Books – Page 10 – The Pinocchio Theory

Issue #1

Ron Silliman reports on a new publication, modestly entitled Issue 1. (I was first alerted to this by The Mumpsimus). This e-text is 3785 pages long (!); each page contains a “poem” attributed to one of 3785 3164 writers. The names of the writers range from Silliman himself and other language poets, through a number of (now dead) poets and writers, onto various bloggers (especially ones who appear in Silliman’s blogroll, it would seem). In point of fact, none of the writers have actually written the pieces attributed to them. My name appears among the list of authors, together with the names of several people I know, including some who read (and sometimes comment on) this blog. My own “poem” appears on page 1893; for what it’s worth, it doesn’t strike me as being very good, nor is it like anything that I could ever imagine myself writing, either in style or in sentiment.

I kind of wonder how other “victims” of this hoax (if that’s what it is) respond to it. Silliman seems kind of pissed off, as do many (but not all) of the commenters on his blog entry. Matthew Cheney (of The Mumpsimus blog) seems more or less amused:

The whole thing strikes me as a stunt pulled by someone who desperately wants attention. (And now I’m giving it to ’em. So it goes.) I’m still amazed that anyone would put the time into creating something like this, but the amazement now is the sort of amazement one has when watching the totally insane rather than watching the harmlessly obsessive.

Me, I think that the stunt raises all sorts of interesting questions (or perhaps I should say, in Palin-speak, that lots of interesting questions “rear their heads”). Early-20th-century Dadaist stunts raised meta-questions about art, about what could be considered art, etc. But such meta-questions have long since been so well assimilated into our culture (both artistic culture and commercial culture) that they scarcely raise an eyebrow any longer. Today, we can only be blase about self-referentiality, conceptual art, and so on.

In such a context, Issue 1 attempts to up the ante, by asking meta-meta-questions, as it were. Most notably, there’s the difficulty of deciding whether the publication actually is some sort of interesting conceptual art, or whether it is rather just a dumb prank, or a malicious hoax. Then there is the issue of obsessiveness that Matthew Cheney raises. Certainly a lot of modernist and post-modernist art is quite obsessive (I am thinking of everything from Yayoi Kusama’s polka dots to Henry Darger’s weather chronicles). But Issue 1 might well only be pseudo-obsessive; it seems to be something that would have required an insane amount of time and energy (if only to collect all those author names and write all those poems), but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it was all generated by a computer program in just a few hours. Even insanity isn’t what it used to be, in our age of digital simulation.

Finally, given all the questions about the status of the author that have been raised in the last half-century or so, it only makes sense that I should be credited with the authorship of something that I had nothing to do with writing. Remember, Roland Barthes proclaimed “the death of the author” more than forty years ago, in 1967. And even well before that, in 1940, Borges proposed a literary criticism that would “take two dissimilar works — the Tao Te Ching and the 1001 Nights, for instance — attribute them to a single author, and then in all good conscience determine the psychology of that most interesting homme de lettres…” (from “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”). Issue 1 is a logical outgrowth of the situation in which such ideas no longer seem new, or radical, or outrageously counterintuitive, but have instead been entirely assimilated into our “common sense.”

In short, Issue 1 makes sense to me as a conceptual art project precisely to the extent that it marks the utter banalization, routinization, and digitization of any sort of conceptualism and experimentalism in art, and of all supposedly “avant-garde” gestures. There is something melancholy in coming to this conclusion; but perhaps something liberating as well, since it suggests that the whole strain of avant-gardism that starts in the 19th century, goes through dadaism and other forms of radical modernism, and moves through conceptualism in the 1960s and 1970s to the supposedly oppositional political art of the last few decades, has finally outlived its relevance and its usefulness. We have finally reached the point where we can shake off the dead weight of the anti-traditionalist tradition, and perhaps move on to something else. This doesn’t mean rejecting all the art of the avant-garde tradition, much of which I still very much love. But it does mean seeing that art historically, just as we see the art of the Baroque historically, or as we see the science fiction of the “Golden Age” of the early-to-mid 20th century historically. It’s still there to be tapped (or looted) for clever ideas, formal approaches, and so on. But modernist experimentation and avant-gardism is no longer a living resource; in an age of arcane financial instruments capable at one moment of generating huge quantities of fictitious wealth, and at another moment of sending shockwaves through the entire society, wiping out retirement accounts, causing businesses to go bankrupt and jobs to disappear, etc, etc — in such a climate, modernist avant-gardism fails to be “as radical as reality itself.” (I am fully aware that financial panics with real effects upon people’s lives are as old as capitalism itself; what’s new in the present situation comes from the way that new technologies have a multiplier effect, as well as adding additional layers of meta-referentiality and meta-feedback into the system).

