet forums, that emerges out of deep-seated collective feelings toward the “excess” and “decadence” of the city and its historical position as a beacon of capitalist accumulation. This, of course, was the motivation behind the attackers as they plotted what site(s) they could engage with that would affect the kind of symbolic reading the event would necessarily require. Although, if we do read NYC as the predominant city of the industrial era, it would seem that its financial cache has begun to wane. Was it, in retrospect, a shock that NYC almost fell to its knees in the late 70s at the same time other major industrial cities (Detroit, for one) were similarly defeated by capital’s moving elsewhere. That was the period of the first great re-construction of industrial capital—where the economy no longer demanded highly concentrated cities, but rather sought to break those restrictive bounds and begin circulating more globally. NYC stayed alive despite the fracture; capital continued to flow into the environment, in a continual resuscitation of those masses of “dead” human labor, thanks, in part, to the great symbolic weight it carries in the cultural imaginary. But doesn’t it seem rather passé to destroy New York, both aesthetically and actually, with our knowledge of the contemporary global market? Wouldn’t it make more sense, and this has been <a href="http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/26/the-irresistible-urge-to-destroy-new-york-on-screen/">cleverly suggested elsewhere</a>, to begin “taking out” (in film!) Singapore? Beijing? Bangalore? This might just be the great swan song (<span style="font-style:italic;">Schwanengesang</span>) of the aesthetic destruction of NYC. A few more films and then we’re done…<div class="blogger-post-footer"><br/><a href="http://culturemonkey.blogspot.com">http://culturemonkey.blogspot.com</a></div>Klarrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01103546973773360568noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4078198831968495589.post-72537253147333353972008-02-15T01:06:00.007-05:002008-02-15T01:49:57.587-05:00philip k. dick link explosion<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7Ypy3Xb25IiNPpsInq2GzjmNAbepau0fJij_sURVt0E8GCTwDYmMJ-znRXMskYyy6x7kHOHqdrNIORDaDesIjT06waS2AHJJl5gRwrlYCt9bYhLiiB0jn6G6OyK0nYYtE4G9gbp-eZimp/s1600-h/latimescover-lg.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7Ypy3Xb25IiNPpsInq2GzjmNAbepau0fJij_sURVt0E8GCTwDYmMJ-znRXMskYyy6x7kHOHqdrNIORDaDesIjT06waS2AHJJl5gRwrlYCt9bYhLiiB0jn6G6OyK0nYYtE4G9gbp-eZimp/s320/latimescover-lg.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5167085441796862002" /></a>I've been blogging for a few years now, and over that time I've linked to Philip K. Dick related material a whole lot of times. Here, in honor of reading <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Bloodmoney,_or_How_We_Got_Along_After_the_Bomb"><i>Dr. Bloodmoney</i></a> this week, are just a few PKD highlights, all to the glory of the man Fredric Jameson once called <a href="http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/5/jameson5art.htm">"the Shakespeare of science fiction"</a>:<br /><br />* <a href="http://deoxy.org/pkd_how2build.htm">"How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later."</a> In some ways this is the definitive PKD essay, and it's the one referenced somewhat famously at the end of <i>Waking Life</i>.<blockquote>It was always my hope, in writing novels and stories which asked the question "What is reality?", to someday get an answer. This was the hope of most of my readers, too. Years passed. I wrote over thirty novels and over a hundred stories, and still I could not figure out what was real. One day a girl college student in Canada asked me to define reality for her, for a paper she was writing for her philosophy class. She wanted a one-sentence answer. I thought about it and finally said, "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." That's all I could come up with. That was back in 1972. Since then I haven't been able to define reality any more lucidly.</blockquote>* Another great essay at <i>Grey Lodge Occult Review</i>: <a href="http://www.greylodge.org/occultreview/glor_010/dick_world.htm">"If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others."</a> <blockquote>We are accustomed to supposing that all change takes place along the linear time axis: from past to present to future. The present is an accrual of the past and is different from it. The future will accrue from the present on and be different yet. That an orthogonal or right-angle time axis could exist, a lateral domain in which change takes place -- processes occuring sideways in reality, so to speak -- this is almost impossible to imagine. How would we perceive such lateral changes? What would we experience? What clues -- if we are trying to test out this bizarre theory -- should we be on the alert for? In other words, how can change take place outside of linear time at all, in any sense, to any degree?