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.

Der Untergang des Magnum Opus

Quite aside from the basic and dull point that is made ad vomitum regarding "master-narratives", one alternative way to regard the decline of "great works" is the fact that writers are coming to be regarded, and to regard themselves, as accidents. It is a fact of our social structures, in a two-fold manner.

Firstly, in the narrative perspective whereby our overview of history needs actors for reasons of identification, the great writer or their text can serve this function, as a cognitive anchor. It is a way to make history less autistic, less concerned with facts. That is the "history of literature" view, but it holds true in any field, whereby an -ism is deployed like a sheep dog to round up those pesky individuals with fancy notions of freedom and independence.

Speculative Realism

Evidently, a text can serve just this function, but with each repeated deployment it has become increasingly attenuated. It got to the point where Adorno's Aesthetic Theory can, in its blurb, be referred to as his magnum opus. The fact that he did not complete it during his lifetime is related to the sapping of the ideal that such a book has, as much a result of an atmosphere where the fragment is fetishized (need one give examples?), as well as one in which we can witness its reactionary rejection (but this reaction is usually political in tone, thus Badiou's elevation of the Event, which is a tellingly Maoist movement, but good god I digress...) . The point, again, is that not all great texts surpass everything by their contemporaries, and so some are chosen by default, simply as others will never be considered once this process has taken place. 

The second manner is that whereby fame accrues more fame. Like any standing reserve in a structure (money, information, etc.), there is a network effect in evidence. Fame can cycle endlessly, as in Bataille's "general economy" (which is in contrast to the "restricted economy" that we are led to understand is economics proper), and once the surplus standing reserve being left to pass down along the same well-worn channels of a text having a place in the canon, or of a thinker being a part of an -ism, until it this channel is blocked. The point is that now there are so many various opportunities, that it becomes a question as to whether there is sufficient force behind the flow to create more than a trickle of renown. We see this in the notion that there are "too many journals", but as noted in this link, often these journals are no more than tags attached to articles. 

This is not a jeremiad against change, and I find the point made by Jan Velterop in that link more helpful, as it allows us to view the old problem in a new light. People have complained about there being too many books since there were two books. What changes is the structure that governs and facilitates our access to and interactions with these works. Accordingly, we get fields (can I please call this the "sheepdog effect"?) of influence, counter-influence, rejection, interest, and all these interact with myriad others. Returning to Adorno for a moment, we can see an analogy of this where the punning title of his work gives us a Minima Moralia rather than the Magna Moralia of Aristotle, a collection of observations which can be fashioned into a constellation by our own effort to read him, as well as what we bring from our reading others. The age of the magnum opus had its dark counter-image in the dilettante, but our age needs to develop its alternative to this. 

Žižek, alone.

By writing so prodigiously, and in opposition to apparently everybody else, in terms of style Slavoj Žižek seeks to deny affiliation with any other contemporary thinkers. Writing so much is an effort against particulars, it is an attempt to ascend to the level of the universal. In short, he seeks to deny any broader context for his work by becoming his own context. 

Kardashev-Syndicalists of the world unite!

Allen Tate, "The Man of Letters in the Modern World", (1952): 'What modern literature has taught us is not merely that the man of letters has not participated fully in the action of society; it has taught us that nobody else has either.' 

Tate is fascinating for a modern reader because he comes from a position that is alien to most of us now, one that manages to be learned yet at the same time unapologetically moral. This is not in the often reactionary or defeated mode of T.S. Eliot, but somewhat closer to Emmanuel Lévinas. He calls for a distinction to be made between communication and communion, noting that what he terms secularism (as the death of the notion of "spirit") apparently seeks to do away with all ends in favour of the absoulte of the means. 