I am sorely tempted to add the “poem” of mine which appears in Issue 1, and which I had absolutely nothing to do with producing, to my CV.

The Red Men (Matthew De Abaitua)

Matthew De Abaitua’s The Red Men (2007) is a literary/SF novel about digital simulation and corporate power in the new millennium. In the wake of 9/11, and with the increasing power of computing technology, the “brand age” of the late 20th century, in which we founded our identity on our favorite corporate brands, has come to an end. It has given way to the “unreal age” (64), a situation in which we find ourselves still subsisting after the apocalypse, or “after the end of the world” (175ff). In the “unreal age,” the cheery brand identification of the 1990s has been replaced by a general atmosphere of fear, anxiety, and distrust. The Red Men offers us a vision of how corporate power and exploitation continue to flourish in this new age of anxiety, and after the “irrational exuberance” of neoliberalism has collapsed along with the economic bubbles that fueled its excesses (cf. 73-74).The corporate-dominated control society now works through an eerie combination of disenchantment and mystification, low-level uneasiness and aggressive solicitation, dreary resignation and the looming threat of brute force.

The Red Men articulates all this through a combination of its general ambiance and its careful prose. The book presents a recognizable present-day world (specifically, England) whose deviations from actuality into science-fictional extrapolation are all-too-disturbingly believable. At the same time, striking aphorisms well up throughout the narration, linking the protagonist’s hair-raising experiences to larger trends. The book is smart, self-conscious, and self-lacerating: but all this in an utterly unpretentious way. On a psychological level, The Red Men combines a lucidity born of disappointment and disillusionment with a deeper understanding of how such disenchanted lucidity is itself an alibi for failure, cowardice, and complicity. And on a sociological level, it probes the ways in which we continue to mythologize an innovative future long after that future has been exhausted.

Nelson Millar, the narrator of The Red Men, used to be (in the long-ago mid-1990s) the editor of a too-hip-for-words magazine called Drug Porn, which fancied itself as being ever so scandalous and transgressive — but which, of course, was really just another medium for commodifying dissent and selling cool fashion accessories: “with retrospect, the notion of an alternative magazine is as preposterous as an alternative arms manufacturer, or a counter-cultural oil company. It is a consumerist medium. Hopeless to deny it” (32). [The example of the ludicrousness of “an alternative arms manufacturer” resonates with how I have been thinking about Iron Man]. Now Nelson is a “responsible” married man with a small daughter, instead of a hipster snorting coke in expensive clubs every night. “I was thirty, and the self-mythologizing begun in my adolescence had finally come to an end” (33). Like so many members of the so-called “creative class”, he now works doing “creative thinking consulting” (40) for a corporation on the “cutting edge” of technological innovation and marketing. His “creativity,” such as it is (and it doesn’t seem to add up to very much), is now the property of his employer, in what turns out to be an alarmingly literal sense (as I will explain shortly). Nelson perpetually feels defeated and disappointed — he has learned that his life will never amount to very much, and that he is really only good at obeying orders and submitting to bosses and other domineering authorities. This depressive (masochistic?) position is, in fact, the ideal and proper status for a citizen of the new corporate world.

