culturemonkey

'Nature has the right to exist'

2008-10-06T00:18:00.004-04:00

Art. 1. 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.

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.

With the public ratification of its new constitution last week, Ecuador has for the first time anywhere in history granted inalienable rights to nature. The new constitution also includes strict egalitarian provisions about food production, water access, and protection for indigenous peoples and uncontacted tribes.

As the Guardian 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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

It remains somewhat unclear what this law will mean in practice, especially in the context of a country whose economy is so heavily dependent on petroleum extraction. However things shake out, though, this should be a fascinating test case for protection of the environment outside the failed paradigms of property rights on the one hand and "securitization" on the other.

Here's the full text of the relevant articles, including an intriguing bit of commentary that suggests a codified right to civil disobedience in defense of the environment: “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.

There's still more 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.

(cross-posted at gerrycanavan.blogspot.com)

Heroes We Deserve

2008-08-03T13:28:00.036-04:00

As the critics note, 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 camp sensibility. 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."

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 "human condition."

Pairing up the summer's two most critically and commercially successful entries: Iron Man and The Dark Knight, is instructive. One or two 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 smart ones and the dumb ones alike seemed generally pleased.

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.

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 collective desires -- even that it does so better than a production financed independently. We are then able to rationalize objectionable content. The curiously archaic gender roles -- the women of IM and TDK essentially spend the entire movie trying to decide who to screw -- are of a kind with the racial politics -- witness IM's moronic (and casually incinerated) Arab barbarians and their helpless Arab victims, TDK'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 here, 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 line of dialogue, an alibi is always in play for shrugging it off as a completely meaningless special effect: "it's just a comic book movie, man."

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 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. IM is a little bit science fiction, a little bit Top Gun/Iron Eagle, visual borrowings from mecha anime, splash of romcom patter, pinch of Jackass (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. TDK labors under 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. They're for kids and adults.

The apparent openness of interpretation is more true of TDK than IM, since most of the latter's 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 IM and TDK. As Voyou 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.

IM 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 personal 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 IM and TDK -- Stark can 'come out' as Iron Man. Maximum power=maximum accountability -- though retaining secret paramilitary backup just in case -- in other words, the old Clintonian boom years restored.

Padraig notes in the comments here 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). IM 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 TDK 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 IM -- IM is a "guilty pleasure" or an "entertaining romp," TDK 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:

Žižek: 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.

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?

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 reinforce premises. 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.'

Movies featuring Batman and Iron Man are art in the same sense that this 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?

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 Batman came out in the late '80s. What it needs is its Don Quixote, what it's getting is its Unforgiven. That's what they're selling: who's buying?

*1978's Superman, 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 non-comic book, but equally homoerotic/phobic superheroes for Hollywood to entertain us with.

** OTT, 300 is going to be amazing in 12 years or so, if any of us are still alive.

Apes, legal personhood and the plight of Nim Chimpsky

2008-07-23T17:49:00.007-04:00

Apes, legal personhood and the plight of Nim Chimpsky.

Eberhart Theuer: 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.

Anita Barraud: 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.

Eberhart Theuer: Exactly.

Paula Stibbe: 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.

In sci-fi-philosophic terms, this is the distinction between sapience and sentience; 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.

I say likely 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 Kinds of Minds that our dogs appear to "love" us precisely because we've selected for just that impression over millenia of canine domestication. But as an anecdotal matter I must admit this is really evocative:

Paula Stibbe: 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.

Anita Barraud: What does he draw?

Paula Stibbe: 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.

(cross-posted at gerrycanavan.blogspot.com)

thoughts on zizecology - 2

2008-07-22T16:21:00.004-04:00

There are two primary axes of political conflict in Kim Stanley Robinson's incomparable Mars trilogy: first, the expected (almost generically required) question of independence vs. interdependence with regard to the mother planet, Earth, which is really a question about Utopia and enclavism that is concretized in the fierce battles over the space elevator; 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.

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 Mars's huge mountains 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.

And Redism is surely doomed, doomed from the moment of its first articulation on the Ares 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 natural 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 for us, which is to say Mars must enter into (human) history. It must be changed; it must be ruined.

The Reds have always, necessarily, lost, though their recognition of this fact that doesn't dim their fervor.

I bring this up as in attempt to return to Žižek's critique of ecology, specifically the radical reconsideration of finitude he ignites in the latter half of the essay. 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 ecology of fear. 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:

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.

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.

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:

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.

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 too 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 Timothy Morton, author of Ecology without Nature, who writes that “it is very hard to get used to the idea that the catastrophe, far from being imminent, has already taken place.”

I am reminded here of Norbert Weiner’s memorable depiction of the human race as “shipwrecked passengers on a doomed planet” in 1950’s The Human Use of Human Beings. 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.

Felix Guattari, too, comes to make essentially the same claim in his “The Three Ecologies”:

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.

We can add to this a whole host of possible geoengineering projects, including the new proposal to add lime to the oceans to combat climate change 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 telos 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).

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.”

What Žižek rejects here is any notion of equilibrium (to use the Club of Rome’s preferred term) or sustainability (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 first and second laws of thermodynamics (You can’t get something for nothing, and Things fall apart.) There is, in the end, reality, such as it is.

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 necessarily leads to a hopeless conservatism, because the recognition of our finitude is also 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 cannot 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.

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.

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 consumers except by sudden (and in this case likely irreversible) scarcity: a crisis. John Bellamy Foster writes in Ecology Against Capital:

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.

Evoking John Kenneth Galbraith’s famous dependence effect, 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 Marx’s Ecology, Foster calls this state of affairs socialism.

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 permaculture. In a recent interview with the Web site BLDGBLOG, Robinson defined permaculture in this way:

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.

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.
…

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 permanent but also permutation. 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.

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 from and for the future:

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.

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.

For there is a third, unspoken suggestion in permaculture, too, beyond permanence and permutation, and that of course is permafrost, 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.

Extinction level event

2008-06-16T12:56:00.012-04:00

Love then screams in my own throat; I am the Jesuve, the filthy parody of the torrid and blinding sun.

Let's consider Danny Boyle's Sunshine 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 Armageddon.

So do we then say Sunshine 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 this 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 suffer. Thought, like the marauding cowboy, must have spurs.

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 2001, Solaris, and Alien, Sunshine's setting is a 'haunted house in space,' a seemingly familiar structure infected by its vast, unfamiliar outside.

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 'push the fatty or pull the lever' 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 asserted beforehand: "If the sun dies, so do we." Lyotard's question is answered with a simple "no."

Aesthetically Sunshine 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 Event Horizon 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:

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.

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. "Resembles Life what once was held of Light, / Too ample in itself for human sight?" 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 "everything is dead already." 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.

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 object 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. Certain crisis. Would extinction matter if there were no one there to enjoy it?

thoughts on zizecology 1

2008-06-06T02:01:00.017-04:00

Lord Stern, 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.

"Water is not a renewable resource. People have been mining it without restraint because it has not been priced properly," he said.

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 recent lectures published on his Web site, lacan.com, and popularized on the video site YouTube. 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 “Fukuyamaian” 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.

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:

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.’

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 7 Deadly Sins for the modern age, 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.

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 Whole Foods 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.)

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 is the ecological catastrophe already in process. Nowhere is this fact made clearer than in John Bellamy Foster’s first book The Vulnerable Planet, 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:

[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.

The so-called “infinite adaptability” of the market therefore should be understood to necessarily require 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. Contra Žižek, the supposed newfound power of individual actors to affect History by degrading the biosphere only masks the extent to which capitalism has always demanded widespread and irreversible environmental degradation in order to function in the first place.

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).

Against Barry Commoner’s four laws of ecology, Foster offers the four counter-ecological laws of capital:

(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.

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 from nature but on a structural level cannot respect nature except insofar as nature can be commodified.

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 Ecology Against Capitalism. 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.”

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.

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.

monkeypocalypse

2008-05-29T22:16:00.003-04:00

While we were ~~sleeping~~ writing our papers, monkeys executed the first stage of their three-pronged plan to take over the world: learn to control robotic arms with their thoughts.

I don't need to tell you about stage two.

Thanks to Alex Greenberg for the shout-out.

Polygraph 22: Call for Papers

2008-05-16T23:00:00.004-04:00

Polygraph 22—Call for Papers
http://www.duke.edu/web/polygraph/cfp22.html

Special Issue: Ecology and Ideology

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.

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.

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?

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.

Potential areas of interest include:

Political Ecology
Globalization and ecology
Marxism and ecology
"Environmental accounting" as a challenge to the free market
Ecology and capital / consumerism
Ecology as growth market

Eco-Disaster
Peak oil and climate change
Biofuels and the food crisis
Overpopulation and Neo-Malthusianism
Ecology as a rhetoric of control
Figurations of eco-disaster in popular culture

Religion and Ecology
Green apocalypticism and green evangelism
Ecology and world religion

Ecology and gender
Recent articulations of eco-feminism
Eco- & transnational feminisms
Women's work and the global chain of production
Agricultural work and reproduction

Ecologies against ecologies
"Light" vs. "dark green" environmentalism (i.e. deep ecology)
Primitivism and technofuturism
The status of international Green movements

Polygraph 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.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE
December 31, 2008

ISSUE EDITORS
Gerry Canavan
Lisa Klarr
Ryan Vu

CONTACT
polygraph22cfp@gmail.com

heterotopia and the myth-science of sf, pt.2

2008-05-08T01:29:00.025-04:00

Sorry for the intense lag time -- like Gerry said we should be back on regular schedule shortly (ha!).

part one can be found here

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 New Worlds 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.'

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.

(A more complete narrative of the New Wave's rise and fall can be found here.)

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 Simulacra and Simulation. The other is Samuel Delany's 1976 novel Triton, 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 'heterotopia' (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."

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 probable, and pursued to the extent that they are desirable. Within the realm of speculation we are talking about the relations between past, future, and an incomplete present.

Heterotopia has nothing to do with such things. Heterotopology recognizes heterotopias as sites 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. Triton 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.

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.

In a revealing interview, 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. My take on Star-Maker 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 David Lewis 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.

Before going on I want to mention that Fredric Jameson, whose recent work we keep coming back to on the question of science fiction and utopia, is not 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 formally 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:

"'The fantasy/reality confusion...it's just marvelous in her work. I mean, there, it's practically like what we 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 in 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 is, 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.'" (Triton)

'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 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 is" 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 why 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 to x, Bron yearns for the negative freedom promised by rights in defense of the other. The right not to know, not to struggle, not to think, not to feel, not to love, finally not to be bothered.

Aesthetics and imaginative storytelling appear in Triton 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. Triton claims 'heterotopology' for art -- and especially imaginative, extra-mimetic, theatrical 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.

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 Triton and the earlier Dhalgren, 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 now. Its constitutive wager was to deliberately treat imaginative writing as a material practice with which to examine (and intervene in) the present.

Like its distant counterparts in film, this 'New Wave' would be aestheticized into oblivion, but one can't say it never had its moment.

The negative theology of Star-Maker 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 should not be, the irrational hope it spurs in the narrator experienced as a reassuring, even invigorating feeling of emptiness, overlaid with anticipation.

"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.

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?"

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.

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.

Next, maybe something on cyberpunk and Afrofuturism. Maybe.

where have all the culturemonkeys gone?

2008-05-05T11:24:00.003-04:00

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...

Kunkel on Vonnegut

2008-04-27T11:07:00.000-04:00

link
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

Saturday April 26, 2008
The Guardian

White Noise

2008-04-11T08:55:00.002-04:00

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.

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 ways to read apocalyptic fantasy. I'll quote them:

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.
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.
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.
[...]
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.
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.

After our meeting two weeks ago, I think we have to add yet another one (#6), that the apparently dystopian apocalyptic fantasies are actually utopian 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).

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 infinite 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."

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?)

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.

Remind me if there were other counterarguments so I can address them next time.

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 Fish's NYT blog posts), what I've just written wouldn't really apply.

Heterotopia and the Myth-Science of Science Fiction, pt.1

2008-03-28T14:19:00.052-04:00

When 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.

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.

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 Star-Maker (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 genre analysis, it appears as a compendium of sorts).

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 bildungsroman 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 The Odyssey, and like the ancient epic, Star-Maker's peregrinations 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 The Odyssey, and more like More's Utopia, the narrator of Star-Maker plays no active role in the worlds he visits, but is condemned to passively observe (it's astral, 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 The Odyssey or Utopia, 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.

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:

"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.

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.

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."

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:

"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."

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 telos. With good reason. But what if, from our late perspective, Star-Maker'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 Star Maker, 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.

And at what cost! For perhaps the first time in history, the sheer price 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 Star-Maker, 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 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.

So what happens when the horizon of knowledge exceeds that of speculation? When the possibility of extinction 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?

Next time I'll consult the '70s answer to that question (I'll give you a hint, it has to do with human agency).

kidding on the square

2008-03-20T21:07:00.014-04:00

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...

The chart at right is Jameson's Greimas square for Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker, 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 Star Maker, as the square suggests, that trajectory is the dialectic of the one and the many, 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 nondialectical (and usually reformulated as good/evil, progress/anti-progress, life/death, futurity/apocalypse, and so on).

Mapping out the novel in this way we find its principal moments and various figurations nicely laid out.

While discussing Star Maker 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.

I've modified the square slightly since we talked about it, which is something we can talk about in the comments.

The square is an attempt to lay out the component subgenres of speculative fiction along these semiotic lines.

We take as our first opposition the difference between science fiction and fantasy/eros, following Jameson's borrowing of Coleridge's distinction between imagination and fancy 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 Star Maker-esque than even Star Maker itself: this is the programmatic business of speculative engineering and genre combinatorics. This is nerdonomics, 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.

On the other axis, we map horror against spectacle, spectacle in the Debordian sense of a manifestation of pure positivity:

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. (The Society of the Spectacle 15)

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.

When science fiction combines with horror, we get Frankenstein and its many children; when it combines with spectacle, we get Star Wars. 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.

Borrowing from the apocalyptic suprahistorical cycle of Star Maker, 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...

the dickensian aspect

2008-03-15T23:22:00.002-04:00

It's got nothing to do with futurity, but I've got a post on my home blog about season five of The Wire, if anyone here is a fan of the show.

Time Travel: The Creation of A Temporal Ecology

2008-03-07T08:34:00.021-05:00

One tends to mark the birth of time travel as a narratological device with the 1895 publication of Wells’ The Time Machine. 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 Flatland, but Wells seems to be the first to illustrate what it could mean for one of those dimensions to be time.

Making time a dimension of space—spatializing time—allows Wells' characters to visit the future as a place. 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.

Wells' innovation similarly opens up the past as a potential site of discovery. Although in The Time Machine ,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 physically 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 exist.

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.

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 Terminator 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.

Women writers who have evoked the time travel trope tend to treat the experience rather differently. In Octavia Butler’s Kindred, 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 Woman on the Edge of Time 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.

koolhaas

2008-03-03T19:45:00.002-05:00

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..

What I thought of when I saw Koolhaas's next project.

Dystopia as Economic Indicator

2008-02-23T21:26:00.001-05:00

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, dystopian films do best when the economy is booming, and a fall in the number of dystopian movies may predict a recession.

(Click for a full-sized version of the chart)

History and The Forever War (1974)

2008-02-22T09:47:00.006-05:00

The Forever War (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.

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 1984 or even Terminator or Terminator 2 (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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.)

