Timescales of hope and critique

In Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's "Some Reflections on Progress" from The Future of Man,  we are confronted with a view of progress which is refreshing in the honesty with which it is proposed. This honesty and this hope are the best parts of Teilhard de Chardin because they are something that is all too alien to us critical secularists. As he says, "Whether from immobilist reaction, sick pessimism or simply pose, it has become 'good form' to deride or mistrust anything that looks like faith in the future."

What is refreshing here is that progress is taken as a given. On the conditions he sets out, it is, seen in the light of life as a "phenomenon of prodigious age", hundreds of millions of years in the making. What is then the next step, is to consider how such a timescale influences arguments about progress. In another essay in this collection ("The New Spirit, 1942") he describes "the immense travail of the world" as inevitably the reverse side of "an immense triumph." This is as troubling as all theodicies. One cannot an longer assert a crude polarity whereby suffering inevitably leads to its reverse; every manner of cruelty and hatred have been justified thus. This is the brutal catholic element of his thought which must be immediately jettisoned. This type of argument leads us to an optimism of which we have been rightly suspicious ever since Voltaire's critique of Leibniz, and even more so since the Holocaust. 

We must be very careful when we take a long view, because this is the timescale of institutions and the state. This is how suffering and injustice is rationalized. It is the deus ex machina to which individuals appeal when they wish to silence other individuals. It is just as troubling in this guise as it is in the philosophical apparatus of Habermas's "consensus". We should probably start (as with Hans Georg Gadamer, pace Habermas, though this article correctly points out that the two positions are finally united somewhat by Paul Ricoeur) from what is, and proceed thence to where we actually wish to be. This might lead us to a nuanced and fluid mode of thought and action. It begins with our human all too human foibles, and takes us from there towards something better. This is a praxis of becoming. 

By contrast, the position (one might say pose) of critique starts with negative criticism. It is already hoarse with the shrill haranguing of self-righteous denunciation. It takes no time to reflect, to consider, to discuss, to debate. It reifies critique. It is praxis still-born, strangled at birth by a flawed theory. This is not to suggest that critique has no place, ever. It is to show what influence a particular conception of time has on human thought. To say that an awareness of time stopped with the insights of phenomenology is misleading, and indeed has misled thought ever since. Returning to a more fundamental, even basic awareness of how time influences thought is a necessity. 

The Luddites were right

Luddites were not objectively anti-technology, even if that is what their acts of sabotage and destruction might suggest, and even if that is how history has on the whole remembered them. What they were searching for was a way to integrate new technologies into their way of life, rather than allowing each new gadget dictate what form society would take. In this, they were the first to encounter the problem which endures today, namely the disparity between new processes and technologies on the one hand, and on the other, social and political models which took place long before such changes could even have been imagined. It is the divide between the human and the machine. It is an abyss of scale.

What was needed was a new social technology which could have been attendant to the machine and organizational technologies which had been developed. As it was, the machine begat the organization, with the social and human crowded out. Concepts such as "change" and "progress" were introduced which lacked the nuance and sophistication to equip us intellectually with these inventions. This conceptual dearth impoverished our intellectual world to such a degree that only recently have we begun to exit this recession of the mind. Critics of the effects of industrial organization on the lowest levels (such as Engels and Dickens) showed that all was not well, but yet we still needed to have the tools of thought to formulate not just the answer, but also the problem.

One definition of ideology is that which we don't know we know. It is a pervasive paradigm of heuristics, prejudices (in Gadamer's sense), assumptions, and habits. It is that 'unthought' which to some extent leads our thinking. The Victorian moralists who criticized the 'excesses' of their age were still under the dark pall that the smokestacks spread throughout all economic and intellectual life. The should, rather, have been realizing that the problem was the essence of their age. The entire model of industrial scale economics allowed for a skewed accounting, such that those advocates of factories and railroads genuinely believed that theirs was the best way. They had so structured their informational world, that the excesses for which they were critiqued were in fact the foundation for everything they did. Industrialization was predicated upon markets being opened at gunpoint. Industrialism and colonialism are mutually defining.