</blockquote><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_ZSHf6bIelJetQ6DdOVnvYqDfutRKGKd1kfaV081BajyHYBV1HxYT9p30TOJ5bwah76uR0T3-2ZkedgOgBlKE9EdPq74lIGayn2D0uHSxnMAelbB5cjNUy0iYZNpz7i_1noFwCF4y7nXE/s1600-h/pkd1.JPG"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_ZSHf6bIelJetQ6DdOVnvYqDfutRKGKd1kfaV081BajyHYBV1HxYT9p30TOJ5bwah76uR0T3-2ZkedgOgBlKE9EdPq74lIGayn2D0uHSxnMAelbB5cjNUy0iYZNpz7i_1noFwCF4y7nXE/s320/pkd1.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5167084453954383890" /></a>* <a href="http://www.philipkdickfans.com/weirdo.htm">R. Crumb's comic, "The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick."</a><br /><br />* <a href="http://backwardscity.blogspot.com/2006/07/first-law-of-kipple-is-that-kipple.html">The first law of kipple is that kipple drives out nonkipple.</a><br /><br />* <a href="http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/sciencefiction/story/0,,1842816,00.html">Philip K. Dick and drugs.</a><br /><br />* <a href="http://www.boingboing.net/2007/04/13/philip-k-dick-on-kur.html">Philip K. Dick on Kurt Vonnegut.</a><blockquote><b>Interviewer:</b> What did you think of Vonnegut’s attitude towards his characters (in Breakfast of Champions)?<br /><br /><b>PKD:</b> Disgusting and an abomination. I think that that book is an incredible drying up of the liquid sap of life in the veins of a person like a dead tree…that’s what I think. I also love Kurt Vonnegut.</blockquote>* <a href="http://www.mindcontrolforums.com/hambone/pkdjfk.html">Philip K. Dick and the Kennedy Assassination.</a> (Warning: spoilers for the last book we're going to read this semester, also a Dick novel, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Futurity"><i>Dr. Futurity</i></a>.)<br /><br />* Profiles of Philip K. Dick from <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2007/08/20/070820crbo_books_gopnik"><i>The New Yorker</i></a>, <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A6396-2002Jul26¬Found=true"><i>The Washington Post</i></a>, and the <a href="http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/fiction/article1428377.ece"><i>Times</i></a>. <a href="http://www.philipkdickfans.com/interviews.htm">Interviews with Philip K. Dick.</a> <a href="http://www.vqronline.org/articles/2006/fiction/lethem-phil-marketplace/">Lethem on Philip K. Dick.</a> <a href="http://articlejournal.net/issue_three/p_k_d.html">Again.</a> <a href="http://articlejournal.net/issue_three/p_k_d.html">Stanislaw Lem on PKD.</a><br /><br />* <a href="http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/5/jameson5art.htm">Jameson on <span style="font-style:italic;">Dr. Bloodmoney</span>.</a><div class="blogger-post-footer"><br/><a href="http://culturemonkey.blogspot.com">http://culturemonkey.blogspot.com</a></div>Gerry Canavanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12821256718713645033noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4078198831968495589.post-63707616638676840872008-02-08T02:24:00.000-05:002008-02-08T03:10:16.762-05:00survivability and thinkability<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPw5L9y7srAxXNfy1JZCN-CaZvIO-FniTABwDpXnWeCK5a4itlMfIF-8tALlMJLjVtvppTPUlg4VyjqRoabeRp4A4GC8pNSxsC7_J_tnPDajvOm15tCJTPGxIGLFo7uzTVlx2caqtSk7HF/s1600-h/rothko_unknown_2.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPw5L9y7srAxXNfy1JZCN-CaZvIO-FniTABwDpXnWeCK5a4itlMfIF-8tALlMJLjVtvppTPUlg4VyjqRoabeRp4A4GC8pNSxsC7_J_tnPDajvOm15tCJTPGxIGLFo7uzTVlx2caqtSk7HF/s400/rothko_unknown_2.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5164499797873578642" /></a>I'm trying something on for size here. I'm not sure I'm ready to make a down payment.<br /><br /><i>"...the trauma suffered by everyone in the middle of the 20th century when it became clear that from now on to the end of human history, every person would spend his individual life under the threat not only of individual death, which is certain, but of something almost insupportable psychologically — collective incineration and extinction which could come at any time, virtually without warning."<br />—Susan Sontag, "The Imagination of Disaster"<br /><br />"Perhaps if we have a terrible privilege it is merely that we are alive and are going to die, all at once or one at a time."<br />— Frank Kermode, </i>The Sense of an Ending<i><br /><br />"What protects us is that in nuclear war the event is likely to eliminate the possibility of the spectacle. </i>This is why it will not take place.