Vietnam War (~1959 to 1975)
Human Spaceflight to other Planets / Moons: Apollo Moon landing July 20, 1969.
Human Spaceflight: USSR: Yuri Gagarin (April 12, 1961).
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.
Relativity: 1905?
Search for extraterrestrial intelligence: First SETI conference in 1961.
Wormholes: Term coined by physicist John Wheeler in 1957.
Relevance of countless cultural events and movements of the 1960s and 1970s.
nth wave overpopulation fears? Worldwatch founded in 1974...
Psychopharmacology: 1950s on..
Computers doing probability calculations (See p. 200): Fourth generation Computers: November 15, 1971, Intel releases the 4004, first commercial microprocessor.
Laser weapons: First working laser in May 1960. Introduced to public in 1959. "The LASER, Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation"

No doubt we need more additions..

There are so many problems with this approach. I think you can count several peaking out even from my description.

Digression: There Will Be Blood

2008-02-16T00:09:00.034-05:00

Finally 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 Edward Doheny 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 character, 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 canon. But while we may get their de rigueur 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.

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.

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 Dracula 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.

As many others have said, There Will Be Blood belongs above all to horror.

This is what truly makes it comparable to No Country For Old Men, 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.

Though their secrets are different, the real horror is that there are 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 artificially, even demiurgically, rendered unclear -- mystified. It's a function traditionally reserved for female characters, 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 absence of mystery with something else. What? Diegetically nothing happens which could not conceivably be explained, and yet somehow we emerge certain that a really adequate explanation is impossible. An invisible force (TWBB) or axiom (NCFOM) 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 ideological core.

In TWBB 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 any light back on the end of one still present? Or has Plainview eaten that as well?

the destruction of new york: an aesthetic on the wane?

2008-02-15T09:11:00.011-05:00

New York is the city most-often destroyed in American cinema. Why should this be so? Explanations 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.

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 Op-Ed piece, 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 (Flight 93 (TV 2006), United 93 (2006) World Trade Center (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:

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.

And that would be the beginning of the city's end.

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.

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.

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 cleverly suggested elsewhere, to begin “taking out” (in film!) Singapore? Beijing? Bangalore? This might just be the great swan song (Schwanengesang) of the aesthetic destruction of NYC. A few more films and then we’re done…

philip k. dick link explosion

2008-02-15T01:06:00.007-05:00

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 Dr. Bloodmoney this week, are just a few PKD highlights, all to the glory of the man Fredric Jameson once called "the Shakespeare of science fiction":

* "How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later." In some ways this is the definitive PKD essay, and it's the one referenced somewhat famously at the end of Waking Life.

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.

* Another great essay at Grey Lodge Occult Review: "If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others."

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?

* R. Crumb's comic, "The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick."

* The first law of kipple is that kipple drives out nonkipple.

* Philip K. Dick and drugs.

* Philip K. Dick on Kurt Vonnegut.

Interviewer: What did you think of Vonnegut’s attitude towards his characters (in Breakfast of Champions)?

PKD: 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.

* Philip K. Dick and the Kennedy Assassination. (Warning: spoilers for the last book we're going to read this semester, also a Dick novel, Dr. Futurity.)

* Profiles of Philip K. Dick from The New Yorker, The Washington Post, and the Times. Interviews with Philip K. Dick. Lethem on Philip K. Dick. Again. Stanislaw Lem on PKD.

* Jameson on Dr. Bloodmoney.

survivability and thinkability

2008-02-08T02:24:00.000-05:00

I'm trying something on for size here. I'm not sure I'm ready to make a down payment.

"...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."
—Susan Sontag, "The Imagination of Disaster"

"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."
— Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending

"What protects us is that in nuclear war the event is likely to eliminate the possibility of the spectacle. This is why it will not take place. For humanity can accept physical annihilation, but cannot agree to sacrifice the spectacle (unless it can find a spectator in another world)."
—Jean Baudrillard, "Fatal Strategies"

In Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, Bokonoists announce "Now I will destroy the whole world" when they elect to kill themselves. Individual death bound up with collective death, even universal 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 certain prospect of our own inevitable demise?

Or: What does it mean to imagine a future, good or bad, Utopian or dystopian, without you in it?

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 demands the projected permanence of one's conscious mind, the makes the actual absence of one's personal subjectivity by definition strictly unimaginable, strictly unthinkable.

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.

Futurity is the (failed) denial of death.

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, whether to rebuild capitalism anew or simply wallow decadently amidst the ruins. Even the rapturous, totalizing moment of nuclear annihilation has its inevitable excess, tunnels hidden underground where life, it is imagined, might still go on.

And even in the very rare case where narrative does let the bomb does go off, where all life ends, still we watch it 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?

On the Beach, 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.

Bazin writes in "Death Every Afternoon" that “for every creature, death is the unique moment par excellence.” Whether it is personal extinction, or atomic Rapture, or H.G. Wells's giant crabs scuttling about on an empty Earth, death is futurity 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 the character has died but we 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.

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 The End—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.

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 survive radical transgression, that nothing can undo us, that our individual subjectivity will survive all, even total destruction, even its own 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 you will somehow pass through safe and whole to the other side.

So perhaps we could just as well call it the denial-of-reality principle.

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.

Are we living in the Anthropocene?

2008-02-04T08:23:00.001-05:00

Look for a new post on the nuclear sublime in the next few days. In the meantime, cross-posted from my other blog, the question must be asked: Are we living in the Anthropocene?

Geologists at the University of Leicester, picking up on a proposal first made by chemist Paul Crutzen in 2002, now suggest that the Holocene epoch has ended. The new epoch, which they dub the Anthropocene, is the result of significant human actions. 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.

The Anthropocene 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 GSA Today (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... (Italicized text from the Centauri Dreams link. Via io9.)

Speculative Realism

2008-02-02T14:45:00.000-05:00

J.G. Ballard, intro to French 1973 edition of Crash:

"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.

...

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.

...

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."

William Gibson, 2007 (via Ballardian):

"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."

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):

"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.

...

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.

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.

...

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.

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?"

see also a discussion of (speculative) realism in philosophy here.

Vonnegut's Player Piano

2008-01-31T10:21:00.000-05:00

This post is about Vonnegut's 1952 novel Player Piano. In thinking about the novel, I decided to focus on one of the premises, namely, that ever increasing automation leads to mass unemployment. This might be seen as the easy way out since it's clear today Vonnegut was off in important ways, but I'm interested in the premise as an (explicit) engagement with ideas of the time—more evidence for Jameson's claim that “few other literary forms have so brazenly affirmed themselves as argument and counterargument.”¹

Here's a great example from early in the text of Vonnegut's engagement with Norbert Weiner's Cybernetics or, Control and communication in the animal and the machine, published in 1948.

Katherine and Paul are taking. Katherine begins:

“It seemed very fresh to me—I mean that part where you say how the First Industrial Revolution devalued muscle work, then the second one devalued routine mental work. I was fascinated.”

“Nobert Wiener, a mathematician, said all that way back in the nineteen-forties. It's fresh to you because you're too young to know anything but the way things are now.”

“Actually, it is kind of incredible that things were ever any other way, isn't it? It was so ridiculous to have people stuck in one place all day, just using their senses, then a reflex, using their senses, then a reflex, and not really thinking at all.”

...

“To the people who were going to be replaced by machines, maybe. A third one, eh? In a way, I guess the third one's been going on for some time, if you mean thinking machines. That would be the third revolution, I guess—machines that devaluate human thinking. Some of the big computers like EPICAC do that all right, in specialized fields.”²

Of course the third revolution has arrived. The loan officer is one of the best examples of this. Deciding whether or not someone or some business was credit worthy used to be a job requiring significant skill and expertise. Now the vast majority of such decisions can be made faster and more accurately by statistics and information technology. In this case, a computed “credit score” has replaced human thinking to a breathtaking extent.

Of course, as I imagine most people have observed, there's nothing close to mass unemployment in the United States, even as population has doubled since Vonnegut wrote the novel in 1952. I don't have much more to say about the prediction except that I think current Science fiction reflects the consensus pretty well. Machines in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy do just about everything, but there's still plenty for humans to do on Mars and on Earth—to say nothing of the very premise of KSR's novel and so many like it: humans, finished expanding on Earth, find things to do outside its gravity well.

Like Vonnegut, I share the concern that the increasing use of “machines,” broadly construed, will lead to stratification in society. Yet, if I compare some European countries with America, I find very similar degrees of mechanization/computerization and very different degrees of income stratification. This inclines me to think that the performance of machines is as determinative as Vonnegut seems to be arguing.

1Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future (Verso, 2005), 2.

2Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano (New York: Scribner's, 1952), 13.

Utopic Space

2008-01-30T11:25:00.003-05:00

In the study of semiotics, utopic space is strictly defined as a space of transformation. For Gremias, in his example of making vegetable soup, the pot is the utopic space, the space where the transformation from raw to cooked occurs. Or, to pull a definition directly from Key Terms in Semiotics:

The term utopic space designates the space in which the decisive test takes place and where performances are realized. Utopic space is contrasted with paratopic space. In Zola’s Germinal, the mine Le Voreux where the miners fight their principal battle for survival constitutes the utopic space. In Cinderella, the ballroom where Cinderella encounters the prince constitutes the utopic space.

Artist Paul Laffoley—and his cult of internet followers—highlight the mystical side of this transformational space. In a press release for a 2001 exhibit, Laffoley describes utopic space as a “felt and lived sensibility” with a “generic religious base” stemming from its origination in the mind of the fervent devotee, Thomas More. He defines utopic space as a “multiplenum of an octave of spatiality and temporality in the form of total continuity”—basically, oneness. In this space, the possibility of “complete merger of content without any loss of noetic integrity” exists. Taking his cue from the futurists—a title he also bestows on himself in reference to his own corpus—Laffoley explains how utopic space results from the (eventual) congealing of all knowledge in what can be imagined as a state of pure transdisciplinarity. This has resonances with Pierre Tielhard de Chardin’s conception of the Noosphere (a concept that proves particularly fruitful for Laffoley’s work) as:

the sphere of human consciousness or mental activity that grows out of the biosphere of the various species of creatures that exist on the surface of the earth, especially in relation to the force of evolution.

The noosphere becomes the convergence of all mental space. For Laffoley and his followers at work on the various internet spirituality forums, once utopic space is reached, once true transdisciplinarity is achieved, “we will all experience the end of the future.”

These types of ruminations are interesting for multiple reasons. As they appear rather symptomatically in web-based millenarism, they remind us how the project of utopia remains bound up (even in 2008) with the mystical; the pursuit of utopia is a kind of spiritual quest—perhaps the only spiritual quest—left to inhabitants of the secularized West. But more importantly, these speculations also direct us back to the question of transformation vis-à-vis utopia that came up in our recent conversation with FRJ; namely, must the human being be transformed before utopia can be actualized? And what type(s) of transformations must occur? Obviously, in the case of utopic space, we are well beyond a simple shift in the mode of production and have entered instead into some kind of freaky a-dimensionality (take that, Marx).

Another articulation of utopic space that is, perhaps, more useful (unless you really feel like going down the rabbit hole) is that it is the space of signification. In an essay on Auster’s The New York Trilogy, Steven E. Alford suggests, in a reading comparable to our thoughts on textual utopia, that “the space of signification is what we have traditionally called utopia, which is not a ‘nowhere’ but a ‘neither-here-no-there’.” In comparing the two utopias of More and Thoreau, Alford takes the Thoreauvian utopia to be the clue to utopic space:

The utopia of Walden clearly differs from those of More, and of Dark in City of Glass. In both Utopia and The New Babel, the quest is to build an external structure, that of an island or a huge building, and by reordering citizens' external relationship to space and property, destroy historical time and its attendant injustices through mandating an ultimately static space. Walden, by contrast, believes in the transformative inner power of the imagination—a change in our inner space will [a]ffect external space. Like Wordsworth's "Spots of Time" (themselves an interesting spatialization of temporality), the events narrated in Walden record the power of nature to transform the seer morally through affecting his/her imagination. The language of Walden becomes a second-order phenomenon that in turn affects the poet's readers.

Here, again, utopic space clearly emerges as a space of transformation, which, for Walden and Alford alike, does not exist in structuring built space but rather in the continual transformation of a space that remains forever flexible: the mind. It links us up again with Jameson’s take on textual utopia—that it is a continual production of mental space that acts as “enclave” within a system—and, to quote Louis Marin from Utopiques, jeux d’espace, the “no-place” of utopia emerges in the act of signification:

Utopia is thus the neutral moment of a difference, the space outside of place; it is a gap impossible either to inscribe on a geographic map or to assign to history. Its reality thus belongs to the order of the text; more precisely, it is the figurative representation that the text inscribes beneath its discourse, and by it (57).

transition, violence, and dystopia; or, utopia's struggle with realism

2008-01-25T20:49:00.000-05:00

At least since More, the imagination of an ideal society in Western literature has traditionally invoked an ideal state to regulate it. As this imagination underwent a decisive shift from the spatial to the temporal (utopia as a possible future rather than a far-off land) from the late 18th century onward and became more practically oriented, it became more and more tightly bound to socialism, a marriage that with few exceptions (for the most part either millenarian or Rousseauian primitive communalism) went without competition from the middle 19th century until after WWI. Outside of this period, and especially since the dismantling of the New Deal, Americans have tended to be the least keen on the idea; within it they were among the keenest. Still, suspicion of statist fantasies has existed from the beginning, and today it remains at an all-time high. For between the present and any ideal future is a space of uncertainty on which the possibility and the very identity of the coming state depends, and not even the most glimmering, comprehensive vision of perfection can assimilate it without bearing its marks.

The most prominent American socialist utopian novel of the 19th century is Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888). From our present perspective, it might as well have been written in an alternate universe. It depicts a world of allied super-states, each network of production and distribution centralized under the control of a technocratic Industrial Army of labor. This allows for a radically simplified, moneyless/classless economy able to provide absolute security and even comfort to everyone, all without systemic violence or exploitation. In our post-communist, post-1984 environment such a fiction would probably be dismissed as naive by most people, and appear unintelligible to most Americans. At the time, however, it quickly became massively influential in a number of areas, spawning hundreds of imitators (some critical, others merely derivative) as well as leading to the formation of 'Bellamy Clubs' and even political parties all over the world. It inspired such prominent socialists as Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) founder and presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs and Socialist Labor Party founder Daniel DeLeon. And in a slightly different vein, it was the key touchstone for British urban planner Ebenezer Howard's Garden city movement, which in turn influenced the faux-towns of New Urbanism -- though bits and pieces of it also found their way (in distorted form) into the antithetical design 'philosophy' of American suburbia.

Letchworth Garden City, England

Bellamy's vision is indeed packaged as a bourgeois lifestyle for the masses, and it's probably no coincidence that his utopia sometimes reads like a giant Wal-Mart -- with the end of private ownership, all wares are sold at huge district department stores, all fed by even larger centralized warehouses (as in Wal-Mart, the aggressive salesmanship of what we might call 'customer service' is absent, along with all pretense of expertise: "Courtesy and accuracy in taking orders are all that are required of him"). Art and other types of intellectual work are the only economic sectors based on open meritocracy, but one that contrary to free market advocates is enabled rather than restricted by the social 'safety net.'

But Bellamy's utopia is structurally incapable of absolute closure. Something is opened up by the utopia's position in time -- the future, not an island of the imagination but a specific date: the year 2000. We have moved from simple proposition to extrapolation from existing trends. The question 'how do we get here' thus demands an answer. For the 19th-century gentleman narrator Julian West, it's the riddle of the devouring Sphinx, the question of labor. The answer, like all this society's answers, is simple and direct: "The solution came as the result of a process of industrial evolution which could not have terminated otherwise. All that society had to do was to recognize and cooperate with that evolution, when its tendency had become unmistakable." Utopia is not merely an end, but a projected stage in an evolutionary process. Contrary to that other evolutionary socialist, Karl Marx, no revolutionary struggle is required to move things along, just widespread knowledge of the facts. The eminently reasonable next stage, remarks one of West's guides, is for all the world's nations to merge into a single global nation.