Nelson works for an ultra-hip and ultra-modern company called Monad. Monad itself is the epitome of the “new economy,” grounded in (so-called) immaterial or affective labor. “Monad is naive. Monad is novelty. We don’t define ourselves by what we do because next week we might be doing something entirely different” (40). More officially, “the nature of its business is listed as ‘Other service activities’ and ‘Other business activities'” (59). In fact, Monad does an advanced form of market research and advertising consulting. Its sole product is images, or the promoting or products. Monad markets and sells auras; it is a corporation for a time when the aura surrounding a commodity, rather than what it actually “does”, is the real “use-value” of that commodity.

Monad draws upon — or licences the right to use — an artificial intellligence construct named Cantor (after the mathematician known as much for his depressive madness as for his fundamental work on set theory and on the notion of infinity). “The Cantor intelligence” is so advanced that it seems to have somehow come to Monad from the future — although we are also told that it was originally produced by US military intelligence (59) and that it emerged through evolutionary algorithms for generating software by Darwinian selection (358). In any case, Cantor runs digital simulations of real people; and it also instantiates itself in robots, so that it can physically act in the real world. The simulations allow Monad to test in advance the consequences of advertising campaigns, and also of political and economic policy decisions. The robots are used mostly for security and crowd control and enforcement. They come in two varieties, both seven feet tall: Dr Easy, with soft features and soulful eyes, designed to evoke feelings of trust and reassurance; and Dr Hard, harsh and frightening, designed to threaten people and to scare them into compliance.

The narrative of The Red Men basically draws out the full consequences of these premises, and these technologies. The novel is gruesomely comic in the way it depicts the chains of command in corporate hierarchies, and the ways that superiors exploit their underlings and make them grovel. At the same time, it recounts the increasingly manic consequences of Cantor’s creation of simulated personalities. In the first part of the novel, the high-ranking executives at Monad have their personalities replicated and simulated as a kind of privileged focus group for market research. These simulations are known as “Red Men” (hence the novel’s title). As they become increasingly autonomous, and develop away from their models, they also become even more egotistical, aggressive, power-mad, and willfully obnoxious than their originals. They engage in ever-more-ruthless Darwinian struggles, both among themselves and with actual people in the real world. Occasionally, they interact physically with the world, by taking over Dr Easy robot bodies. But even without this, the reach of the Red Men extends throughout the Net. They manipulate data, and work through Net-connected devices like mobile phones, in order to extend their power and persecute people they don’t like (including those ‘originals’ that don’t live up to their levels of ruthlessness).

The second part of the novel extends the simulations even further, as Monad replicates an entire suburban town, in order to have it available for market research, and for trying out new measures of control and manipulation. “Redtown is the simulation of a British town. That simulation will allow us to predict the consequences of our actions, and so act with complete confidence of the outcome” (179). In order to create Redtown, the citizens of Maghull, an actual Liverpool suburb, are bribed, cajoled, and bullied into submitting to brain scans and intrusive interviews, so that Cantor can construct sufficiently detailed simulations of them. Even though people are leery of haivng themselves replicated, not to mention of letting a machine learn their deepest secrets, they cannot resist the corporate juggernaut.

Nonetheless, this simulation of an entire town runs into several problems. For one thing, the Monad programmers realize that “we will have to incude ourselves in Redtown. The Maghull we are copying is a Maghull changed by our interference. The observer alters the observed” (280). This threatens to turn into an infinite regress. For simulation does not just reflect, or “represent”, a prior, external reality; it necessarily affects and alters the reality to which it refers, de-realizing it (as Baudrillard more or less said), infecting it with its own processes of manipulation and feedback. For another thing, there is the question of what happens if the marketers (manipulators) using the simulation “don’t get the results [they] expect” (322). At one point, Redtown is presented with “supply-side tax cuts” that are supposed to “motivat[e] the work force to be more productive,” and with more rigorous “homeland security” measures, designed to take advantage of the way that “the concomitant increase in ambient fear levels” is supposed to “increase consumption” (340). The experimenters are upset that these effects do not occur; the virtual citizens of Redtown do not work more and buy more, but become massively depressed and unmotivated instead. But since the error cannot lie with the policies, nor with the simulation, it must be the people themselves who are at fault.

