thoughts on zizecology - 2

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.

kidding on the square

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...

Time Travel: The Creation of A Temporal Ecology

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.

philip k. dick link explosion

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

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.

the uses of more's utopia

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

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

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

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...