Among the many criticisms of Bellamy's utopia embodied in William Morris's socialist-pastoral News from Nowhere (1890) -- its statism, its antiseptic environment, its cultural uniformity -- what may be the most fundamental is that his state utopia dishonestly glosses over the struggle and pain of social change, which always risks being much worse than the adverse conditions that initiate it. There's an incongruous moment toward the end of LB where the good Reverend Mr. Barton confesses a wish to exchange his present happiness for a taste of "that stormy epoch of transition," which is elsewhere explained again and again as entirely pedestrian and nigh-instantaneous. In Morris's 'epoch of rest' the wish to forget the 19th century (common to the people of both scenarios) is extended also to the horrific period of revolution and revolt that birthed the new society. This brilliant chapter from the middle of NfN describes in detail the terrible, and contingent series of revolts, repressions, and mishaps that led to the present peace. "It was war from beginning to end: bitter war, till hope and pleasure put an end to it."

William Morris and Philip Webb's "Red House"

In terms of the ideal society itself, Morris's dream functions in a more traditional vein than Bellamy's -- where the latter describes in detail the economic and political structure of his world, Morris only describes their pleasant lifestyle. His people are naturally communal in a state of anarchy, requiring only the pleasure of cooperation and unalienated manual and handicraft labor to 'regulate' them. It is a world not quite outside of time, but outside the time of development and property, the most basic logics of capitalism. It's difficult to call it naive considering the grasp of human motive Morris displays throughout the novel, and the fact that unlike Bellamy he was a practicing socialist, but one can wonder if it really deserves the title 'utopia.' It serves more as a vision of human happiness than a plan for the future, what humans could collectively desire if they really had the opportunity to choose. All the same, Morris's ideas along with those of the Arts and Crafts movement had at least an equivalent effect on modern architecture as Bellamy's via their influence on the Bauhaus school, even if in terms of politics his fiction left little to work with.

In the now-competitive world of utopian literature, Morris's attention to the gory details of utopia's actual realization made the subject impossible for serious writers to ignore. Equality (1897), Bellamy's sequel to LB, addressed Morris's critique by providing a more detailed analysis of the transition (here), though still refusing the idea that violence is necessary to make it happen. H.G. Wells, in Anticipations (1901), argues that evolution rather than simple teleology is the necessary form for 20th century utopian imaginings, and that large-scale violence (especially against other races, which are mostly absent from both Bellamy and Morris) may well be necessary for the establishment of a World State. Perhaps the apotheosis of attempts to realistically consider the transition to utopia can be found in Jack London's Iron Heel (1908), in which socialist utopia is relegated entirely to the footnotes, as a framing device -- the narrative itself, in the form of a revolutionary's incomplete journal, is an episode within the (extremely) violent, centuries-long transition into this merely hinted-at future. Though its premise of protracted class war is predated by U.S. Congressman and Atlanticist Ignatius Donnelly's little-known Caesar's Column (1890), that novel at least takes a few stabs at utopian speculation. London's (much better written) entry is an aggressive blend of narrative action and didactic criticism; its 'scholarly' footnotes, like of the fictional footnotes more common to 18th-century literature, serve as a mere justification and ironic distancing device. In IH we are being trained to read a 'new'* genre. Welcome to the dystopian imagination.

What can we say about dystopian fiction at this point? Certainly that it is not simply the obverse of utopia. It comes from a strain of utopian fiction that has become extrapolative, its speculations devoted as much to what will be as what should be. While it's easy to regard something like More's Utopia as 'really' a dystopia (what should not be), it's hard to imagine More himself writing it that way. Even a paradise of torment like Dante's Inferno shows something that, however complex our reaction might be to it, is ultimately subordinated to the good -- the punishment of the wicked by a (the) moral being. Swift's Gulliver's Travels is basically a satirical fantasy, designed to achieve piecemeal, non-systemic critique through fanciful caricature and exaggeration. Second, though dystopian fiction is more interested in describing a corrupt society (as the hidden potential or underlying truth of the writer's own) than individual psychology, its protagonist is not just an observer but a dramatic actor, bringing the genre formally much closer to realism. The most obvious difference between IH and traditional utopian fiction is that London's novel actually has a plot. A drama with active characters. This may seem like a strange comparison for those used to contemporary 'domestic' realism, but a good dystopia is not so different from a Balzac or Dickens, where exciting plots and documentary-style social detail combine in more or less equal measure. And of course, many of the great realist classics take place during periods of social upheaval, where the individual is pitted against the forces of social oppression.

Back to IH: the utopian perspective given by the footnotes make it more of a transition to dystopia than dystopia proper, but we can already begin to see shades of 1984 in the uneasy dissonance between the detached, self-satisfied scholar and the passion, moral drama, and intrigue of his material. Like all extrapolative fiction it treats the present as the past, but unlike most later dystopias (and like the realist novel) it shows historical changes happening in a world that is immediately familiar to us. The consequences of a realism that tries to show historical change taking place, in either the past or present, tend to be a) that the story must be full of conflict and excitement and b) though it can excoriate, it must not make positive recommendations, and in spite of public pressure (no longer much of an issue), should ideally avoid absolute moral judgment. It is thus capable of indirect criticism, but never proposals, no matter how ironic they may be. One cannot apparently write a realist utopia. So the principal differences between dystopia and 19th-century realism may well be the relative frequency of direct criticism and speculative content, meaning that we now come up against a very late-20th-century question about realism: why is it that made-up stories directly about political events tend to be excluded from the genre, restricted to 'all the rest': fantasy, popular fiction (i.e. mystery, thriller), journalism, travelogue, and speculation?

*new insofar as it is among the first in a slew of socialist and anti-socialist dystopias -- American dystopian fiction in general goes back further, prior to the Civil War.

Singularity Summit

2008-01-22T12:48:00.000-05:00

Check up on the current status of the Singularity -- Summit 2006 and Summit 2007. All via Metafilter.

As in the early days of futurology, a 'discipline' usually attributed to H.G. Wells, the degree of influence from science fiction on all proceedings is immediately apparent.

Here's AI scientist Rodney Brooks introducing the subject:

Now, predicting the future is sometimes hard, so I want to take you back to Paris in 1783.The first hot air balloon floats out of Paris. Marie turns to Francois, and what does she predict about the future based on that hot air balloon? Does she say, “This is great, we’ll be able to travel internationally anywhere within 24 hours”? Does she get upset about noise abatement at airports, which is a big issue from flying? No, that’s not the sort of things that she can think about. They are the consequences that happened from tha, but they weren’t the things she could think about. She was more likely to have said, “No one will be able to breathe in those things.” Or, “It’s going to crash and the city is going to burn down!” Or, maybe, and this looks a little quaint, we’ll be able to get up really close to God and touch his face.

I think at the time when things are happening, you understand the world as it is, but it is very hard to understand the world as it will be. And the sorts of questions we ask ourselves here may well be the wrong questions in the long term. So, I’m a little skeptical about some of the worries of an artificial general intelligence and I’m a little skeptical about some of the promises. I sort of see a little too much techno salvation and techno holocaust. I don’t think things are ever quite as good as we expect, in my experience anyway, and never quite as bad as we fear. I’m being up front about that. There are the questions that Hollywood asks. Will they be great, will we accept them, or should we fear them? This is a theme in movies.

When we think about the future, lots of people have thought about it. Niels Bohr said it’s really difficult to predict. Albert Einstein, this shows he was really a scientist, he was not a technologist, because technologists will not bear with that. And Yogi, he had something intelligent to say. As I was looking through quotes about the future I realized, we didn’t know how good we had it when Dan Quayle was our vice president. “The future is here, maybe, just not everyone’s got it.” And now every research lab in the world now uses this one as their slogan: the best way to predict the future is to invent it, and we’re the ones who are going to invent it. I actually think Arthur C. Clarke had it right. Arthur C. Clarke said that when it comes to technology, most people overestimate it in the short term, but underestimate it in the long-term. And that’s, I think, what we would have seen in Paris in 1783 - overestimating how good it would be in the short term but completely missing the understanding that we have 200 years later.

So, in the future, the way we think about the future often is through Hollywood. But Hollywood has a very specific way of talking about the future. This is from one of, I think, the best movies about the future, Bicentennial Man. And there’s Robin Williams being a robot, but look what else is in this picture. Here, he’s sitting there, he’s got a fully functional android and he’s reading a paper newspaper. She’s pouring orange juice, though she’s got a fully functional android. So, what happens in Hollywood, we tale the world exactly as it is, and then we add one thing. So, in AI, which is one of the worst movies about the future, it was the world as it is and then they had robots, and then they added emotion to the robot and then everything changed. In Minority Report, they still used regular guns, even though they were able to predict the future in great detail.

My point there is that when an artificial general intelligence appears, the world is going to be a very different place than it is today. So it’s not today’s world and add in this really super-intelligent being. It’s the world that’s going to change over time. By the way, I think by then “we” will be long gone, but in a positive way. I’ll come back to that.

The rest is here.

For the sake of historical comparison, let's look at Wells' seminal work, Anticipations, his attempt to collate all the ideas from his earlier science fiction novels into a single theoretical position (which, characteristically, required several more attempts). Note the financial metaphors on top of the references to fiction. Note especially the widening gap, as in the above speech, between the drag of a gradualist evolutionary narrative, now increasingly weighed down by excess data and escalating standards for 'completeness,' and the accelerated speed of speculation. And watch how deemphasizing the individual's role in historical (now technological/'natural') change draws the meaning of 'invention' and 'creation' closer and closer to speculation and investment -- placing (or preferably fixing) a bet -- even as the underlying overdetermined techno-historical narrative paradoxically becomes deterministic.

It is proposed in this book to present in as orderly an arrangement as the necessarily diffused nature of the subject admits, certain speculations about the trend of present forces, speculations which, taken all together, will build up an imperfect and very hypothetical, but sincerely intended forecast of the way things will probably go in this new century. Necessarily diffidence will be one of the graces of the performance. Hitherto such forecasts have been presented almost invariably in the form of fiction, and commonly the provocation of the satirical opportunity has been too much for the writer; the narrative form becomes more and more of a nuisance as the speculative inductions become sincerer, and here it will be abandoned altogether in favour of a texture of frank inquiries and arranged considerations. Our utmost aim is a rough sketch of the coming time, a prospectus, as it were, of the joint undertaking of mankind in facing these impending years. The reader is a prospective shareholder—he and his heirs—though whether he will find this anticipatory balance-sheet to his belief or liking is another matter.

For reasons that will develop themselves more clearly as these papers unfold, it is extremely convenient to begin with a speculation upon the probable developments and changes of the means of land locomotion during the coming decades. No one who has studied the civil history of the nineteenth century will deny how far-reaching the consequences of changes in transit may be, and no one who has studied the military performances of General Buller and General De Wet but will see that upon transport, upon locomotion, may also hang the most momentous issues of politics and war. The growth of our great cities, the rapid populating of America, the entry of China into the field of European politics are, for example, quite obviously and directly consequences of new methods of locomotion. And while so much hangs upon the development of these methods, that development is, on the other hand, a process comparatively independent, now at any rate, of most of the other great movements affected by it. It depends upon a sequence of ideas arising, and of experiments made, and upon laws of political economy, almost as inevitable as natural laws. Such great issues, supposing them to be possible, as the return of Western Europe to the Roman communion, the overthrow of the British Empire by Germany, or the inundation of Europe by the "Yellow Peril," might conceivably affect such details, let us say, as door-handles and ventilators or mileage of line, but would probably leave the essential features of the evolution of locomotion untouched. The evolution of locomotion has a purely historical relation to the Western European peoples. It is no longer dependent upon them, or exclusively in their hands. The Malay nowadays sets out upon his pilgrimage to Mecca in an excursion steamship of iron, and the immemorial Hindoo goes a-shopping in a train, and in Japan and Australasia and America, there are plentiful hands and minds to take up the process now, even should the European let it fall.

...

A curious and profitable question arises at once. How is it that the steam locomotive appeared at the time it did, and not earlier in the history of the world?
Because it was not invented. But why was it not invented? Not for want of a crowning intellect, for none of the many minds concerned in the development strikes one—as the mind of Newton, Shakespeare, or Darwin strikes one—as being that of an unprecedented man. It is not that the need for the railway and steam engine had only just arisen, and—to use one of the most egregiously wrong and misleading phrases that ever dropped from the lips of man—the demand created the supply; it was quite the other way about.

And to drive the point home with a hammer, here's a hedge fund manager on the perils of investing in the world in a time of extreme crisis:

I thought I would dispense with the powerpoint presentations and the detailed slides to share a few thoughts I’ve had on investing in a world where the possibility of a Singularity exists. It’s sort of a different perspective from some of the discussions people have had. There are two levels one can think about investing. One is as a venture capitalist, investing in early stage companies. The basic rule there, and for investing in general, is that you want to do something that is fundamentally true and that nobody else sees. That’s how your do really well.
Artificial intelligence, or near-artificial intelligence, or quasi artificial intelligence, this is so out of fashion today that it is perhaps the only thing thematically that I think makes sense on a venture capital side to do - to try to identify things that are promising in this sort of direction. I think the venture capital end of it is fairly straightforward. There are all sorts of details you can discuss, but I want to focus instead on a very different element of it, which is the big picture. How do you invest in the world as a whole? What is going to happen to the world’s stock market or the world’s larger financial markets in a world where this possibility of a Singularity, or something like this, exists? How will the world’s markets be different from a Singularity-type world from a world where such a thing would never happen or not even be possible?

I suppose the basic intuition that I have about it is very simply, this is a world in which there is a possibility of things going extraordinarily well or extraordinarily badly, where both the good things and the bad things are bigger than people think. If you have a bell curve distribution of possible futures for the world, the tails on that bell curve are much fatter than people think. There is far more that can happen at the far edges. This would lead to a very different behavior in markets from a normal bell curve of distributions where nothing that interesting or extraordinary is going to happen. In particular, the Singularity will either be very successful, in which case we are going to have the biggest boom ever, or it is going to blow up the whole world and there will be nothing left to invest in whatsoever. This leads to an interesting investment dynamic.
I will start parenthetically by saying that the second category is one that’s rather difficult to invest in. If you are somebody who is predicting the end of the world, even if you are right, I think you will still not make a lot of money. Even if you put all of your money into gold coins in a silver chest and hide it in some forgotten corner of the planet, when the world does come to an end there will be nothing left to buy or to sell, and probably well before then some humans or robots will have come along and taken your gold away from you. The bad versions of the Singularity are things that one cannot invest in, at all. They are not investable. So there are all these possibilities that one cannot even think about. In some sense, if you believe in something like this, you have no choice but to bet on it, as an investor. The best investments will be the ones that represent the most aggressive bets on it: you have no choice at all, ultimately.

the past as anti-future

2008-01-21T11:50:00.000-05:00

Our in-person discussion last week ended up on some interesting ground that bears heavily on the question of the end of the world as a cultural form. We found ourselves wrestling with the question of the origins of apocalyptic fantasy, why these sorts of productions are so very popular. We basically hit upon five overlapping and sometimes contradictory motivations:

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.

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.

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.

I think this is probably at once the best and worst answer, as it explains Cloverfield better than anything else, but can't explain the genesis of our initial attraction to the form at all. Take this as a given—I won't be talking much about it.

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.

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.