What works on the international scale works on the local too, however, and 'markets for the sake of markets' is equally reprehensible to the Luddites as it is for the subjugated inhabitant of a colonized land. What was apparent even in 1811, when the Prince Regent offered a reward for information regarding "giving information on any person or persons wickedly breaking the frames" was that it was the new technologies who set the terms against which the actions of people might be measured. Destruction of property was all this matter was, and questions of why there were people attempting to be so destructive were scattered before they could be formulated in the knee-jerk accusation of immorality: destruction of property = evil, end of. Rather than engage in a discussion, it was more convenient to allow a spontaneous order to develop, without thinking it through. It is as though it was decided that the economy to which Adam Smith's invisible hand was attached should be blindfolded too, as long as it suited those whom it benefited. 

The art of technology

"As ever more sensitive emulsions come into use, pictures could be taken in a flash of light, and there was no need for a sitter to pose for long periods of time with glazed, unnatural expressions."
What of an alternative view that there was, on the contrary, something more honest about a process with such undeniable artifice -sitting in a studio, remaining completely still, trusting in the expertise of the practitioner. That is a form of respect paid to the total difference manifested in this radical departure of a medium. It is not simply a 'democratization of the image' whereby anyone can now have a portrait, where previously such was only within the economic means of the higher ups. This was not an extension of the visual franchise, though it now suits all of us to call it such, and also suits the various companies who sell the equipment necessary to produce ever more snapshots.

There is a mendacity to the pervasive notion that the photograph gives us the natural, spontaneous "moment". On this, consider whether you would ever greet a friend by saying, "my, how natural and spontaneous you look today!" (If you would, then I don't know what can be done for you...) The snapshot pushes the natural and the real ever further away from us, and the technology makes it ever more difficult to see with our own eyes, instead of with the entire history of photography acting as a set of templates of acceptability. But this is a trite, cliched criticism. I have said nothing new. What I want to consider is the techniques of seeing that we can compare. Painters and photographers see the world differently. The photographer waits for that instant that is telling, unusual, striking. The painter, according to conditions of the medium, considers that which is to be depicted on a much longer time-scale.

For me, the above photograph by Diane Arbus does everything that photography can do. It erases what is potentially human in a portrait to the mechanism of the technology of depiction. It reduces the interplay of facial muscles to a time-scale that serves only the camera. It captures, with all its terrifying capacity for precision and focus, a particular series of electrical impulses firing throughout the hundreds of muscles in the face, reducing the becoming of a facial expression - in all its delicacy and complexity - to the lie of a static, solid gurn. It is a commonplace of discussing technology (via Lewis Mumford) that each new invention would be set in the terms of that which it replaces; thus the motor-car was in its early days referred to a horseless carriage. Time was needed for the new device or complex of techniques to come into its own. It saves us the effort of wasting time completely rethinking each new technology only to see it rot into redundancy. If it succeeds, then it can do so on its own terms. I do not think this is what I am doing in my comparison of photography and painting however.

For one thing, the photograph is not cutting-edge technology. I don't think I would be extreme in considering it established. What I would question, however, is if we ever properly considered it in dispassionate terms. It is a tool, and accordingly it is a response to a human need via a human capability. It offers a semi-permanent method of storage of visual processing that takes place via sight. It brings sight into ever smaller divisions and ever greater extension of time via super-fast cameras and long exposures. It allows us to see in lower light. It expands sight into the infra-red and the ultra-violet. All these it can do, but what is it for? On the human, social level, in terms of objectification (in whatever regard one wishes to consider), it serves the machine and not the human. The most successful photographers for my euro, are those who bring the two closer together (Nan Goldin springs immediately to mind), rather than reveling in the technical difference that this machine can manifest (as with Arbus, though pass over this dichotomy in silence as a blogger's prerogative).

Goldin revels (as with The Devil's Playground - read the review which this links to) in the act of seeing itself, and the long relationships over many years allow us to see with her, rather than to simply see what she saw. The "absence" which the above review refers to is actually us. We see friends and relatives in the long view of many years, and in some cases of different generations. Time is made to conform to a human scale, one that gives us a beautiful intimacy. The charges of voyeurism made against Goldin might stick against some in the snap-shot generation, but in considering her own work they reveal a blindness. In her work, Goldin has thought through the act of seeing, and the technique of seeing that the photograph gives us. The effect of her work is cumulative, so that while of course she is subject to the same contraints as all other photographers, it is how she structures her own context that sets her apart. Her snapshots (as above) are something more than that. It is one view among many, as in a fleeting memory. They are not the instant being held up as the entirety of that person. She makes her own canon.