<i> For humanity can accept physical annihilation, but cannot agree to sacrifice the spectacle (unless it can find a spectator in another world)."<br />—Jean Baudrillard, "Fatal Strategies"</i><br /><br />In Vonnegut's <i>Cat's Cradle</i>, Bokonoists announce "Now I will destroy the whole world" when they elect to kill themselves. Individual death bound up with collective death, even <i>universal</i> death—this is the ethical question smoldering at the heart of futurity. Why should I care about anything that happens after I am dead? Or, from another angle: why should the potential annihilation of society fill us with so much more revulsion and dread than the <i>certain</i> prospect of our own inevitable demise? <br /><br />Or: What does it mean to imagine a future, good or bad, Utopian or dystopian, without you in it?<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg66073ThOYcLSBkxWyrcVFO5eXdGkoo2LV5YsdTP-93qDgEiHmP4gR0JXTYMuzn29CUeVAYMmz81s6ms43hhUwAbEMjYijre5mfUoXG_kY0YJk5br15oG5nY3GdjvlsjyXZf3PjZFTFzed/s1600-h/rothko.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg66073ThOYcLSBkxWyrcVFO5eXdGkoo2LV5YsdTP-93qDgEiHmP4gR0JXTYMuzn29CUeVAYMmz81s6ms43hhUwAbEMjYijre5mfUoXG_kY0YJk5br15oG5nY3GdjvlsjyXZf3PjZFTFzed/s400/rothko.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5164500038391747266" /></a>There is surely a biological imperative at work here—but there is also, it seems to me, a phenomenological one, a kind of onto-epistemological blind spot that <i>demands</i> the projected permanence of one's conscious mind, the makes the actual absence of one's personal subjectivity by definition strictly unimaginable, strictly unthinkable. <br /><br />Thus, we rechannel our own self-consciously impossible wish for immortality into an imagined collectivity that extends into the future, and the death of collectivity thereby becomes renewed as both the object of horror and the object of desire—in both senses really just our own denied deaths returned to us.<br /><br />Futurity is the (failed) denial of death.<br /><br />We can find this impossibility of representation revealed in any imagination of apocalypse—the promise of survivability (and therefore futurity) emerges in any ultimate disaster, the point of view character who dodges every bullet and emerges through to the other side, <a href="http://culturemonkey.blogspot.com/2008/01/past-as-anti-future.html">whether to rebuild capitalism anew or simply wallow decadently amidst the ruins</a>. Even the rapturous, totalizing moment of nuclear annihilation has its inevitable excess, tunnels hidden underground where life, it is imagined, might still go on.<br /><br />And even in the very rare case where narrative does let the bomb does go off, where all life ends, still <i>we watch it</i> happen from a cosmic position of complete safety, an atemporal position of non-embodiment—outside the text. Think of your position when you see the Earth blow up. Where are you standing?<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWa-WgErCDhISw_lPp7o-xwHt9KkasihrOdGb_FtVKEBIeTkL-uXBz1tyleohRkEjTlATKmABXyFYsa-RGlcOTe478BaXM-l_CzpNl0JWXE0tHnhrnbNyo2gmpbcqtwiQtY_GkyqkI-jDI/s1600-h/g051_rothko_vbkoy-wr.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWa-WgErCDhISw_lPp7o-xwHt9KkasihrOdGb_FtVKEBIeTkL-uXBz1tyleohRkEjTlATKmABXyFYsa-RGlcOTe478BaXM-l_CzpNl0JWXE0tHnhrnbNyo2gmpbcqtwiQtY_GkyqkI-jDI/s400/g051_rothko_vbkoy-wr.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5164499883772924578" /></a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Beach_%28novel%29"><i>On the Beach</i></a>, which with its slow and horrid countdown to the total extinction of humanity heroically attempts to face this problem of death head on (and which consequently may well be the most depressing book ever written) in the end cannot dance to its own music: after jumping perspectives over and over in its final chapter, hoping to escape the necessary moment, it ends with its American hero and his doomed crew still technically alive, still sailing south, towards what little is left.<br /><br />Bazin writes in <a href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Fbooks.google.com%2Fbooks%3Fid%3DGOGYEfa-16MC%26pg%3DPA27%26lpg%3DPA27%26dq%3Ddeath%2Bevery%2Bafternoon%2Bbazin%26source%3Dweb%26ots%3D5vQbzxVdhe%26sig%3DMygfTCPKs1UmDrLlTtKQtaazJ0w&ei=rPmrR5HiMZ6CggSzkqwb&usg=AFQjCNGJ6dPJhISArxZ1LkwdTo__KTvdWQ&sig2=hxQsH2A0h9OqoYLKR0GfWQ">"Death Every Afternoon"</a> that “for every creature, death is the unique moment par excellence.” Whether it is personal extinction, or atomic Rapture, or <a href="http://www.online-literature.com/wellshg/timemachine/">H.G. Wells's giant crabs</a> scuttling about on an empty Earth, death is <i>futurity</i> par excellence; it is that moment towards which all things point but which no