I'm tempted to note here that #1 generally goes with #4, and #2 generally with #5—but I don't believe it's that simple. They're all inextricably bound up with one another. I'm happy to accept "overdetermination" as the answer to this argument, but not without qualification—I think we must acknowledge that Jameson is essentially right when he insists (following Bloch) on the Utopian kernel at the core of both cultural production and daily life. Without #5—without the carrot, whatever form it takes—apocalypse could never sell. There are plenty of places where Jameson says this, but I thought it might be useful (given that our discussion last week came to focus on what exactly is the Utopian hook in a movie like Saw IV) to look at Christopher Sharrett's well-known essay on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Not all of it is available online, but a good portion of it is through Google Books, in particular the part I was hoping to quote:

The point to be made here is that the failure of America's sense of divinely ordained "mission," the development of pessimism and the fixation by many American artists on a nonregenerative apocalypse, suggests a kind of wish-fulfillment calling for an end to history, a divine intervention meant to destroy what cannot be revitalized or what has worked against the earlier collective (that is to say white, male, capitalist) beliefs of society.

What is the nature of this wish-fulfillment? Against Sharrett I would suggest that it is almost no different than the catastrophe of science fiction, or rather that it is of a piece with the tripartite possibility that is opened up by the end of the world. When we pass through societal collapse and find ourselves on the other side, three dialectically interrelated possibilities present themselves:

1) We are now free to rebuild capitalist society, but "right" this time. This sort of story inevitably involves a kind of jack-of-all-trades, Swiss-Family-Robinson, white, male, capitalist Übermensch with exactly the skillset necessary to rise to the equation and restart civilization.

We can see already that this narrative hits nearly all the points above—the latest in a long tradition of Robinson Crusoe stories (#3) that we simultaneously don't fear and yet always expect (#1 and #2), this type of post-apocalyptic fantasy both wipes clean the slate of capitalism's practical injustices (#5) while simultaneously justifying an idealized form of capitalism as the natural state of humankind and our only protection against a life of utter deprivation (#4).

You can usually tell you're in this kind of story when the story ends just as it looks like they're about to get the lights back on.

2) In a second variation on apocalpyse, we find ourselves in the state of nature, again as an Übermensch but this time as one finally empowered to fight and struggle and conquer completely freed from societal constraint. The collapse of society is equated with the collapse of all taboo, allowing us to "do whatever it takes to survive," which often just means murdering other people without compulsion, but sometimes also includes such psychoanalytic breaches as abandoning our wives to sleep with our daughters. The post-apocalyptic here is therefore bound up hopelessly with both nightmare (#4) and with wish-fulfillment (#5)—the one feeds into the other—but it is a nightmare that our identification with the hero allows us not only to survive, but on some level enjoy. (This, as I argued in our meeting last week, is the brilliance of High Rise—Ballard makes all his characters so unlikable that we are denied identification and left with just the nightmare.) Clearly, too, this is a thrill ride (#1) that positions us through the power of identification as the unbound survivor hero we all imagine we would be (#2)—we are able to experience at last (albeit vicariously) the total freedom we long for (#5 again).

3) But there is a third track, which might be called the "quiet end" for capitalism, and which in a kind of reverse synthesis leaves #1 and especially #4 out of the equation. While there is always deprivation and destruction, it is always downplayed in favor of a survivalist mentality that denies the capacities of the individual survival in favor of the collectivity of survivors. It is here, not surprising, that we find the Utopian kernel in its purest form, and likewise that we find renewed in these stories a new sense of history that extends far beyond the "Great Disaster" and its immediate aftermath. This is the longed-for apocalypticism of primitivism or of Earth Abides, a life free from capitalism's pressures and contradictions, a literal turning back of the clock. The past, then, not merely as anti-future, but as super-future.

In the most extreme of these fantasies, as in 2007's The World Without Us, there are no longer any people at all—a strange Utopia, yes, but an undeniable one.

The sheer incomprehensible violence required to ever get there from here—the massive, world-historical hardship that would have to be endured—makes these vision of an ahistorical future no less Edenic when they are presented to us, especially—and this may well be the key point—given the fact that the power of narrative identification always ensures our personal passage, no matter how improbable, through the crucible of Tribulation into a better world.

against pasta

2008-01-18T21:11:00.000-05:00

A provocative excerpt from the Futurist writings of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti.

Above all we believe necessary:

a) The abolition of pastasciutta, an absurd Italian gastronomic religion.

It may be that a diet of cod, roast beef and steamed pudding is beneficial to the English, cold cuts and cheese to the Dutch and sauerkraut, smoked [salt] pork and sausage to the Germans, but pasta is not beneficial to the Italians. For example it is completely hostile to the vivacious spirit and passionate, generous, intuitive soul of the Neapolitans. If these people have been heroic fighters, inspired artists, awe-inspiring orators, shrewd lawyers, tenacious farmers it was in spite of their voluminous daily plate of pasta. When they eat it they develop that typical ironic and sentimental scepticism which can often cut short their enthusiasm.

A highly intelligent Neapolitan Professor, Signorelli, writes: 'In contrast to bread and rice, pasta is a food which is swallowed, not masticated. Such starchy food should mainly be digested in the mouth by the saliva but in this case the task of transformation is carried out by the pancreas and the liver. This leads to an interrupted equilibrium in these organs. From such disturbances derive lassitude, pessimism, nostalgic inactivity and neutralism.'

Fagus Works and Marinetti

2008-01-18T07:52:00.001-05:00

"Fagus Works" (see p. 41 of Harries)

It's a beautiful building. What I remember most from visiting it in 2001 was that it was phenomenally energy inefficient. As you can see, it has no insulation. I recall the docent remarking on the financial drain of the heating bill.

Marinetti

In another class this semester we've been called on to remark upon the similarities between the futuristic rhapsodies of the 1900s-1960s and those of today. Needless to say, the content and the language of the predictions are nearly identical (longevity, cures to everything under the sun, etc.).

Even if I hadn't been primed to notice them, I think it would be difficult not to find parallels between the exuberant futurism of today and that of modernist Futurism's manifestos. The rhapsodies about a future of immortality, efficiency, speed, and unleashed energy would not be out of place in the pages of Wired today. What did strike me as unusual was the mysticizing of the technological, something that's not absent but certainly different today. For example:

“You will undoubtedly have heard the comments that car owners and car workshop managers habitually make: 'Motorcars, they say, are truly mysterious...They have their foibles, they do unexpected things; they seem to have personalities, souls and wills of their own. You have to stroke them, treat them respectfully, never mishandle them nor overtire them. If you follow this advice, the machine made of cast iron and steel, this motor constructed according to precise calculations, will give you not only its due, but double and triple, considerably more and a whole lot better than the calculations of its creator, its father, ever dreamed of!'

Well then, I see in these words a great, important revelation, promising the not-too-distant discovery of the laws of a true sensitivity in machines!” (Critical Writings: “Extended Man and the Kingdom of the Machine,” 86)

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance notwithstanding, this “sensitivity in machines" seems out of place today (people buy Japanese cars because they work, right?), yet I wonder if an underlying current of such occult hope runs in the writing of the devotees of emergence. Surely one finds a passing resemblance with some of the ardent supporters of Wolfram's A New Kind of Science, to cite one example.

High Rise

2008-01-17T20:59:00.000-05:00

Like the Modernist architectural manifestos, Ballard’s High Rise asks us to believe that the organization of space—the social production of space—is what allows (or does not allow) for utopia. High Rise takes the modernist architectural programme to its logical conclusion; in effect, deconstructing each aspiration of the agenda by pushing it to its extreme, and revealing, in the process, a millennial shortsightedness that we as readers now living awash in glass and concrete readily ascertain. The Modernist impulses: universalization, standardization, mechanization, simplification—satisfying the greatest number of needs with the least amount of capital on the largest scale feasible: this is the High Rise. By moving to the structure, the character Laing feels as though he has “traveled forward fifty years in time, away from crowded streets, traffic hold-ups…” into a building that reveals itself to be “ a huge machine" that "provided a never-failing supply of care and attention” (10). While he does balk at all of the concrete, as it is “an architecture designed for war” (10), he still assumes residency without reservation.

The irony is that these futuristic yearnings prove to be, in a spiral model of progress analogous to Hegel’s dialectical narrative of aesthetics, a re-turn to primitivism. This primitive urge is even apparent in the manifestos themselves. El Lissitzky writes in his "Ideological superstructure" that “In our architecture, as in our whole life, we are striving to create a social order, that is to say, to raise the instinctual into consciousness," and Le Corbusier, in “The Charter of Athens,” similarly declares that the destiny of the city is to “satisfy the primordial biological and psychological needs of their inhabitants” (137). As a “Complete Building,” in a sense modified from Gropius’ conception, the high rise fulfills its purpose by providing its residents with all of their basic necessities, including those we would call social: “By its very efficiency, the high-rise took over the task of maintaining the social structure that supported them all. For the first time, it removed the need to repress every kind of anti-social behaviour” (36). In liberating its residents from the demands of the social, the High Rise calls into existence a subject who ceases to take interest in the exercises of modernity. No religious facilities exist in the High Rise: no airport-style chapels or reflection rooms. In noting what the High Rise does not provide: organized religion, therapy, art (except those pieces hauled up in the freight elevators by the higher floors), an active Home Owners Association or other solid sense of community, we realize that stripped of all the modern enclaves, the residents are left to experience bare life. The simplification desired by the modernists leaves us with these bare essentials: the desire for sex, food, and security.

Does the form of the high rise, the way it bounds space, act as the motor behind this regression? Does the arrangement of space itself call forth these more primitive urges? The high-rise does resemble, albeit on a larger scale, the multistoried cliff dwellings of the Ananzi, whose upper floors were accessible only by ladder, similar to the high speed elevators servicing only the 35th floors and above of the high rise. Quite fittingly, Ballard has the character Laing, in the opening chapter, look out from his abode, his “over-priced cell, slotted almost at random into the cliff face of the apartment building” (7). If, as Karsten Harries attests in "The Dream of the Complete Building," the architect “shape[s] the space and time of everyday experience in such a way that man is recalled from the dispersal into which he is led by the modern world to an order that will reveal to him his vocation,” then the architect has revealed to the inhabitants of the high rise their affinity with a vocationality of more primitive origin (39). The initial stratification of the building relegated Wilder, the documentary filmmaker, to the lower floors/the lower classes, but as the logic of primitivism unfurls, he—by virtue of his physical prowess—assumes the role of hunter-gatherer, becomes chieftain of a clan, reaches the pinnacle of the building, receives the boon (of plunder, death, rape), and then, interestingly, relinquishes himself at the feet of a band of women who have similarly “risen." In the end, the high rise is ruled by a tight matriarchy (note: matrilineal blood lines determined clans in Anasazi tribes as well).

It is not a great leap to grasp modernity as a reincarnation, or at the very least a reconstruction, of the primitive. The triumph of “modern” psychology/Freud’s “id” is the acknowledgement of “primitive” sexual urges. And modern anthropology crystallizes around the study of kinship systems and gift economies. But one character in high rise, astute as we, remarks that the inhabitants are not heading towards “a state of happy primitivism” ruled by the “noble savage,” but are rather moving toward a new age, ruled by “our un-innocent post-Freudian selves…[who] resent never having had a chance to become perverse” (109). It is an age that will go “beyond technology” into a future inhabited by “a well-to-do and well-educated proletariat of the future, boxed up in these expensive apartments with their elegant furniture and intelligent sensibilities, and no possibility of escape” (81). It is the “vertical zoo” (134). And perhaps, if we push Gropius’ “Complete Building” as far as we can, we will arrive at the Total Environment. For Harries, “[a]n environment that is total and complete suggests death” (42). Let us not forget that many inhabitants of the high rise have signed a ninety-nine year lease. Closure—perhaps apprehended as a requisite for unity, for simplicity, is Death. Nothing escapes the system that is the High Rise: garbage, urine, blood, dead bodies. There are few outlets. sexual, mental, physical—Death satisfies all three. If the architect must “wrest a spiritual order from space,” if it must “defend us from the void” (Harries), then what is the void it is defending against?

In the style of Schulze-Fielitz’s “The Space City,” the high rise levitates above ground. Schulze-Fielitz believed that “[t]o regenerate existing cities, structures will stretch above their degenerate sections and cause them to fall into disuse.” The Space City, floating in its ethereal domain, becomes “the structural, systematized, prefabricated, growing or shrinking, adaptable, air-conditioned, multi-purpose space labyrinth that can be fitted together or taken apart at will” (176). We find, again, the primitivism lurking in this dream: the “labyrinth” itself is a mythic figuration that seems to beg the question of whether there is a Minotaur lurking at the heart of the High Rise. But perhaps more importantly, Space City illustrates the aim of modern architecture to get beyond the conception of the building as static. Building was reconceived as “biological process,” a kind of organism, and the Futurists hailed the new architecture’s commitment to an ephemerality that fittingly corresponded to organic life itself. It was no longer a process of erecting monuments and having a monu-mentality, but of generating movable/exchangeable parts. The Space City consists of interchangeable quanta of space that allow for constant reassembling and disassembling. The High Rise, with all of the shuffling of its inhabitants and their cells, presents us with a kind of disassemblage, but we still face the inescapability of its logic. How does the logic of the high rise, projected into the future, come to manifest itself in the social production of space? Does it, true to the "Space City" itself, burst its earthly moorings, propelled by gigantic thrusters into the stratosphere? Is the total environment the man-made space station (the human artifice) positioned against the void of infinite space?

Everyday life in Arcotopia

2008-01-17T10:01:00.000-05:00

At Cordes Junction, a cluster of gas stations and fast food restaurants off of I-17, a tiny, nondescript sign and a winding dirt road mark the passage out of one world and into another. 163 miles north of here is the Grand Canyon; 65 miles south is Phoenix, the fifth-largest city in the U.S., flattening out 1.5 million people over 516 square miles of concrete desert. Arizona's other great architect's utopia, Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin West, can be found here, though Scottsdale's encroaching strip malls and all-in-one condominiums have begun to make it seem like just another gated community. At Arcosanti we can still imagine we are somewhere else. The above photo is of the entrance proper to the dream Paolo Soleri built.

The term 'Arcosanti' is a portmanteau -- 'Ar': Arcology -- 'Cos': cosa, the Italian word for material things -- 'Anti': anti-, or, Arcology against material things. Arcosanti is as self-sufficient as a technological society can be in the middle of the desert.

Soleri's ecological commune is not, importantly, a retrogressive or Luddite ideal. For him and his followers, arcologies are the future, and the design of each building reflects that -- and yet, there is something, if not quite medieval, then close to monastic about life here now. Students come to learn Soleri's design and construction techniques; if they wish to stay, their work subsidizes their living expenses. There are around 100 residents at any one time, with perhaps 40 of them permanent. Permanent residents get PPL insurance and six weeks of paid vacations a year. Rent is approximately $160 a month.

This is the main dining hall for visitors and residents. The circle is Soleri's favored design form, and expresses perhaps better than anything else the arcology's assumed relationship between the city and its environment, the past and the future, and the community with itself.

Aside from construction and giving guided tours, the other major responsibility of Arcosanti residents is the crafting of bronze bells. Bell-making has been Arcosanti's most consistent and longest-running source of income.

Public spaces. Inside the ziggurat-like structure on the right are the VIP suites, periodically rented out to musicians the community hires to perform. John Lennon stayed here once.

Arcosanti apartments are all unique, with larger units distributed according to seniority. Interior decorating is the responsibility of the individual resident.

The main office, with Soleri's residence above.

Green design means: passive heating/cooling system 'powered' by the cement structures' heat absorption; adjustable canopies to control sun exposure; material and water recycling; organically grown food; absence of cars.