Information and stuff: Stephenson and DeLillo

Cryptonomicon and Underworld, two great novels in their respective literary realms, are definitely linked (as Richard Rorty noted in his blurb for the former), and they address each other's weaknesses. They both span much of the last century's history, and they both use the standard approach of the non-linear narrative. Underworld is material, replete with what Hart Crane called "America's plutonic ecstasies" - wastes nuclear, industrial, human... It also, however, misses a crucial trick by more or less accepting the standard model of material progress in the western world, and doing no more than flipping it for our delectation, presenting us with the opportunity to indulge in our bad faith, our consumer guilt. It is an inversion that lacks sophistication. Though the actual work itself is an achievement, the message is banal.

Cryptonomicon is also a mirror though which we darkly consider our recent past, except instead of how DeLillo gives us the flip-side of our material successes (the world of "Just What Is It That Makes Today's Home So Different, So Appealing?") in muck and mire, Stephenson focuses on information, on the immaterial. He is interested in how its structures structure our lives. More than this, if the 'darkside' parallel is to be valid, then just as the structure of information in the 20th century is such that openness and freedom of digital movement are the ideals held up by theorists and advocates, Cryptonomicon astutely shows that this is more often than not perverted by those who wish to dominate via information and technologies of communication.

With the Baroque Cycle (a trilogy, which serve as a kind of prelude rather than a prequel to Cryptonomicon, which he subsequently penned), Stephenson gives us what amounts to a secret history of the immaterial's ascendancy, which shows that the material world was predicated on this world that was accessible only to those with the particular inclination to learn the language of the universe, maths and physics. Where Underworld is about burying the implications of our approach to living in the world, of using our skills, ideas, tools to alter our surroundings, Cryptonomicon gives us that which we haven't even repressed as we don't know enough about it. Encryption is the key to the whole other side of the bright, shiny story that is peddled out so often by the corporate histories (that not infrequently becomes academic and popular history). Not all the information that is out there is available to us, and we do not make all our own information available to others. Stephenson brings us to the point where we can ask ourselves, should everything be available to all?

Do androids dream of remarkable things?

One notable difficulty which science fiction - and sci-fi - has is that while it is a discourse of possibility, it makes too few concessions to social reality for it to be regarded as a part of literature as conceived as a liberal art. Literature had become, via grammar and rhetoric, a liberal art in the sense of it being that which the free [Latin: liber] person (man originally) would study. Now it is also something we tend to do in our free time, though the professor of literature spends remarkably little time actually reading literature, and more time keeping up with other responsibilities, with writing about writing (about writing) having become more professionally rewarding than reading. Either way, it is a concern to us as a form via which we can be circumspect about aspects of our existence.

Science fiction is different to speculative fiction or to the fantastic (I think of Calvino's Cosmicomiche as an example of the latter, perhaps Margaret Atwood falls into the first loose bracketing) in that it is more concerned with being a type of thought experiment, than the fullness of life as is (apparently) found in realism. The most basic description you can give of a classic of science fiction starts with the sentence "Imagine if...". That goes for hard science-fiction in the line of Tau Zero or Ringworld. These are opportunities to chase after the myriad implications of an event or an idea.

There is then the question of the more nuanced texts, such as those of Philip K. Dick, Sheri S. Tepper, Dan Simmons, Walter Tevis etc. In these examples it is not the idea that is made the master of the form, and there is an interplay between character, setting, and form that makes this field more interesting as literature rather than as "ideas texts".

There is also that popular realm of Dune and Star Wars, which is (as Voegele notes above) is little more than swords and sorcery at faster than light speeds. Star Trek I would put in a sub-group, as the United Nations and the balance of power at FTL speeds.

What all of these have in common is that the overriding ideology defining the discourse is one of willful elitism. We have an unapologetically aristocratic system (as with Tepper's Grass; and in all of the positively feudal Dune series, notably with examples such as the priestly 'Bene Gesserit' and the 'Spacing Guild'), or a elitism of apparent intellectual entitlement. Even in those examples where we supposedly encounter the underworld (as in much of Dick), there is still yet the idea that they are subject to some powerful capitalist or some cosmic corporation. The reason for this is, according to Fredric Jameson's excellent Archaeologies of the Future is that all literatures write about now, and that at best the future is a distancing device.