Mere plot summary cannot convey the true intricacies of The Red Men; at the same time that the plot extends into ever greater areas of delirium, the implications of the simulation and robot technologies — which cannot be separated, as technologies, from their role as “social machines,” i.e. from the social, economic, and political circumstances of their use — become ever more detailed and multilayered. The novel touches on everything from the ways that the 24/7 demands of the “new economy” impinge upon, and remold, things like emotional intimacies, sexual relations, and family life, to scary suggestions about the ideologies that accompany “new economy” corporate formations (the executives at Monad and its related companies seem to be affiliated, on the one hand with fundamentalist Christianity, and on the other with a strange brand of Gnosticism).

Also, Monad’s virtualization of everything finds its counterpart, obverse, and competition in the activities of an equally shady corporation called Dyad, which provides “improvements” of the human body (sold to wealthy business executives) through mind- and emotion-enhancing drugs, and through “xenotransplants” of internal organs origiinally grown in pigs. Where Monad’s simulations are based upon a cognitive theory of mind (the Cantor artificial intelligence admits that it is blind to the unconscious), Dyad deals with raw physicality, unconscious drives, and Cronenbergian bodily metamorphoses. (Is it Zizek’s “obscene supplement”?) The two corporations are competitors and enemies, but they are really two sides of the same coin, mutually implicated with one another. Although Dyad is sworn to destroy Monad, it turns out that all the Monad executives are customers of Dyad as well. The pursuit of power, wealth, and “self-improvement” passes through the use of biophyisical enhancements, just as much as it does through the creation of avatars with superhuman intelligence and speed. It should be no surprise, then, that at the climax of the novel, when Dyad finally manages to bring down Monad, it also necessarily destroys itself.

I could go on, for The Red Men is extremely rich in detail, and in ideas. Passages that seem like throwaways, or digressions, or literary indulgences, almost always turn out, by the time you’ve gotten to the end of the novel, to be conceptually incisive, and affectively pointed. The Red Men is a brilliant work of social theory, in the same way that (as I have argued before) novels by authors like J G Ballard and Bret Easton Ellis are works of social theory. The Red Men is as informative and thought-provoking, when it comes to working out how society actually works in the 21st century, as anything by Zygmunt Bauman, Ulrich Beck, or Manuel Castells.

Negri?

I’m reading Negri’s The Porcelain Workshop with continual exasperation. What is he talking about?

For instance, almost at random: “When we speak of difference, we are therefore speaking of resistance. Difference cannot be recognized within the homologation [sic; this is not a careful translation] that biopower imposes on society” (page 98).

One doesn’t need to be a Zizekian to make a Critique of the Gotha Program-like dissection of every phrase in a passage like this. In fact, difference need not, and usually does not, imply resistance. Capitalism today, with its niche marketing and just-in-time, “flexible” production schedules, likes nothing better than to recognize difference, to proclaim its love of differences, to provide commodities tailored to each and every, no matter how minute, difference. Negri claims to be drawing on a Deleuzian inspiration; but it was Deleuze who denounced the danger of “lapsing into the representations of a beautiful soul: there are only reconcilable and federative differences, far removed from bloody struggle. The beautiful soul says: we are different, but not opposed” (Difference and Repetition, page xx).