The projected population of Arcosanti is 5,000 residents, a single node in a worldwide network of arcologies. With its completion status hovering at around 2%, it is a structure that exists primarily in the noosphere. By rejecting external funding for the project Soleri has ensured it will never be finished in his lifetime. What really exists, now, is a very fancy co-op, and the people seem to like it that way. Its function is more that of a school and the home of a grand vision than it is a reality, the physical marker of an imaginary space.

Arcology This, Arcology That

2008-01-16T22:51:00.000-05:00

We're reading J.G. Ballard's High Rise this week, as well as some architectural manifestos, and we were hoping we would be able to include some of Paolo Soleri's arcological theories as well. Unfortunately, the sinister Duke library conspired against us, managing to lose every single one of his books—and so we turn, hats in hand, to the internets.

Proposed as an alternative to wasteful Western living and especially suburban sprawl, the arcology—an unimaginably immense structure with a huge population density that allows for "total living," an entire city in a single building—is clearly the premier Utopian architecture of our time. I want to draw particular attention to the intriguing dialectic centrally bound up with the imagination of the arcology: a vast supercity that is built in largely or totally undeveloped wilderness.

The arcology concept proposes a highly integrated and compact three-dimensional urban form that is the opposite of urban sprawl with its inherently wasteful consumption of land, energy and time, tending to isolate people from each other and the community. The complexification and miniaturization of the city enables radical conservation of land, energy and resources.

An arcology would need about two percent as much land as a typical city of similar population. Today’s typical city devotes more than sixty percent of its land to roads and automobile services. Arcology eliminates the automobile from within the city. The multi-use nature of arcology design would put living, working and public spaces within easy reach of each other and walking would be the main form of transportation within the city.

An arcology’s direct proximity to uninhabited wilderness would provide the city dweller with constant immediate and low-impact access to rural space as well as allowing agriculture to be situated near the city, maximizing the logistical efficiency of food distribution systems. Arcology would use passive solar architectural techniques such as the apse effect, greenhouse architecture and garment architecture to reduce the energy usage of the city, especially in terms of heating, lighting and cooling. Overall, arcology seeks to embody a “Lean Alternative” to hyper consumption and wastefulness through more frugal, efficient and intelligent city design.

Arcology theory holds that this leanness is obtainable only via the miniaturization intrinsic to the Urban Effect, the complex interaction between diverse entities and organisms which mark healthy systems both in the natural world and in every successful and culturally significant city in history. —arcosanti.org

In combining ecological sustainability with an idealized, hyper-efficient supercity, in crafting a massive superstructure which one would never need to leave (and which therefore there is essentially nothing "outside") the arcology makes two Utopian moves: first, it relocates the imagination of ecotopia from the pastoral to a highly modern, highly technological space, and second it shrinks the national imaginary into a single city while at the same time shrinking the map of the city into a single building.

The world's best hope for a functioning arcology is Arcosanti, Arizona, which has been under construction for almost forty years: In 1970, the Cosanti Foundation began building Arcosanti, an experimental town in the high desert of Arizona, 70 miles north of metropolitan Phoenix. When complete, Arcosanti will house 5000 people, demonstrating ways to improve urban conditions and lessen our destructive impact on the earth. Its large, compact structures and large-scale solar greenhouses will occupy only 25 acres of a 4060 acre land preserve, keeping the natural countryside in close proximity to urban dwellers. Arcosanti is an open project—after just a short workshop, you can become a resident. (Ryan was actually there a few weeks ago, snooping around and taking pictures. I'll let him say more if he likes.)

Another candidate for world's first arcology could be the XSEED 4000, proposed to be the world's tallest structure at 13,000 feet, though it's stalled in the planning and financing stages. (This MetaFilter thread on XSEED from last year is actually where I first heard about arcology.)

So that's the Utopian dream, a dream of ecology and sustainability on the one hand and the usual classless egalitarianism on the other. In a day or so we'll start talking about this in connection with High Rise, in which this dream predictably and perhaps inevitably becomes a hell at precisely the moment when the delicate calibration of services and sustainability begins to breaks down...

Kim Stanley Robinson and Althusser

2008-01-12T19:30:00.000-05:00

Kim Stanley Robinson explaining his thoughts on climate change via Althusser. Somehow this seems like the tail wagging the dog of this course...

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5181659599111751804

Textual Utopianism and More’s Utopia

2008-01-11T10:43:00.000-05:00

Textual utopianism (as opposed to political or hermeneutic utopianism) seeks, in the “space” of the text, to produce--in the reader--a differentiated mental space. In Archaeologies of the Future, Jameson locates utopian space as “an imaginary enclave within real social space” (15). The imaginary can, and has, taken many forms. Jameson tallies a historical inventory of such “mental spaces”: the early court which he interprets as a “kind of mental space” (16); the emergent money form in More’s England; secular science in Bacon; the psychic enclave of Freud’s psychology; physical space in the form of the imagined city (20). Cyberspace ultimately deterritorializes the physical space of the city. It is a spatialized non-space: a mental space in its own right, andfor this reason threatens to supplant the literary text. Having arrived at cyberspace (as Jameson does), it would seem that in our time both the utopian impulse and the utopian form exist in cyber-utopias (i.e. Second Life).

If textual utopia is the desire to delimit a mental space, fashioners of these textual enclaves realize this desire through a strategy of estrangement. The “making strange” of utopia allows for distantiation; it is a way to recover critical distance. The desire for textual utopia conflates with a desire for a “space” in which to critique. Whether it is the imaginary geographies of More or the temporal imaginary of the future (for Bukatman, the future is the only way to achieve distance on a postmodern present marked by its inescapable immanence), utopian space, to quote Jameson, is a “kind of eddy or self-contained backwater within the general differentiation process” (15). In Jameson’s analysis, culture once functioned as the removed mental site in which to conduct diagnoses of societal ills, but the onset of late capitalism diffused culture through its myriad channels of mass media rendering impossible its disentegument. The “pocket of stasis” Jameson describes becomes the haunted space of the intellectual, the site of the university before its total subsumption into finance capitalism.

To turn to More’s Utopia, the etymology of the term, Utopia as “no-place,” already points us toward this quest for textual (mental) space. It is interesting to note the numerous points at which, at least in my English translation, the phrase "no place" is evoked. In Book One, the character More tells Hythloday that his ruminations regarding England are “not unpleasant among friends in familiar communication, but in the council of kings, where great matters be debated and reasoned with great authority, these things have no place” (41). Hythloday continues the conversation, remarking that the customs of the Utopians, “though they were (as they be indeed) better, yet they might seem spoken out of place” (42). Hythloday explains that the Utopians do not suffer from covetousness because they have no fear of lack, thus that “kind of vice among the Utopians can have no place” (64). In terms of pleasure, those who have “a false opinion of pleasure” have “no place left for true and natural delectations” (79). “No-place” becomes mental space, the space in which to enact alternatives. When Hythloday concludes that “there is in no place of the world neither a more excellent people, neither a more flourishing commonwealth” (85), we can posit a double meaning, causing the sentence to read: there is in “ ‘no-place’ of the world.” Utopia, as “no-place,” is the ever-changing “pocket of stasis,” the mental space that allows for contrary thought. This is what More provides, whether he actually believed in all of the tenets of Utopia or not (peeing in golden chamberpots) is beside the point. The very act of writing Utopia, despite its intent, opens this mental “no-place.” The question for our era, then, is: will there continue to be ways of generating these sites?

the uses of more's utopia

2008-01-08T15:54:00.000-05:00

How do we read Thomas More's Utopia? What is it? The progenitor of a new kind of fantasy escapism? A disguised political treatise? A philosophical inquiry into the power of reason to be the guiding force of society a la Plato's Republic? A satire on presumptuous local customs and prejudices in the vein of Swift's Gulliver's Travels? As it is in many ways the first of a quintessentially modern genre, we can understand it to contain in some measure all of the above, an uneasy (and so continually fascinating) hodgepodge of elements.

Early in Archaeologies of the Future, Fredric Jameson argues that the first "objective precondition" for utopia to be imagined is a social structure that permits the individual to believe that he or she holds a complete solution to fixing society's ills. In other words, an individual with a wide view of history who is prone to oversimplification: "the miseries and injustices thus visible must seem to shape and organize themselves around one specific ill or wrong" (12). A root of all evil that must be extracted. Jameson goes on to argue that unlike the pastoral or idyll, or in a different register, the liberal political theory of a Locke or Rawls, Utopia is not a positive vision of a happy society, nor does it include a positive set of proposals or criteria to build one. It has instead a negative, "diagnostic" focus, and any laws or policies it might include are only to be implemented after the fundamental source of societal evil is removed.

For More this evil was money and private property, and that focus Jameson argues runs through nearly all utopian literature to follow -- until the point at which money infuses all of social life, and the genre can only persist in its traditional form by imagining unconvincing replacements for money (i.e. labor tickets). In the Tudor England of More's time, money and enclosure, or the privatization of land and resources formerly held in common, had not yet become omnipresent. It coexisted with a waning autocratic feudalism, the mercantilist expansion of Spain and Portugal, pockets of monastic communalism, and more exotically, the newly discovered 'primitive' communalism of the New World, popularized by famed stealer-of-Columbus's thunder Amerigo Vespucci and his Four Voyages.

It was a transitional period, an interregnum before the modern era of revolution and reform for which England would experience the first birthing pangs. It was not yet possible for anyone to think of 'capitalism' as a world-system or even much of a local system. No current political or economic regime had attained obvious global dominance. The promises of religion and the attendant boasts of the various European powers to universality had the form of figural myth, prone to multiple conflicting interpretations. Though a 'total society' of the sort that would later become a popular target for dystopian criticism, less attention is paid to the ways in which Utopia is not completely determined -- there is freedom of religion (with the notable exception of atheism), limited working hours with most time devoted to "freedom and culture of the mind," and a chapter devoted to the crafty games of realpolitik Utopia plays with its less enlightened neighbors (such as using its store of gold to hire mercenaries and assassins). Indeed, Utopian society can be characterized as a basically pragmatic political structure designed to maximize individual pleasure and distribute it throughout a (supposedly) classless society, though with 'pleasure' defined according to a strict moral philosophy with religion at its core: "they seek support for this hedonistic philosophy from their religion, which is serious and strict, indeed, almost stern and forbidding" (54). The meaning of the Utopians' "good and honest pleasure" is fairly liberal, simply "a delight which does not injure others, which does not preclude a greater pleasure, and which is not followed by pain" (56-57). Though reproduction is heavily regulated, this includes bodily pleasure, the ideal form of which is health, or "the calm and harmonious state of the body" (59). When we juxtapose this humanist, moderated hedonism with the strict and thorough regulation the Utopians employ to uphold it -- the illegality of idleness, slavery as punishment for just about every crime -- we can begin to see the insufficiency of simple stereotypes like 'totalitarian,' 'communist,' 'liberal,' 'monastic,' etc. to understanding Utopia.

This is because, as mentioned earlier, More draws on elements from the many traditions he was familiar with (both ancient and contemporary) to construct this fictional society in an act of creative bricolage. Subtracting money and enclosure from the equation still left him with much to work with. We should keep in mind, for example, that More's moneyless, propertyless society was still colonialist. Indeed, as Ellen Meiksins Wood argues in The Origin of Capitalism and Empire of Capital, More was "the first major English writer to revive the ancient Roman concept of colonia to designate the settlement of foreign lands" (EoC 74), and England was the first European nation of the time to have suggested it (OoC 162). The argument is, in the words of More's character Hythloday, "The Utopians say it's perfectly justifiable to make war on people who leave their land idle and waste, yet forbid the use of it to others who, by the law of nature, ought to be supported from it" (More 45). We can perhaps trace this to the Utopians inordinate hatred of waste (wasted resources, wasted time, etc.), another trope used to justify violence and, yes, even enclosure in the capitalist era. Unlike capitalists and Marxists, the Utopians do not emphasize production or productivity, nor is anything like 'surplus' ever mentioned -- the rejection of excess goes both ways. Spiritual growth seems to demand material equilibrium (and this is not so different from the always-out-of-reach 'equilibrium' theorized/promised by economists since Adam Smith, or the often disastrous 'austerity' measures taken by various financial organizations supposedly to insure it). As Robert Adams refers to it, Utopia is "that strange blend of medieval discipline, humanist freedom, and practical bourgeois acquisitiveness."

Other ambiguities abound. Much effort is taken to portray Utopia not as static and unreachable, but as a living society capable of dialogue and cultural exchange with More's, especially (as one might expect) in its adoption of Christianity from foreign visitors. With a bit of conspiratorial service from his friends, much of More's audience was convinced his story was literally true at the time of the book's publication. Then there is the island of Utopia's crescent moon shape, and the fact that the fifty-four cities of Utopia match the fifty-four boroughs of London, suggesting that Utopia is simply an inversion of England. This tactic of representing Othered, foreign space as an imaginary double of England, culturally and physically set off from its surroundings as the British Isles are set off from the Continent, would become a common trope among English writers well beyond More's immediate imitators, examples including the Happy Valley of Samuel Johnson's Rasselas (1759), and the kingdom of Ijaveo in Eliza Haywood's less well-known Adventures of Eovaai (1741). These pseudo-Oriental tales knowingly used foreign space to imaginatively work through (and conceal from censors) moral and political critiques of English society. Imaginary distance was a tool of critical distance, foreclosing absolute Otherness (all places must be legible to the educated English reader) through the cleverly chosen parallelisms that give the critique its bite.

Part of Utopia's lasting appeal is that it is impossible to tell what More 'really' believed or how 'serious' he was in writing this tale. Of the more recent interpreters, Karl Kautsky (1888) held that More was a proto-socialist, his 'communism' "modern in most of its tendencies, and unmodern in most of its expedients." For R.W. Chambers (1953), More presented a rationally ideal pagan society to encourage his Christian readers to reach their even higher spiritual ideal. Robert Elliott, in The Shape of Utopia (1963) writes the following:

"Two standards can be derived from within Utopia itself. The first is on the level of reform within existing institutions: laws to enforce the rebuilding of devastated farms and towns, the restriction of monopoly, provision of work for the idle, limitations on the power of the rich and the wealth of the king, etc. The second and higher standard is the ideal of the work itself, so to speak: Utopia, the model commonwealth, the only one worthy of the name. But if we go outside Utopia to think of Thomas More's ideal, we must think of one far higher yet. Father Surtz cites the appropriate passage. For More, the ultimate ideal would be 'the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God' (Revelation XXI, 2)."

Jameson also adopts, and furthers, this dialectical view of Utopia. There is creativity and ingenuity in the blueprint, the carefully thought-out details of the Utopian society, but every moment carries with it the force of the initial negation that makes the various laws and regulations possible: the negation of money and enclosure and the power they grant to sinful Pride, or as Jameson puts it, the three-part complex of Gold, Hierarchy, and Pride. For Jameson the the space of Utopia is "an imaginary enclave within real social space...a pocket of stasis within the ferment and rushing forces of social change" (AotF 15). It is a kind of laboratory emerging within times of uncertainty (the recent Utopian revival of which this series of posts is a part suggests the same of our time) where previously impossible connections, now 'allowed' because of the imaginary removal of some real obstruction (or is it real abstraction?), can be made and tested. The problem Jameson's analysis is formulated to solve is: how to imagine a world after or beyond capitalism at the moment of its apparent omnipresence?

This is the view of utopia that we will be wrestling with over the course of our postings here.
But I now wonder if the space of utopia, the space of an imaginative critique/experimental overcoming of the present, can itself be thought of as a positive goal or desire, the real 'content' of the utopian wish -- and whether or not the creation and preservation of this ideologically ambiguous space, from the diegetic plane of the text to the mind of its reader, is precisely what More means when he says "freedom and culture of the mind," stopping short of considering anything, good or ill, that might arise from it, or changing anything, good or ill, that might be going on outside it.

