where have all the culturemonkeys gone?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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)

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.