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...

Utopic Space

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).