things point beyond. It is the most unknowable moment of any history and yet the most familiar—we are doomed to speculate over and over “What if I were dead right now? What if I am to die in this next moment?”, but despite its intense familiarity we are completely unable to ever consider the absence of our own consciousness. Always, this is the way we imagine death: a still body inhabited by a still-waking mind, observing ghosts hiding haunting the ruins. Any and all narrative representations of death must necessarily fail—all possibility of identification ends at the moment when the represented figure dies, at the necessarily distanciating moment when we recognize <i>the character</i> has died but <i>we</i> are still alive. (We can recognize death, but never our own.) Consciousness cannot negate itself; it is always there, even when it is trying to play dead. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPwWW2eRmXd_52hQ_iXvPCVeoCGzRZk482mdJtkAnpK6J1lVIHmcymYmgyBz_Q5w1v7jNzE3Nqb8SIbcphh7jhKrSbBJYcYeaJw8fQmrB3pfxuEsz13pz3DDXdF7ctaU6Xg8LXcIwOKWxQ/s1600-h/rothko2.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPwWW2eRmXd_52hQ_iXvPCVeoCGzRZk482mdJtkAnpK6J1lVIHmcymYmgyBz_Q5w1v7jNzE3Nqb8SIbcphh7jhKrSbBJYcYeaJw8fQmrB3pfxuEsz13pz3DDXdF7ctaU6Xg8LXcIwOKWxQ/s400/rothko2.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5164500124291093202" /></a>We are dealing here with something narrative promises but can never deliver: the authentic, projected sensation of surviving ourselves, in the sense of outliving either our physical bodies or the techno-social, biopolitical structures with which life has become functionally identical. Narrative—and not merely in the death scene or in the apocalyptic sci-fi thriller, but also in the jump-cut, in the chapter break, in the fade-to-black and the page turn after <i>The End</i>—can only reinforce the quintessential solipsism endemic to symbolic consciousness: the principle that no matter what happens our subjectivity is eternal and inviolable, that each of us occupies the center of the universe.<br /><br />This ideological reinforcement may be called, after Bloch, the dystopian function, and while we can find it across genres we can find it most clearly in horror, in apocalyptic fantasy, in science-fiction disaster, in rape, torture, szchiophrenia, madness, snuff, Holocaust, nuclear winter, death: in depicting what's as-bad-as-things-can-get, we are at the same moment promised that we can <i>survive</i> radical transgression, that nothing can undo us, that our individual subjectivity will survive all, even total destruction, even its <i>own</i> destruction. The dystopian function provides the vicarious, spectacular experience of how bad things might get precisely so that it might again make the impossible promise that <i>you</i> will somehow pass through safe and whole to the other side. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKx2XZ3vLnVfjG2N4SqYdwgOviwZA6H4j2-zQMHD3k5VVXPMuFp1mq_DMloD-y7CXWEmPX-xIzDrkM0rFzFn6sCAV6OWik7Lp85lTTLt76nF42MpeqeSwNKmYQWO_Ei8XW8UCu0LKz5IU0/s1600-h/g050_rothko_rotp.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKx2XZ3vLnVfjG2N4SqYdwgOviwZA6H4j2-zQMHD3k5VVXPMuFp1mq_DMloD-y7CXWEmPX-xIzDrkM0rFzFn6sCAV6OWik7Lp85lTTLt76nF42MpeqeSwNKmYQWO_Ei8XW8UCu0LKz5IU0/s400/g050_rothko_rotp.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5164499961082335922" /></a>So perhaps we could just as well call it the denial-of-reality principle. <br /><br />Narrativized attempts to transgress the radical boundaries of bodily integrity and societal longevity, to take the reader over the line into new territory, are always a stretching, never a transposition—the subject will always return to where she is anchored in the end, she will neither move nor break in two. There are limits past which neither representation nor imagination can take us, though we may compel both to try. The dystopian function will always in the end fail the reality test: you cannot just sample death, you can only plunge fully into it. Like any other subgenre of futurity, apocalyptic fantasy—relying as it does on the continuity of subjectivity for its very transmission and comprehension—can never shake us from our subjectivity, and so despite its obsessive attempts to transgress of the life/death, now/then boundary, it is always doomed to fail.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><br/><a href="http://culturemonkey.blogspot.com">http://culturemonkey.blogspot.com</a></div>Gerry Canavanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12821256718713645033noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4078198831968495589.post-68746690177214172952008-02-04T08:23:00.001-05:002008-02-04T08:25:19.458-05:00Are we living in the Anthropocene?Look for a new post on the nuclear sublime in the next few days. In the meantime, <a href="http://gerrycanavan.blogspot.com/2008/02/are-we-living-in-anthropocene.html">cross-posted from my other blog</a>, the question must be asked: Are we living in the Anthropocene?