The question becomes, then, why are authors of science fiction so perversely conservative, so reactionary? The objection might be made that the elitism of the 'scientist as hero' is but the meritocracy of the universities. Even the Jedi, you could argue, do not exclude people on the basis of sex or species, but only on the basis of ability. Very well and good if that is so, but my question would be a bit distanced from all that. If we consider the bustling, space-faring civilization either on the page or on the screen, more often than not we see things from the heights, from a privileged perspective. An exception might be in Bladerunner, where we are in the muck and mire of a decaying Earth, but the governing principle is still 'higher = better'. Indeed, in the text on which the film is based, the entire narrative hinges on a consumerist desire for nicer things, a cyborg keeping up with the Joneses.

For me, one of the most frightening examples of this blindness to any kind of social inclusion comes from Star Wars, and the fact that it is the most successful series of science fiction texts in history. It is a sub-genre unto itself. In my view, all six films should not be regarded as the story of princesses and knights, and the turn of Anakin to the Dark Side is irrelevant, for to my mind there is too much grey to be entirely comfortable with a fast distinction between Dark and Light (though that is Sith talk...). That is the history of the industrialists, the war-mongers, the bureaucrats. In my mind, the entire story can be seen in the arc from Jango Fett to 'the clones'. The reason for this is that within the Galactic Empire, these are the only non-Jedi, non-diplomats we encounter. Basically, from the perspective of anybody who matters, everybody else are just clones: interchangeable, replaceable, expendable. They are us.

In all those shots of busy worlds, where the people look like ants, those tiny dots are us, and they have as much an impact on their lives as does the average North Korean. The giant farms where the clones are grown on Kamino for the empire are not so different from the nightmarish world of The Matrix. The clones are but biological robot soldiers, and there is no notion of them having any autonomy. They are in Kantian terms an abomination, humans designed to be a means, and not an end.

What then, is the alternative to all this? Ursula Le Guin as always presents us with both sides, both the mirror of the world as we know it (as Deleuze's identity, under which I perhaps perversely also include the other three pillars of reason, namely: opposition, analogy, and resemblance) and that difference that 'makes a difference'. Examples of this are in the anarcho-utopia in The Dispossessed, as well as the properly alien (though Jameson finds echoes of medieval Muscovy) of The Left Hand of Darkness.

My favourite example of an alternative is in a short story collected in Cordwainer Smith's The Rediscovery of Man. The story is "The Ballad of Lost C'Mell" and concerns the attempts by the underpeople of Smith's cycle of stories (huge in scope, spanning thousands of years) to get the franchise for themselves. It concerns them as people (though not necessarily human), and relegates the controlling apparatus of the galaxy (aptly named 'The Instrumentality of Mankind") to the status of a blocking mechanism. It is but another example of attempts to shut down the opening up of citizenship, of rights as well as obligations, of personhood. These are the ideas informing this short story, but it is the execution of it that elevates this text above most others in this genre, bringing it to a level of literary greatness. The conclusion is as emotionally affecting as Flowers for Algernon, and indeed anything else in science fiction.

For the next stage of science fiction, we need to pass beyond the echoes of big science (as in the 40s and 50s), the counterculture (of the 60s and 70s), of neoconservatism (of the 80s and 90s, v. Cyberpunk), and of globalization (the 90s and 00s). For science fiction to remain an important discourse for examining ideas that confront us here, now, then it must step out from behind its blanket of distance, of cool examination, or of intellectual revenge. We must allow the clones, androids, the cyborgs, the robots, the underpeople to have hearts. This is how we can bring our ideas about technology and the future into contact with the human reality of our lives now.

Horror: the poetry of the lizard brain

To be fair, this is not specifically about Lovecraft, but actually some notes on what I consider to be weaknesses that are structurally inherent to the horror genre itself. Lovecraft just happens to be the midden onto which I toss the rotting filth of my antipathy. Reasons to hate Lovecraft: 1, 2, ∞.

Horror is in a curious position as a genre given that it is almost entirely based on emotion, or rather a small gamut of emotional reactions, rather than a form or idea (pick your counter-examples in whatever genre you like). It relies upon stereotypes rather than tropes. Tropes are what we find in all literature, and it is the interruption and overturning of such tropes (which are weak indicators of our expectations) that we often point out a work's originality and creative merit.