Which humanity has this form of freedom as its dream? What is necessary for its realization?

Week 0: Space, More's Utopia, and Time

2008-01-07T20:00:00.000-05:00

Recent blogospheric polemicists have argued against a politics predicated on Utopia on the grounds (if I may summarize) that it is Utopia's very impossibility that is actually its most salient and essential characteristic:

Utopia: perfect, not meant to be found, impossible, hidden, veiled. It is perfect because it is the place where veils are unnecessary. No place for deception when everything is truth. And this is why it must always be displaced — the term ‘non-place’ suggests the absence of something that is always and essentially present to the speaker, the very conditions of speaking. Utopia as double negation, the (necessary) absence of an (impossible) absence.

I think this is largely right, but it elides somewhat the reason why: what has happened to Utopia since More published is that Utopia has shifted from a spatial concern—an actual place impossible to reach—to a temporal one—a possible future you won't live to see.

It's not simply that More, playfully insisting in the prefatory material it's all really true, locates his Utopia in the New World, a distant location well outside the horizon of experience for nearly everyone alive in his time; nor that someone coughs at the moment Raphael Hythloday reveals the island's exact location (as recounted in Busleyden's letter); nor that the sea is so unnavigable and dangerous around the island that "it seldom chances that any stranger, unless he be guided by a Utopian, can come into this haven" (first page of book 2). It is the inescapable nature of a spatial Utopia like More's, an Atlantis or a Shangri-La, to be actual and yet essentially unreachable—really, to be a kind of a parallel universe in an age when there was still room enough for them to exist on Earth itself.

Following More, however, Utopia has been relocated from a location in space to a moment in time—the future—and accordingly we have exchanged Utopia as a signifying noun for the Utopian, a metaphorizing adjective. Now Utopia is no longer actual—it doesn't yet exist—but it is reachable, at least in some theoretical sense;it is realizable through the actions of those individuals for whom it is still yet a dream. This potential reachability draws its logic not from the travelogue, as did More's Utopia, but instead from the religious promise of Christian eschatology of the Kingdom of Heaven (usually the substitution is as easy as replacing the Christian savior for a new one).

At the risk of splitting my hairs too finely, I'm speaking here of the difference between the alternative and the potential.

The move from a perfect place to a perfect time necessarily interjects the impossible questions of planning and transition that are objected to in the linked post. To get from England to Utopia (or from Earth-1 to Earth-2), you only have to know in which direction to sail; but to get from the present to ecotopia or the Singularity you have to plan—you have to build. Any Utopian project becomes quickly and hopelessly overrun with logistical impossibility, and accordingly the relevant imagined timeline becomes more and more prolonged:it's not going to be easy; it's a long hard slog; it's the struggle of a generation; it's a generational struggle; I may not get there with you, but I believe...

This is where the longing for apocalypse originates, in the desire for a radical break that does all the work for us at once.

But there's a dialectical countermovement to this longing for apocalypse. As change and progress become so slow as to resemble stasis, the long arm of the future and the impossibility of ever reaching it has a second and even more pernicious effect on the imagination of Utopia: in addition to voiding the Utopian of its political power and reducing it instead to the failed dreams of the naive for a "perfect world," it also respatializes Utopia, reinscribing it back inside the present. Our teleological view of history makes this happen. If the Utopian dream of tomorrow can be built out of the present moment, the future and the present begin to telescope, narratively, into a single, indistinguishable motion. If the warm-up pitch begets the pitch begets the swing begets the hit begets the arc of the ball over the infield begets the home run that is the end of history, then in a narrative sense they're all Utopia. To be anywhere along the path to Utopia is to already be as close to paradise on Earth as one could possibly be. Insofar as Utopia is impossible, the present is all we have, and insofar as it is inevitable, the present is still all we have. This is how Utopia becomes respatialized not as parallel world or impossible alternative but the nation as it currently exists—no longer over there but here, now, with ever-more empty and vague gestures towards progress or a better tomorrow. This, I think, is the genesis of American exceptionalism: the temporal potentiality of the city on the hill becomes confused with the nation's spatial actuality, and suddenly the possibility that we might be moving towards Utopia becomes proof we already live in it.

future of culture, future of utopia

2008-01-03T12:52:00.001-05:00

While we put together our initial Utopia posts, allow me to briefly pass along Allen's recommendation of Jameson's recent "Future of Culture, Future of Utopia" lecture inaugurating the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto, with audio hosted at Goodreads and some video at YouTube.

brave new monkey: american futurity

2008-01-02T17:41:00.001-05:00

The southern flank of the culturemonkey revolutionary guard—and the only two of us who have actually posted anything to the site yet, not that we don't love Jacob no matter how little he posts—will be taking an independent study this semester on American and Anglospheric representations of the future, focusing on the concepts of utopia, dystopia, and heterotopia in science fiction on one axis and prediction vs. prescription on another. Joining us in this study will be a new, fourth culturemonkey, klarr, who has already joined traxus on the internets in his recent altDurham project and who will surely get around to accepting her Blogger invitation one of these days.

Most importantly, we're going to use culturemonkey as a central part of the course, which means this site will be much more active than we kept it last semester, with multiple posts per week focusing along the lines of the syllabus we've devised for ourselves:

Week 0: Utopia
Sir Thomas More’s Utopia

Week 1: Building the Future
Marinetti, “Futurist Manifesto”/ architecture manifestos
H.G. Wells, The Discovery of the Future, more
J.G. Ballard, High Rise
ARCology
Andrew Ross, The Celebration Chronicles
FILM: 2001

Week 2: The Past as Anti-Future
Samuel Butler, Erewhon
George Stewart, Earth Abides
Wyndham Lewis
Bob Black, The Abolition of Work (excerpts)
Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (excerpts)
FILM: The Quiet Earth

Week 3: The Future of Socialism
Jack London, The Iron Heel
A critical essay that discusses William Morris’s News From Nowhere and Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward and their influence
”Proletarian Literature” from William Empson’s Some Versions of Pastoral
Brook Farm

Week 4: Automation
Marx, Taylor, Ford
Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano
FILMS: THX-1138, Brazil

Week 5: The Nuclear Sublime
Fate of the Earth (selections)
Nevil Shute, On the Beach
Sontag, Baudrillard
Science Fiction: The Gernsback Years (selections)
FILMS: Dr. Strangelove, Atomic Cafe, etc

Week 6 The Post-Apocalyptic
Philip K. Dick, Dr. Bloodmoney
J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World
FILM: Zardoz

Week 7: Race Fantasies / Race Wars
Joe Haldeman, The Forever War
Excerpts from Lindqvist, A History of Bombing
Science Fiction: The Gernsback Years (selections)
Hugo Gernsback and the Century of Science Fiction (selections)
Lovecraft, “Whisperer in the Dark”
Walter Mosley, “The Nig in Me”
FILMS: Planet of the Apes, Starship Troopers

Week 8: Race and Outer Space: Afrofuturism
Science Fiction: The Gernsback Years (selections)
George Schuyler, “The Rise of the Black Internationale”
Marcus Garvey on Pan-Africanism, “The Black Star Line”
Music/lyrics from Sun Ra, George Clinton (P-Funk Mythology), Lee “Scratch”
Perry, Cybotron, Afrika Bambaataa, and DJ Spooky
One essay each from Mark Dery and DJ Spooky (Paul D. Miller)
“Afrotech and Outer Spaces,” Art Journal, vol. 60, no. 3
FILM: Space Is The Place

Week 9: Dreaming the Future / Future History / Time Travel and Alt. Universes
Olaf Stapleton, Starmaker
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time
Theodore Sturgeon, “Microcosmic God”
Asimov, Foundation series
H.G. Wells, “The Shape of Things to Come,” The Time Machine
Lovecraft
H.R. Haldeman
Larry Niven, “All the Myraid Ways”

Week 10: The Triple Revolution
“The Triple Revolution”: the cybernation revolution of increasing automation; the weaponry revolution of mutually assured destruction; and the human rights revolution.
Philip Jose Farmer, Riders of the Purple Wage
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
William Gibson, The Gernsback Continuum
Alvin Toffler, Future Shock
No Future
FILMS: Rollerball, Logan’s Run

Week 11: Heterotopia
Samuel Delaney, Triton
Foucault, “Heterotopia”

Week 12: Feminism, Reproduction, and Anti-Reproduction
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland
Joanna Russ, The Female Man
Ocatavia Butler, "Bloodchild"
Tiptree, “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?”
Tiptree, “Love Is the Plan, the Plan is Death”
Candace Jane Dorsey, “Learning about Machine Sex”

Week 13: Environmental Control
Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake
Starhawk, The Fifth Sacred Thing
Ursula K. LeGuin, Always Coming Home
Marge Piercy, He, She, It
James Tiptree, Jr. "The Last Flight of Doctor Ain" (1969)
Chapters from Silent Spring
FILM: Safe

Week 14: Colonizing Space
Kim Stanley Robinson, Mars Trilogy
Gerard O’Neill, The High Frontier

Week 15: Cybercapitalism and Postmodern Empire
Bruce Sterling, “Cyberpunk in the 90s”
Gibson, “Burning Chrome”
Gibson, Pattern Recognition
Bruce Sterling, Islands in the Net
H.G. Wells (“World Brain,” “New World Order,” maybe others)
Fukuyama, “The End of History”
Hardt/Negri, Empire, Multitudes (selections)
FILMS: Star Trek, Ender’s Game, Hackers

Week 16: Cyberpunk: Replication, Digitality, and the Singularity
Harraway, Cyborg Manifesto and later renunciation
Pat Cadigan, Synners
Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age
Greg Egan, Permutation City
Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep?
FILM: Blade Runner
Charles Stross, Accelerando
Isaac Asimov, “The Last Question”
Greg Bear, “Blood Music”
Vernor Vinge, “True Names”
Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near (selections)

Week 17: Future of Death
Philip K. Dick, Dr. Futurity
The Long Emergency (selections)
FILM: Children of Men
FILM: The Future of Food and The End of Suburbia

Each week's major text is in bold. So come back soon for a post or two on More's Utopia, and we'll run from there into architecture and Ballard, and on and on, into the future...

Whose Master? Sermon for Capitalmas Eve

2007-12-24T10:52:00.000-05:00

On this Christmas Eve, Americans are having trouble paying off their credit cards, with 30-day-late accounts rising 26% to $17.3 billion and defaults rising 18% to nearly a billion. There's a reason for all this, and you can find it in Bill Moyer's PBS interview with Benjamin Barber (via MeFi), a Galbraithian analysis of capitalism's production not of products but of needs themselves:

As a society becomes increasingly affluent, wants are increasingly created by the process by which they are satisfied.... Wants thus come to depend on output. In technical terms, it can no longer be assumed that welfare is greater at an all-round higher level of production than at a lower one. It may be the same. The higher level of production has, merely, a higher level of want creation necessitating a higher level of want satisfaction.

The orgy of Christmas shopping that continues unabated today—to be followed by deep-discount post-Christmas sales on Wednesday, and on and on—is only the clearest proof that this is what capitalism has become in the post-industrial West and, increasingly, elsewhere as well. Barber thinks the productive energies of capitalism might somehow be harnassed, through willpower and ethical living, for better ends, but I'm much more skeptical that capitalism can ever really move in a direction other than the one it has. What we need is a new logic, a new organizing principle. Call it sustainability or call it permaculture, call it environmental Marxism or environmental capitalism if you want, it's all the same to me—what's important is that the world figure out some way to stop doing the things capitalism demands it must. We have to stop consuming everything, resources, the future, ourselves.

BILL MOYERS: When politics permeates everything we call it totalitarianism. When religion permeates everything we call it theocracy.

BENJAMIN BARBER: Right.

BILL MOYERS: But when commerce pervades everything, we call it liberty.

Merry Christmas.

Stop the Planet of the Apes, I Want to Get Off

2007-12-04T09:44:00.000-05:00

1973: A NASA spacecraft hurtling through a Hasslein curve back in time from the far future splashes down off the California coast. Instead of humans, the capsule contains three superevolved apes. All three are quickly killed by the U.S. government, but not before the female's child has been swapped for a present-day chimp.

2007: Young chimps are able to beat human college students in memory tests.

One memory test included three 5-year-old chimps who'd been taught the order of Arabic numerals 1 through 9, and a dozen human volunteers.

They saw nine numbers displayed on a computer screen. When they touched the first number, the other eight turned into white squares. The test was to touch all these squares in the order of the numbers that used to be there.

Results showed that the chimps, while no more accurate than the people, could do this faster.

One chimp, Ayumu, did the best. Researchers included him and nine college students in a second test.

This time, five numbers flashed on the screen only briefly before they were replaced by white squares. The challenge, again, was to touch these squares in the proper sequence.

When the numbers were displayed for about seven-tenths of a second, Ayumu and the college students were both able to do this correctly about 80 percent of the time.

But when the numbers were displayed for just four-tenths or two-tenths of a second, the chimp was the champ. The briefer of those times is too short to allow a look around the screen, and in those tests Ayumu still scored about 80 percent, while humans plunged to 40 percent.

Full paper here.

UPDATE: We now have video footage from the experiment:

we're not lazy, we're on strike

2007-11-23T21:54:00.000-05:00

As you may have noticed, culturemonkey has been on a short hiatus. Like our capuchin monkey brothers, we have evolved the ability to strike.¹ We won't come back until the powers that be end this semester once and for all.²

¹ Link courtesy of Infinite Thought.
² We may be back before this happens.

You have our demands.

You have one week.³

³ Not counting the paper-writing period.

1973 (eat drink and be merry for tomorrow we die)

2007-10-29T10:28:00.001-04:00

1973—the primal scene of late capitalism in America. It is the year of the oil shock, the year America withdraws from Vietnam. It is the first year of the closed frontier, the first year in a decade without a planned manned mission to the moon. It is the year of Watergate, the year of the Endangered Species Act. It is the year the World Trade Center opens and the year the Sears Tower is built: as high as America will build. 1973 is, in short, the moment of confrontation with limit, with the impossibility both of the sci-fi future we thought we were promised and of continuing along the path of Fordist, production-oriented capitalism.

The rest of the decade, the bad '70s, malaise and stagflation, is the depressed consequence of this recognition—and the "solution" was Reaganism (and its successor Bushism), the absurd denial of limit in the face of all evidence, a psychological phenomenon propped up by empty symbolic victories, irrational exuberance and bubble economies in trading markets, and profligate spending and debt on the level of both consumer and nation. This is the true moment of birth for consumer society, of carpe diem credit-card capitalism.

This is the mode that has dominated the last thirty years of American life, and now it is ending, a new moment of crisis which expresses itself as a return of the repressed, which is to say a return of the limits of 1973: a new energy crisis, a new liquidity crisis, a new Vietnam, a renewed awareness of environmental crisis, and the reaching of the absolute mathematical limits of how much debt people/the nation can possibly take on.

We've borrowed everything we can from the future; there's nothing more to take. We have to change the way we live.

monkey revolt

2007-10-22T00:00:00.000-04:00

In what has for centuries been the world's model for the peaceful co-existence of humans and their simian cousins, recent years have seen human-monkey relations go from bad:

Thousands of monkeys are invading government buildings in Delhi, forcing employees to arm themselves with sticks and stones in case they are attacked.
At least 10,000 monkeys are creating havoc in the Indian capital by barging into government offices, stealing food, threatening bureaucrats and even ripping apart valuable documents.
The increasingly aggressive animals swing effortlessly between the offices of the defence, finance and external affairs ministries and some have even been spotted in the prime minister's office.