<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=1701"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjg9dp_bJ7_7tNebONoN29pCiqOe0YMasOSAtO9p9wcupZo-qlAnUb2KcquzOhufqtxh05Nn7n9oLcj4-e5nvUh7uC81sN_V2ITVqXIEhyiurXQsqpsUyAedj2MkVMkhPKhNwB_3IwL4G0l/s400/anthropocene.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5162187748258664850" /></a><b><i>Geologists at the</b> University of Leicester, picking up on a proposal <a href="http://www.mpch-mainz.mpg.de/~air/anthropocene/Text.html">first made by chemist Paul Crutzen in 2002</a>, now suggest that <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene">the Holocene epoch</a> has ended. The new epoch, which they dub <a href="http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=1701">the Anthropocene</a>, is the result of <a href="http://oceanworld.tamu.edu/resources/oceanography-book/anthropocene.htm">significant human actions</a>. Its markers include disturbances to the carbon cycle and global termperature, ocean acidification, changes to sediment erosion and deposition, and species extinctions like those mentioned above.<br /><br />The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropocene">Anthropocene</a> formally recognizes a widely perceived reality, the sharp line between the pre-industrial world and the technology-laden planet we now call home, awash with digital tools and freighted with the after-effects of industrial activity. And indeed, the cover of </i>GSA Today <i>(a publication of the Geological Society of America) in which this work appears makes the case rather strongly, showing the high-rise buildings of Shanghai fading out into the distance. It’s a stark reminder of how megacities like this one are transforming the planet...</i> (Italicized text from the Centauri Dreams link. Via <a href="http://io9.com/351861/have-humans-changed-the-planet-so-much-that-theyve-ended-the-holocene">io9</a>.)<div class="blogger-post-footer"><br/><a href="http://culturemonkey.blogspot.com">http://culturemonkey.blogspot.com</a></div>Gerry Canavanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12821256718713645033noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4078198831968495589.post-62413246249599234882008-02-02T14:45:00.000-05:002008-02-02T17:54:53.819-05:00Speculative RealismJ.G. Ballard, intro to French 1973 edition of <span style="font-style: italic;">Crash</span>:<br /><blockquote><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">"The kind of imagination that now manifests itself in science fiction is not something new. Homer, Shakespeare, and Milton all invented new worlds to comment on this one. The split of science fiction into a separate and somewhat disreputable genre is a recent development. It is connected with the near disappearance of dramatic and philosophical poetry and the slow shrinking of the traditional novel as it concerns itself more and more exclusively with the nuances of human relationships. Among those areas neglected by the traditional novel are, above all, the dynamics of human societies (the traditional novel tends to depict society as static), and man's place in the universe. However crudely or naively, science fiction at least attempts to place a philosophical and metaphysical frame around the most important events within our lives and consciousness.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">In the past we have always assumed that the external world around us has represented reality, however confusing or uncertain, and that the inner world of our minds, its dreams, hopes, ambitions, represented the realm of fantasy and the imagination. These roles, too, it seems to me, have been reversed. The most prudent and effective method of dealing with the world around us is to assume that it is a complete fiction -- conversely, the one small node of reality left to us is inside our own heads. Freud's classic distinction between the latent and manifest content of the dream, between the apparent and the real, now needs to be applied to the external world of so-called reality.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">I feel myself that the writer's role, his authority and license to act, has changed radically. I feel that, in a sense, the writer knows nothing any longer. He has no moral stance. He offers the reader the contents of his own head, he offers a set of options and imaginative alternatives. His role is that of the scientist, whether on safari or in his laboratory, faced with a completely unknown terrain or subject. All he can do is to devise hypotheses and test them against the facts."