In contrast to this, horror overturns little. It wishes to trigger. It seeks to plug into our most ancient reflexes. It is the poetry of the lizard brain. Its focus is disgust, and not thought. That is its first level. If horror is to become any more "intellectual" than this (i.e., at all...), then this visceral reaction must be aligned with some cultural analogue, and this is the second level of horror. In Lovecraft, this is via some barely veiled WASP racism (do I really need to spell out what lies behind the "horror" of Shub-Niggurath, all torturous attempts at etymological rehabilitation aside). In Kalki by Dan Simmons, it is through a disappointingly un-nuanced form of orientalism (yeah, I went there).

This photo is as crap as a reference to Lovecraft should be.

The final level, as I see it, is the attempt to make horror systematic, formalized. This is doomed by the very source of horror as the literature of that which cannot be expressed (quite different from the inexpressible...I am not getting into a discussion regarding Adorno and Paul Celan and how some things are such an affront that to write about them seems to put writing itself in jeopardy, though after reading Todesfuge I cannot but side with Celan). This third level of horror can be seen in Lovecraft's use of words that are the shibboleths of his oeuvre. These are meant to be some kind of etymological reaction formers. The preeminent example of this is "eldritch". It sounds venerable, ancient (elder), with echoes of an uncanny grotesqueness (witch, ditch...).

The problem with all this is that the part of the brain to which this genre makes its appeals resists systematization, and the reader who bothers to read through Lovecraft's collected works (have mercy on my sense of taste, as I did) begins to interact with each new example in the text of such words much as a bird-watcher might greet the most scraggly pigeon in the street, that is with something less than ecstasy. It all becomes a bit...obvious. The text waves a red flag at us screaming "you will be afraid soon, oh, so very scarified." In actuality, the logic of horror is analogous with the logic of pornography, wherein there is a continuous need to 'make it new' (I am thinking of Gore Vidal's words in the documentary Thinking XXX).

Finally, we can indirectly return to some of the problems surrounding the notion of the inexpressible, and consider Carrion Comfort by Dan Simmons. I simply don't feel comfortable with horror that leeches off the Holocaust. It smacks of theodicy, for how and when could it ever appropriate to introduce paranormal elements to the ferocious reality of millions of deaths?

Facebook, my friend, you are entering a world of pain.

I quite enjoy impromptu battle with people getting furious over Facebook's redesign on one side, and then there is the "hey, keep it cool man, like, change happens, y'know?" brigade who have set themselves up as the default voice of reason. I side more with the former than the latter, since there's a difference between acceptance and acquiescence. The posture of the latter holds that we pay nothing for these online services, and basically falls in with the pre-digital mindset of "you'll take what you're given", or "any colour as long as it's #3B5998". It is the position of the Dude, who just accepts what happens. By default, I am put in the position of Walter by those who are, like, way more chilled out about it all. Facebook abides, man.

 I told that Kraut a fuckin' thousand times, I don't roll on shabbos.

Well, fine. I am he. But think about what exactly the dissatisfaction that people feel with these changes. It's not simply a manifestation of chutzpah (as someone following in the footsteps of a convert to Judaism, I'm assuming I can say that now) for us to point out that all is not well.
The Dude: Walter...
Donny: They already posted it.
Walter Sobchak: Well they can *fucking unpost it*! 
You know what, they can change Facebook, because we are what it runs on. It is of course not the case that we have paid for a service with cash, but do we think they are providing a service to us for free? Of course not, they get our time, they get our attention, and they get the revenue from every advertiser wanting to hit exactly the target-market that we represent.


This is the new logic of open source being brought to bear on ever more realms, and we need to expand our conceptual vocabulary accordingly. We no longer pay for services with money, but with our attention, with our time. That is as valuable as money, if not moreso, because in the murky world of Facebook's revenue stream via ads, they can tell marketers that there is billions to be made in the upcoming world. In capital terms, Facebook is not worth anywhere near the numbers thrown about (such as $100bn), what is behind such fantasy figures is the concept of there being a social ecosystem which this website represents. Those billions that don't come in via direct advertising are to be found right behind our eyeballs. Too right we can complain.


Finally, of course Facebook is going to listen and make more changes, because though Bebo and Myspace etc. are dead in the water, they died because they deserved to. They were no kind of a challenge. The situation we are in now is that Facebook is in the position of AOL, a stupid monopoly of closing off information. Creating a wall to keep information out equally keeps it in, and every information technology has proved that to be a foolhardy strategy in the long term (even the guilds only kept the print press out of Paris for 20 years). The prize of openness and market-share is Google's to grab.