"They are moving in very high security areas," says Defence Ministry officer, IK Jha.
...

"I am sometimes faced with groups of monkeys, big huge looking fellows," says government employee Surekha Rao.
"What I do is make some noise with my shoes so the monkey moves away."

to worse:

The deputy mayor of the Indian capital Delhi died on Sunday after being attacked by a horde of wild monkeys.

What is causing this unrest? The multiple consequences of a steady population increase, the effects of which have only been intensified by the very moral code that kept the peace between the species in times past:

Killing the animals is not an option because monkeys are a sacred symbol in Hinduism, India's main religion.
The authorities used to capture the monkeys and ship them to neighbouring states, but this is no longer possible because other areas are now being over populated with monkeys.

But as we know, the monkeys are not the only ones with a population problem:

Animal rights activists say the main problem is not the rising number of monkeys but the growing population of humans.
"We have encroached on their homelands, we have taken away their fruits, we have reduced their water sources and we are trapping them from their home range, from their forests, so they are coming to urban areas," says rights activist Iqbal Malik.

Overpopulation, deforestation, the ravenous overconsumption of some natural resources combined with the careless waste of others -- aka the daily consequences of modern society -- not only affect both humans and monkeys, but often in the same ways. The abandonment of agriculture and the rush to the city, which has long been a popular pasttime in Europe and North America, is catching on in the modernizing Asian nations as well. Civilization, apparently, demands it. Like humans, monkeys have been forced to adapt to the changing times. They have been forced by humans.

Before 1978, India was the largest exporter of rhesus monkeys for biomedical research. The monkey excess was simply rounded up and sold off to feed the needs of science, of which the U.S. was the biggest beneficiary. When evidence mounted that the U.S. military was violating a trade agreement banning non-medical experimentation by subjecting monkeys to nuclear testing, Hindu morality (and respect for the law) demanded that India close up shop. But the damage had been done.

A haphazard trapping of 'individuals' from troops led to what Malik calls "chaotic fissioning" where monkeys later formed single units for safety. This resulted in the subgroups requiring more space.

Psychologically, they changed. "Suckling youngsters separated from their mothers became depressed, while the mothers got more aggressive," says Malik. And dwindling forest cover encouraged them to move to towns, where abundant food would help them breed well.

The monkeys became modern individuals. Rootless, alienated from its traditional ways of life, the new monkey yearns for an ever more open country even as urban life becomes a practical necessity. Precluded from social advancement and material comfort by a Janus-faced racism that gives charity with one hand while signing forced relocation orders with the other, the modern monkey is constantly the victim of quiet attempts to keep him out of sight by a society that worships stone effigies of monkey heroes and prays to monkey gods.

All these attempts have failed, leading to de-institutionalization -- "Malik also attributes the increased monkey attacks on humans to the current practice of laboratories to release monkeys in urban areas at the behest of 'some NGOs'. 'Clearly they are not healthy monkeys, and they are essentially the ones that are biting people,' she says" -- indefinite internment, sterilization, terror campaigns (attempts to chase the rhesus away using the langur, a bigger monkey), and unless the problem can be solved soon, mass extermination.

The humanlike monkey god Hanuman, one of the most popular Hindu deities, is celebrated for his quick wit, courage, and heroism. But now he has been joined by a new breed of monkey-man:

Mass hysteria is sweeping across India's capital after reports of a superpowered monkey man, with hairy body and sharp metal claws, attacking people as they sleep on their roofs in the sweltering heat.

...

As the cry goes up in the night in one neighbourhood, people sleeping
atop adjacent houses begin screaming. Some jump from two-storey
buildings, fracturing their bones as they escape the phantom in the
darkness.

Fifty such attacks were reported last night and 16 people were injured,
the Delhi police control room said today. One man was killed when he
jumped off the roof of his house during a purported attack, screaming,
''The monkey has come!''

In medieval European legend, the figure of the werewolf stands for the man excluded from the town, or the community that grants him the status 'man.' As Giorgio Agamben puts it, the werewolf is "the threshold passage between nature and politics, animal world and human world," a mythological representative of the always-shifting political boundary between animal and human from which the politics of Western sovereignty derives: the power to determine the law by its very exception. Elsewhere he remarks fearfully that "the total humanization of the animal coincides with a total animalisation of man." Could the appearance of the monkey-man, in the midst of all this interspecies turmoil, be Hanuman's terrifying reminder of the difference between monkey and man, repressed for years by the discourse of primatology?

The fact that the monkey-man is also a cyborg, equipped not only with metal claws but also according to some reports able to turn invisible, increase its strength, and break locks through the use of "buttons on its chest" (see 'monkey-man' link), may provide a clue as to what such an old-fashioned interpretation is missing. We know by now that a human is not necessarily a man. But is a monkey necessarily an animal? Is our knowledge of monkeys any more conclusive than our knowledge of 'man?' What happens when the monkey modernizes along with the man?

early thoughts towards a dissertation of some type

2007-10-21T19:20:00.000-04:00

According to USDA statistics, only approximately 2 million Americans are still directly involved in agricultural production, and of those people only 10% of the average farm family’s income comes directly from farming. As the link notes, there are as many architects and engineers as farmers, and nearly twice as many people play World of Warcraft online as farm for a living; there are four times as many people living in New York City alone. As the urban population grows and the rural population shrinks, with more and more people managing wider stretches of increasingly disappearing farmland, capitalism develops a new flashpoint for crisis. Technological advances have allowed for a relatively small number of people to feed hundreds of millions, but these same innovations place increased pressure on what few food-producing areas remain. Rather than merely threatening local populations, the deterritorialization of agriculture means that cyclical variations in weather patterns can now threaten the entire (inter)national population, and disease and insect infestation can wreck far more havoc than ever before. There is a typically Marxist paradox here: technological advances in the last two hundred years have made food production easier and more reliable, which has in turn allowed the population to expand to the very limits of sustainability—such that relatively small disruptions in the food supply can now threaten severe hardship, especially in the Global South.

This same flashpoint, once identified, can be found across late capitalism. Consider for instance the current severe drought in the American southeast, a situation exacerbated by irrational patterns of development and population distribution that did not take into account infrastructure demands; the engineering marvels our advanced technology allows us to accomplish carry with them an increased interconnectivity and interdependency (and thus vulnerability and proclivity to crisis). The mechanized production we depend on requires such massive daily replenishment that temporary local slowdowns are felt across the system; a single hurricane in New Orleans causes gasoline prices to shoot up nationwide (never to come back down) and the failure of a single power station in Ohio causes a blackout across the entire Northeast.

Indeed, advanced social productivity as a whole would seem to hang upon a single loose nail, global oil production, which according to the most recent figures seems likely to have peaked in late 2006. As of yet there is no cheap energy alternative to oil, and the powers-that-be do not seem especially concerned about finding one (we are assured instead that something will be invented at the last minute to save us all). These phantasmagoric technologies of free energy and total automation, always just around the corner, would seem to be based in science-fiction stories of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and bear little relation to science as we know it today. If anything, we seem actually to be rapidly approaching the absolute physical limits of battery storage and processing power, barriers past which we are unlikely to be able to progress.

Meanwhile, the oil age has grown the population from one billion people in 1800 to seven billion people today, and they will all require food, clothing, and shelter. Without some alternative to oil to drive the mechanized agriculture we now depend on for survival there will be unprecedented, almost unimaginable material suffering across the globe.

It would seem to me, then, that there is ample room now for a reconsideration of Marxism along environmental lines and the creation of a new teleological trajectory for capitalism, one which does not reach its liberatory apotheosis in the separation of production from exploitation but instead self-immolates in the apocalyptic extinguishment of production altogether. Moreso than revolution, the dystopia of de-development we now face strikes me as the real logical consequence of the capitalism, which can never plan ahead, and which can never say “enough.”

preliminary thoughts about The Darjeeling Limited (with spoilers)

2007-10-15T18:55:00.000-04:00

The Darjeeling Limited would seem to close the book on the first major period of Wes Anderson's career, bringing the themes of grief, nostalgia, obsession, trauma, and recovery first explored in Rushmore to a kind of resolution. In a movie whose wonderful first scene—in which one of Anderson's standby players, Bill Murray, misses the train and thus has to sit the movie out—demands that we view it in the context of Anderson's other films, the final shot of the brothers casting off the luggage of their dead father, which they have been carrying with them the entire movie, would suggest Anderson's casting off his own deeply loved thematic baggage as well.

In Anderson's other movies, moving past one's grief has usually required consolation (one way or another) in the form of a psychic substitute. In Rushmore, Max's mourning for his mother is psychologically transferred into obsessive devotion, first to Rushmore itself and later to Miss Cross; at the end of the movie he seems able finally to break free of his grief and enter into a healthier sort of relationship with both Grover Cleveland High and Margaret Yang only as Miss Cross becomes (through her relationship with pseudo-father Herman Blume) not a potential lover but a kind of imaginary mother. In The Royal Tenenbaums, the lingering trauma so present in the lives of every member of the family (especially Chas's) is displaced and resolved by a semi-miraculous last-minute end-of-life reconciliation with a changed Royal. In The Life Aquatic, our usual position is interestingly reversed as the child (Ned) who recovers his lost parent (Stevesie) is subsequently taken from the parent, who himself achieves a kind of reapproachment with the universe through his relationship with surrogate children, Klaus's nephew Werner and Jane's infant son. (Think, too, of Ned's ghost in the crow's nest.)

Not so in Darjeeling. The brothers can acquire no adequate substitute for their lost father, and the mother who has betrayed them, once hunted down, simply betrays them again, sneaking out and vanishing in the middle of the night. The redemptive jaguar shark of Aquatic is here replaced with a man-eating tiger, forever lurking in the shadows, haunting everything.

No one and no thing can return to the Whitman brothers what they have lost, or rather what they have always been denied in the first place—and so they have no other choice but to just leave it all behind them.

More overtly comedic than any of Anderson's other films, with more than a few surprisingly slapsticky exchanges, Darjeeling is in other ways the most overtly tragic, facing head-on nostalgia's unforgiving brutality: our scars don't heal, the dead don't rise, the things we have lost do not return to us. But this brutality is matched in the same breath with a fuller vision of what redemption must mean, one that promises us not a return or replacement of the thing we lack but the ability to live our lives without it.

Ben said a few weeks ago that this is either Anderson's worst movie or else his second-best, and I think that's more or less correct—I just don't think I can say which it is until I've seen it a few more times. In any event I found the movie to be fantastic, and am utterly perplexed by the lukewarm "I guess this is all right if you like Wes Anderson" reviews. In particular the reviewers who have bemoaned the movie's supposed lack of character, resolution, and higher-order meaning strike me as embarrassingly, transcendentally wrong. The film is the culminating stroke of Anderson's entire career thus far, the deepest and most full-throttle exploration of his trademark themes; what we get from him next will surely be a very different sort of film, a rupture with the past, which like any other rupture is exciting, inevitable, and something to be deeply mourned.

my life at the nyff

2007-10-12T20:14:00.000-04:00

Sadly, culturemonkey's coverage of the 45th New York Film Festival is a bit of a joke. This year featured a number of anticipated films, many screened for the first time in North America, a few world premieres, and enough 'local' filmmakers for the press to announce the return of the New York Auteur. For a general overview of all the films, Slant Magazine's capsule reviews are almost finished. Reverse Shot and has several full-length features up, and House Next Door has a sidebar full of posts. Your favorite film blog, or print magazine if you still read those, no doubt has a roughly equal amount of relevant content (assuming it's any good). But we are not real film critics. We are intellectuals. That said, if you would prefer we do some real festival coverage in the future, we are open to funding proposals and travel deals.

While I had a chance to see two of the NYFF's big three -- The Darjeeling Limited, No Country For Old Men, and Persepolis, I passed them all up in favor of three lesser-known films for reasons that were entirely contingent (of course, this being the NYFF, 'lesser-known' just means they won't play at your local AMC). Spoilers follow.

1. Go-Go Tales dir. Abel Ferrara

As it happens, Steven Shaviro saw this in Montreal months ago and has already said most of what is worth saying about it (Dennis Lim in CinemaScope also loved it at Cannes, the link is to a short review and very good interview). So I'd rather focus on the celebrity antics that makes seeing movies at expensive festivals that one could just as easily download remain worthwhile. We saw it at the Walter Reade, the best theater for this sort of thing as it's large enough for a good-sized crowd but small enough for intimacy. The time was midnight. Abel Ferrara came out, totally hammered, and said a lot of things that were incomprehensible, a few of them into the microphone. Willem Defoe saved him from himself with a smooth, professional introduction ("I'd like to thank," etc.), smiled -- which was just as creepy from two hundred yards away as it is in close-up -- then disappeared. As the lights went down, Ferrara, after realizing that there was a possibility tickets had been oversold (the reserved cast & crew seats weren't roped off until late), yelled out, "You can come outside with me and we'll play cards!" Someone yelled at him to be quiet. The first shot in the film was a close overhead pan of Willem Defoe sleeping and I thought of how seeing movies right after seeing the actors makes the experience seem less impersonal, even when you think you're too jaded for that to happen. As the closing credits wrapped up, Ferrara came back up on the stage while it was still dark and said more imcomprehensible things, then left. The first wave of audience members made their exit. Sylvia Miles (who played the bitchy Noo Yawk landlady) was eventually coaxed onto the stage, where she sat, legs swinging off the edge, and asked the mostly incommunicative 2am crowd in her fantastically shrill, cigarette-stained voice, "Well? Does anyone have any questions? About the movie?" After a little while Grace Jones (who has several songs on the soundtrack) appeared , having "just flew in," and sat next to her. I almost didn't recognize her because she doesn't look like an alien anymore. They had great hats. A few other cast and crew wandered up to the stage to hang out, and as the night (and the audience) finally wound down to the dregs, Miles made sure everyone had a ride home: "People from my floor are here, so I know I'm getting home OK. But I don't know about all of you people." Thanks, Sylvia. In a very real way this quirk-heavy closing reception was an extension of the movie's portrayal of eccentrics, washouts, and outcasts struggling to survive in a dysfunctional showbiz community plagued by the external pressures of capitalism and their inability to deal with them. The endless struggle of iconoclasm and its rewards: brief moments of glory, and perhaps more importantly the moments of camaraderie and collective affirmation of the absurd in the midst of individual suffering and humiliation. Though certainly romanticized, the film never stiffs the audience on realism; the portrayal is romanticized but not glorified, if that makes any sense. Its somewhat old-fashioned, feel-good vibe almost overshadows the fact that the setting is a nudie club, but if this minor detail means anything it's that the overall economic, moral, and aesthetic situation, in this present of ours where Show Biz is All Biz, has steadily grown a lot 'worse.' At the same time, the absence of any real glamor or hope of financial security is really the precondition of its irony-free exuberance, and this is the difference between Go-Go Tales and Showgirls, perhaps even between New York go-go dancing and Vegas stripping. It's telling that to avoid triggering cynical rejection in the audience Ferrara has to undercut Defoe's rabble-rousing manifesto with the last shot, as if we the festival audience have grown simply incapable of 'buying' a straightforwardly happy ending. Is this where three decades of irony-laden ennui and anti-human pessimism drops us off? The return of hope, sentiment, nostalgia for Good Times?