In thinking about Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons, we can see how this idea is extended outward.  In the "Consul's Tale" we read in the colonization/invasion of a planet the profound cynicism of the WorldWeb. In this space opera, 28th century, the hyper-technological human society called the Hegemony has spread throughout the galaxy. Quoting from Wikipedia:
'The farcaster network (the "WorldWeb") is the infrastructural and economical basis of the Hegemony of Man and thus determines the whole culture and society. Also flowing across these portals are the structures of the datasphere (a network reminiscent of the Internet in design, but far more advanced). In that lurks the powerful, knowledgeable, and utterly inscrutable TechnoCore — the vast agglomeration of millions of AIs who run almost every piece of high technology of mankind. The unthinking hubris of man resulted in the death of the home-world (Earth), and this arrogant philosophy was carried forth to the stars, for centuries. The Hegemony itself is a largely decadent society, relying on its military to incorporate into the WorldWeb the colony planets, even unwillingly, and also to defend the Hegemony from attacks by the Ousters, "interstellar barbarians" who dwell free of and beyond the bounds of the Hegemony and shun all the works of the TechnoCore (especially farcasters)'
Anyway, in this tale (the first Hyperion book follows loosely the model of The Canterbury Tales or Decameron) we see the profound cynicism of the WorldWeb's entire reasons for existence. There is no actual thought behind all the magnificent technology described to us, and this is but a cosmic extrapolation of the circumstances which confront human society today.

We have always been tool-using creatures, but the question deserves to be posed as to whether we still use tools as we did before. Do tools now begin to use us? This is one of the classic topoi of science fiction (as in The Matrix trilogy technology actively takes over, or Mockingbird by Walter Tevis where we apparently just give up, entrusting everything to our creations). Once, in conversation with a friend, I jokingly referred to my overall philosophical vision as Kardashev-Syndicalism, a mixture of the kind of alternative to state-directed socialism (because, as someone who takes the ideas of spontaneous order and emergence seriously, I would require a non-centralized form of government) with something else, a broader idea of what being human can mean. It sounds good even if you think Kardashev may have been a obscure Ukranian labour theorist affiliated with the Mensheviks. He was not.

Nikolai Kardashev is a Russian astrophysicist who developed the idea of a scale according to which civilizations might be ranked, based on their energy use. There are three types of civilization, with Type I able to use all the energy on its home planet, Type II able to use all the energy from its nearby star, and Type III thirsty or hungry enough to devour all the energy in its home galaxy. An alternative version of this taxonomy, that of Robert Zubrin puts the emphasis on extension throughout space, rather then energy usage, such that Type I has spread throughout the home planet, Type II has outposts and settlements on numerous other planets, and Type III the galaxy.

Now, the nitty-gritty details don't really concern me here. Nor do accusations of cosmic smugness (although I may have to call my first album that). The phrase to me is more of a tool to rethink our present in the light of all the alternative paths we might take. Our thought might be better served by allowing the dynamic and daemonic power of possible worlds to explode our ideas onto a cosmic scale. Woah.

The universe of Hyperion is more than a metaphor of capitalism's viral logic, though it is undeniably this too. The value of science fiction is that it is a truly a mode of thought, rather than adjustment or technocratic problem-solving; counter-intuitively, these latter two are actually the impulses behind all realisms, such that they basically are modes of acceptance. "Let the market take care of it." Thought, in contrast, confronts the machine world which Allen Tate considers was born in the 17th century, along with modern science, the modern economy, modern technology. This world has ever since done its best to erase thought via standardization, universalization. In short, to destroy difference and the ability to try a new approach. This is not because of innate malevolence. It is rather the impulse of this machine logic to seek efficiency at all costs, and if that means saving energy by not thinking. The side effects of this are political, social, and cultural. Machine logic must be contextual, and there are even contexts where the logic of machines won't suit machines.

Tate was right when he said we haven't participated in the action of society. We have accepted what has done before because it worked. Or we thought it worked. It worked within certain limits, and with the development of a science of ecology, of non-linear logic, of ever less authoritarian theories of government, we can see ever more clearly that what was accepted in the past is insufficient now. All thought is technology, and so we can develop new technologies of thought that do not limit us, because the limitations that we imposed (for reasons of expediency) do us no great service. Boundaries are lies.

See also Towards a Historical Cosmology and a Very Large Scale Ethics