</span></blockquote><br /><br />William Gibson, 2007 (via <a href="http://www.ballardian.com/authentic-literature">Ballardian</a>):<br /><br /><blockquote style="font-style: italic;">"Well, I thought that writing about the world today as I perceive it would probably be more challenging, in the real sense of science fiction, than continuing just to make things up… If I’m going to write fiction set in an imaginary future now, I’m going to need a yardstick that gives me some accurate sense of how weird things are now. ‘Cause I’m going to have to go beyond that… But I don’t know if I’ll be able to do it again. I don’t know if I’ll be able to make up an imaginary future in the same way. In the ’80s and ’90s, as strange as it may seem to say this, we had such luxury of stability. Things weren’t changing quite so quickly in the ’80s and ’90s. And when things are changing too quickly, as one of the characters in Pattern Recognition says, you don’t have any place to stand from which to imagine a very elaborate future.<em>"<br /><br /><br /></em></blockquote><em></em>Lukacs, attacking Bloch's support for the Expressionist and Surrealist modernist avant-gardes, on "the anticipatory function of ideology" (from "Realism in the Balance," 1938):<span style="font-style: italic;"></span><br /><blockquote style="font-style: italic;">"To remain within the sphere of literature, we need only remind ourselves of what Paul Lafargue has to say about Marx's evaluation of Balzac: 'Balzac was not just the chronicler of his own society, he was also the creator of prophetic figures who were still embryonic under Louis Philippe and who only emerged fully grown after his death, under Napoleon III.' But is this Marxian view still valid in the present? Of course it is. Such 'prophetic figures,' however, are to be found exclusively in the works of the important realists.<br /><br />...<br /><br />There is nothing mysterious or paradoxical about any of this -- it is the very essence of all authentic realism of any importance. Since such realism must be concerned with the creation of types (this has always been the case, from Don Quixote down to Oblomov and the realists of our own time), the realist must seek out the lasting features in people, in their relations with each other and in the situations in which they have to act; he must focus on those elements which endure over long periods and which constitute the objective human tendencies of society and indeed of mankind as a whole.<br /><br />Such writers form the authentic ideological avant-garde since they depict the vital, but not immediately obvious forces at work in objective reality. They do so with such profundity and truth that the products of their imagination receive confirmation from subsequent events -- not merely in the simple sense in which a successful photograph mirrors the original, but because they express the wealth and diversity of reality, reflecting forces as yet submerged beneath the surface, which only blossom forth visibly to all at a later stage. Great realism, therefore, does not portray an immediately obvious aspect of reality but one which is permanent and objectively more significant, namely man in the whole range of his relations to the real world, above all those which outlast mere fashion. Over and above that, it captures tendencies of development that only exist incipiently and so have not yet had the opportunity to unfold their entire human and social potential. To discern and give shape to such underground trends is the great historical mission of the true literary avant-garde.<br /><br />...<br /><br />So what really matters is not the subjective belief, however sincere, that one belongs to the avant-garde and is eager to march in the forefront of literary developments. Nor is it essential to have been the first to discover some technical innovation, however dazzling. What counts is the social and human content of the avant-garde, the breadth, the profundity and the truth of the ideas that have been 'prophetically' anticipated.<br /><br />In short, what is at issue here is not whether or not we deny the possibility of anticipatory movements in the superstructure. The vital questions are what was anticipated, in what manner and by whom?"</blockquote><br /><br />see also a discussion of (speculative) realism in philosophy <a href="http://traxus4420.wordpress.com/2008/02/02/speculative-realism-or-whats-on-in-philosophy/">here</a>.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><br/><a href="http://culturemonkey.blogspot.com">http://culturemonkey.blogspot.com</a></div>traxus4420http://www.blogger.com/profile/05083641650092543902noreply@blogger.com0