2. Paranoid Park, dir. Gus Van Sant

Gus Van Sant has a thing for teenage boys. There, I said it. While some might take this as an opportunity to get all moralistic about perversion and exploitation, I submit that sometimes an honest sexual attraction to the subject is necessary to avoid exploitative treatment (this gets at the difference between sexual desire and objectification, but now is neither the time nor the place). And all three films in Van Sant's 'slow cycle' -- Elephant, Last Days, and now Paranoid Park -- manage to portray the world of high school-aged youth in a way that is hyper-idealized but not false, and most importantly not condescending, not using their specific milieu to achieve or say something else (though the material is there for other things to be said). Last Days might seem like a digression as it is ostensibly about Kurt Cobain, but Kurt Cobain had his biggest effect on high school-age youth, and this is the perspective the film takes, more about his mythology than his life. In a culture where 'adolescent' is an insult more or less equated with corporate Hollywood's worst impulses, for a middle-aged man to tell sympathetic stories about teen angst is probably more difficult than telling them about children. Helmed by Christopher Doyle, the cinematography in Paranoid Park develops an ethereal, even pastoral vision of a Portland occupied by a group of skateboarders shuttling back and forth between high school and the eponymous skate park. The flat affectlessness of Van Sant's young male protagonists this time around is countered by snippets of the lead's letter to an imagined female audience in the form of a confessional, posing throughout the film as interior monologue. The dialogue has a clipped, perfunctory feel to it that suggests it too is a part of the written account. Unlike Elephant and Last Days, Paranoid Park takes a subjective, written document as its basis, rather than an 'objective,' sensationalized media event; also, this document is fictional, a novel. This results in a more conventional plot that allows for the most direct presentation of what Van Sant has been doing all this time -- transforming traumatic events into visual and aural fantasias that, by distancing us from any logic imposed by adult authority figures (journalists, police, teachers, psychologists, novelists, etc.), allow the viewer to experience it in a safe space free of bombardment by media cliches, in some sense rediscovering objectivity. That this experience tends to be private and incommunicable is Paranoid Park's chief thematic concern. Alex, the protagonist/narrator, grapples with his involvement in the death of a security guard whose gruesome end splits the film in half, causing him to go about his life fractured, numbed, by a secret he can't tell. Here we are confronted with the paradox of the internalized trauma -- Doubling as a stand-in for the viewer, Alex is only able to maintain a real connection to himself (his emotions, his safety, his identity) in the face of horror by keeping his memory of it locked away from others, thus alienating himself from the rest of the world; and yet this secret grants him a unique fascination, the allure that makes him a subject for the camera and its audience. The fantasy of both the film and novel is that by expressing himself in writing, then destroying it (as he does in a bonfire near the end of the film), he can arrive at a sort of compromise. Van Sant exposes the truth of so-called adolescence here, at the point where its 'immaturity' presents us with what at times seems like the only practical solution to the mediasphere's insatiable urge to erase every human tragedy with sensationalist platitudes. In the Q&A following the screening, Van Sant called Paranoid Park a "Young Adult film," and this seems like the most appropriate genre heading to me.

3. Blade Runner, The Final Cut, dir. Ridley Scott

Blade Runner really doesn't need anything else to be written about it. Probably the film most discussed by academics ever made, every crowded frame bears the seeds of a thousand dissertations. All the hot topics are here: free will, artificial intelligence, the postmodern city, noir and pastiche, psychoanalysis, the list goes on. It's also Ridley Scott's last really good film, after which he made nothing but overproduced shit with the possible minor exceptions of Black Rain and Thelma and Louise. It makes sense in retrospect that Scott's one major innovation over the content of Philip K. Dick's novel was to make dystopia sexy, a great service for future filmmakers/advertisers/propagandists who needed to sell people on a way of life that regularly produced violence, misery, urban blight, and environmental catastrophe. Dick gave us a comedy, Scott a tragedy, and it's interesting to reflect on which treatment criticized its subject and which glorified it. A discussion of the changes in the final (?) cut can be found here, along with still more debate about whether or not Deckard is a replicant. The changes are minor and mostly cosmetic, the transfer to HD bringing out the vibrancy of the colors but the increased clarity making a few shots look a little empty (only in comparison to all the other ones). Is Deckard a replicant? I'm going to be boring and say the film is inconsistent, though I've always thought the answer lay in Goff's memorable parting shot: "It's too bad she won't live! But then again who does!" We're only human in our dreams (this is also works as an answer to the ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi's famous butterfly dream). At any rate, it was nice to see it at the Ziegfield.

Appendix: Eastern Promises dir. David Cronenberg

This wasn't at the NYFF but we saw it shortly afterward, and this rather presumptuous post could always use more filler. Following a dispiriting trend, much has been written about this film as well, so I will instead pick out a few elements that played to my interests. Or rather, the point where all elements converge: Viggo Mortensen. Why so fascinating? Because, as in History of Violence, the film is so structurally and aesthetically neat by virtue of Mortensen's character, his performance, his incredible presence, and yet at the same time he is the one thing that remains out of place. In Promises, Cronenberg/Mortensen start us off with the familiar archetype of the good soldier. Preternaturally competent, the good soldier has no history, no personality, no 'inner life.' He seems to exist only to obey the commands of a given organization, even though the reasons why he might do so, if given, are always arbitrary. That organization is usually shown to be corrupt, and by reflecting its betrayed ideals in a purer form he provokes a conflict between them. A fairly recent example is Forest Whittaker's character in Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai, whose unexplained adherence to the samurai code first brings him into submission to the Italian mafia, then turns them against each other. What Cronenberg seizes on in Promises is that the good soldier's blind submission to corrupt authority in some mysterious way both feminizes him and intensifies his power/attraction. Nikolai (Mortensen) is the object of desire for everyone in and outside of the film. The closeted Kirill wants to fuck him, his father the mafia boss Semyon wants to use him, and it seems like everyone except Naomi Watts' female lead wants to see him naked. Nikolai's body is a mirror, though an idealized one, as its images are seared into his flesh in the mafia's own language (much in the same way as his sculpted physique reflects an ideal masculine body image to the audience), as a symbol of his might (marks on his knees signify that he "will kneel before no man") and his subjection. In the initiation scene, he is forced to renounce his parentage; he will have no history, no identity other than the one written on his body. Comparisons can be made to Cronenberg's other male heroes, both empowered and enslaved by technological remaking. In Promises, masculinity itself is a technology. Every man is a kind of cyborg. But when Nikolai is revealed to have ulterior motives, we see how his very presence subverts the traditionalist, patriarchal order of the Russian mob at every turn, turning son against father, etc. When we learn he is an undercover cop, this at once valorizes all the suffering he receives (and distributes) and puts the lie to the shared fantasy of technofetishists and manly men: that the whole truth of a man/machine can be reducible to his apparent actions and physical form, that he can be wholly externalized, turned inside out. A real man, like a real machine, should be a reliable (predictable) tool. The seductive power of this fantasy and Nikolai's mastery of it brings about the mafia's downfall. As soon as Semyon thinks he can mediate his conflict with his son through Nikolai, he opens the way for Western moral authority to reassert itself. What is often interpreted as the feminization of the male hero in Promises and Cronenberg's earlier work consists of two properties: an appearance that suggests he can be rewritten at will (the power of seduction), and the mysterious way in which his motivations exceed all rewriting (the power of deception). This actually brings it closer to Marx's definition of money than any traditional notion of femininity. Like money, Nikolai dissolves the old rules of the Eastern mafia subculture and restores the rules of money's true owners, Western civil society. The single, sterile woman (Watts) is given an orphaned Russian baby and restored to motherhood. Semyon is removed and Nikolai (apparently) put in his place. But in the ambiguous final shot, the recurring motif of Russian peasant authenticity -- the voice over diary narration of the baby's dead immigrant mother -- is repeated again, reminding us that all the main characters are still of Russian origin and keeping alive the tension between East and West. Like many, I found the diary to be the weakest aspect of the film, but it does highlight the point at which the film's 'inner' logic -- what I've tried to outline here -- exceeds its narrative and aesthetic rigor. Along with motherhood and the dominance of the Free World, conflict too is restored, if only for ambiguity's sake.

reification and dystopia in mass culture

2007-10-08T13:20:00.000-04:00

The politcal efficacy of the imagination of dystopia—historical or fictional—has an inverse relationship to representational realism. Through the power of narrative identification, any dystopia that is realist is quickly, hopelessly reified—and becomes reduced to a kind of "cautionary tale" that in fact fails to caution us at all. As long as we can avoid the surface appearance of Nazi Germany, we think we avoid fascism; as long as people can still speak their minds, we avoid Ingsoc; as long as the robots haven't taken over yet, our relationship with technology is on track. Realist dystopias calcify; they lose all symbolic flexibility and are able to stand in only for themselves.

Worse still, over time these dystopias transmogrify into a kind of wish-fulfillment, a survivalist Imaginary with a perfect enemy to revolt against, a playground where raised world-historical stakes and Manichean binarism provide an opportunity for heroism and sacrifice of the sort we feel unable to locate in real life—which is to say that through reification dystopia most improbably becomes a kind of Utopia.

Whether reification calcifies or transmogrifies, we lose our grip on what was really at stake all along: the dystopian character of the now.

If dystopia is to function as an imaginary for cultural and political critique, then it can only do so by resisting reification and thereby by resisting realism itself—which is why Terry Gilliam's Brazil is easily the most powerful American dystopia of the twentieth century. From its cartoonish retrofuturism and its periodic bursts of slapstick comedy to its absurd dream sequences and deliberately schizophrenic soundtrack, Brazil's surreality functions as a prophylactic against reification and preserves the horror of the film's terrible modernity even twenty-two years later. The world of Brazil is never real and so it always is.

what is a political film?, part II: the possibility of political film

2007-09-21T09:49:00.000-04:00

The problem of left-wing political film is as much a question of distribution as production: the very forces of global capital that are the rightful object of revolutionary critique in our moment control the distribution apparatus even more tightly than they control the technologies of production, and, moreover, their monopoly on distribution can be purchased only in exchange for marketplace profit, a limitation that corrupts and co-opts political film before it begins or else serves to strangle it in the cradle. Brechtian innovation of the sort that Godard turned to after the failures of 1968 strikes me as ultimately the wrong direction; in the gears of the mass culture machine even (and perhaps especially) the Brechtian “political film” is reduced to yet another commodity to be marketed to a particular sort of niche demographic.

The Internet certainly suggests itself here as a type of Utopian free space insofar as technological innovation, the declining price of computers and digital cameras, and new distribution formats like YouTube and Google Video allow for films to be made by people outside the culture industry and distributed widely at low cost. (The 9/11 Truth movement, wrongheaded and counterproductive as it may be, serves as a useful model of the way networked modes of distribution can spread information to a large number of people quickly and effortlessly, as well as draw out throngs of volunteer revolutionaries.) As useful a tool as YouTube is, however, access barriers to the Internet—class most importantly, but also corporate ownership and control of the technology needed to access these sites and the ease of censorship through such devices as “nanny programs” or the so-called Great Firewall of China—give us good reason not to pin all our revolutionary hopes on YouTube.

What is needed, I think, is more thinking along the lines of Jorge Sanjinés’s “Problems of Form and Content in Revolutionary Cinema,” which goes a long way towards thinking through the problem of production and distribution entirely free from both governmental and corporate interference through the development of strategies of rhizomatic creation and distribution, emphasizing mass engagement, alternative modes of funding and publicity, and organized screenings in communities and populations that the usual distribution chain and its YouTube alternative both continue to ignore. Further development and enactment of such strategies of distribution alongside production is the only hope I can see for truly political, truly resistant films to thrive outside of dependence on either corporate largess or the beneficence of billionaire leftists.

What is a political film?

2007-09-20T22:05:00.000-04:00

What is usually indicated by the predicate ‘political’ when applied to narrative films in the U.S. (to set aside documentaries, just for now) is a liberal or leftist partisanship. This has been the case since at least after the fall of the U.S.S.R. and the achievement of almost total ideological hegemony by ‘the West' (before that of course there were plenty of John Wayne war movies that no one has any problem calling 'political,' those and Birth of a Nation). Have films with non-left, non-liberal allegiances given up the kind of overt antagonism that traditionally defines political cinema? The quick answer would be that the cultural environment dominated by the West is no longer safe for a film that straightforwardly identifies as Right – unveiled racism, imperialism, sexism are alienated from the ‘mainstream’ and even nationalism is less acceptable than it used to be. The second part to this answer would be that the real opponents of the left and increasingly traditional liberals as well are neoliberal and especially neoconservative ideologies. Is there a neoliberal or neoconservative cinema? Should this be considered a political cinema? The whole point of neoliberalism, from a political perspective, is to antiquate the term ‘ideology,’ striving instead for economistic ‘reality.’ It is against politics as they have been traditionally conceived, as conflicting viewpoints aired from within and addressed to a commons. Neoconservativism's twist is to attribute global agency to a single world power. When a film’s politics are criticized by the left/liberal press today, they struggle to establish that the film is political at all. Is 300 a political film (see the Iranian protests)? Is Passion of the Christ? Black Hawk Down? Deniers frame their counterarguments in terms of, respectively, ‘entertainment,’ ‘freedom of religion,’ and ‘even-handedness/compassion,’ the very language of traditional liberal politics. On the other hand, films like The Constant Gardener say, or Three Kings, have no problem bearing the responsibility of being ‘political’ and are praised for their critical stance; opposing critics (if there are any who oppose them on grounds other than taste) do not need to establish such an intent. Top Gun, a Hollywood film notable for its blend of cutting-edge advertising techniques, conventional narrative structure, and ‘50s-style jingoism, allegedly caused a surge in Navy recruitment during its release and remains popular today. Did three classic 'political' films from very different historical periods and with very different allegiances and intended audiences, Queimada (Burn!), Battleship Potemkin, or Tout Va Bien, have comparable effects? Why shouldn't they be expected to? These three films, chosen for their status among critics and broad identification with a 'left,' are not agitprop in the sense of being thought of as mere tools for the dissemination of preconceived ideas (I suppose a case could be made for Potemkin), but are attempts to present a certain reality within (not 'through') the medium of cinema. All 'effects,' all attempts to do things to the audience (through editing, graphic violence, scenes engineered to heighten specific emotions) are attempts to shape, reveal, or discover a particular kind of audience member, one that is political. Fredric Jameson's tentative definition of a political film as one which "tries to define a subject of history, which is always a collective subject," is apropos here. Its fundamental problem is how a collective story can be told by individuals, how the split between the existential experience of the viewer and the filmmakers can be reconciled with specific systemic consequences. But if this definition, this mapping of the terrain, is all film alone can do, can one film, alone, still be called political? Isn't a film that is conceived, produced, and propagated within a socius constituted by shared interests and 'values' -- which could include anything from the Navy, Tony Scott/Paramount, and young American patriots, to Eisenstein and the Soviet state, to Godard and international cineastes -- already subject to the politics of that community? Why shouldn’t a vulgar phrase like 'does it work?' be the criteria for determining how ‘political’ a film is, to be judged according to terms given by those who help produce it physically and socially as a film, and only secondarily by what outside critics allege are its 'views' or 'intentions?' This would refocus old arguments about whether a focus on form (such as Brecht/Godard-ian audience alienation) or content (Pontecorvo’s Romantic vision of imperialism that is also filled with realistic detail and critical analysis) is better suited to realizing political aims -- whose are they, anyway? Such a reframing seems especially pressing in a time when concepts like ‘ideology’ have become as imprecise as the theological ones they ostensibly replaced. A 'political' film would then be one that proves useful to and is only intelligible, on its own terms at least, from within a community, one with which the filmmakers have a a real social connection -- that is, one not prepackaged within the stock images of suffering children given by CNN, or by the celebrities, their number growing by the hour, whose mundanest activities have the power to infiltrate our dreams. First this connection has to be understood, and if incomplete it must be made.