Isn’t there a bit too much of the beautiful soul in Negri’s vision of the multitude, even if he insists on the “antagonism” between the multitude and Capital? The most important thing that Negri says is that, in “postmodernism”, or post-Fordist capitalism — what I like to call “aesthetic capitalism” — we have moved from what Marx called the formal subsumption to the real subsumption of society, and all social life, under Capital. This means that Capital is no longer satisfied to profit from “archaic” modes of production and technologies, of things that are outside its orbit in their social actuality, even if profit can be expropriated from them — the situation under merely “formal subsumtion.” Under real subsumption everything without exception is reorganized according to the capitalistic form: leisure time as well as work time, the “domestic” sphere of unpaid female labor as well as the “productive” sphere of male factory labor, the “private” no less than the “public”…

But Negri is so eager, and so quick, to move on to the resistance and creativity of the multitude that he acts as if this resistance and creativity is the main thing that “real subsumption” means. He glides all too quickly over the horrors of real subsumption, not to mention the fact that this real subsumption involves, precisely, the capitalization, or commodification, or “branding”, of precisely that vision of personal “liberation” that was so exalted in the 1960s. (This is something that Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello are especially clear about, in their important if overly lengthy and repetitious book The New Spirit of Capitalism).

So, when I read statements like the following, I can only wonder what planet Negri is living on:

We have already insisted upon the importance of “real subsumption” understood as the essential phenomenon in the shift from the modern to the postmodern. However, the fundamental element of this transition also seems to be the generalization of resistance in each intersection of the great grid of real subsumption of society under capital. The discovery of resistance as a general phenomenon, a paradoxical opening in each link of power and a multiform apparatus of subjective production, is precisely where the postmodern affirmation lies.

Say what? I would think that the predominant feature of “postmodern” existence, with the fading of “grand narratives,” is precisely the fact that resistance — even if it is present everywhere — becomes ever more scattered, more atomized, more ineffectual, more invisible. As Jodi remarked the other day, resistance is simply ignored by the government and the corporations, including by the media, because it is simply irrelevant to a “faith-based” (as Ron Suskind would put it) power system that doesn’t even bother to take it into account: “the [anti-war] movement doesn’t matter because public opinion doesn’t matter.”

This fits in with other aspects of the situation that I have groused about before. Most notably, the wondrous “creativity” of the multitude that Negri celebrates so strenuously is not a form of empowerment, much less of resistance, but precisely a new way of extracting surplus value — this is precisely what “real subsumption” means. Creativity today takes the form of things like crowdsourcing and ludocapitalism — “customers” now pay corporations for the privilege of doing their research and development work for them (which is the way, for instance, that a virtual world like Second Life is built), or volunteer to engage in “word-of-mouth marketing”; and even play turns into a form of work, that is to say of the unremunerated expenditure of labor-power.

This is also where I think that Nate is right in complaining that Negri makes “a variety of claims made about the present which are not actually attributes of the present as distinct from earlier eras,” including “implied claims about the past due to claims marking the present off from the past, such as the notion that now because of immaterialization of labor adequate representation of the proletariat is impossible â€“ the proletariat is _now_ a multiplicity, as if it could previously be adequately represented.” I see this again and again when Negri argues, for instance, that the potential (potentia) of the multitude is incommensurate with the structures of power (potestas), such as when Negri speaks of

a new analysis of labor organization, wherein value becomes the cognitive and immaterial product of creative action, and at the same time escapes the law of value (the latter understood in a strictly objective and economic manner). We encounter the same idea, on a different level, when we localize the ontological dissymmetry between how biopower functions and the potential (puissance) of biopolitical resistance. If power is measurable (measure and disparity (Ã©cart) are precious instruments of discipline and control), potential (puissance) is, on the contrary, the non-measurable, the pure expression of irreducible differences. (page 39)

I find this passage astonishing, because the disjunction or “ontological dissymmetry”, that Negri discusses here, as if it were a special new development of “postmodernity”, is precisely the central point of Marx’s theory of surplus value — and arguably of Marx’s entire body of thought. There is a radical incommensurability between humanity’s productive and reproductive “species activity” and enforced work; and therefore between qualtiatively distinct forms of human activity and their homogenization in the form of abstract, socially necessary labor; and therefore also between the “value” of labor-power in a capitalist economy (this value ultimately correlating to what workers are paid) and the “value” of what that labor-power produces; and therefore, at a still further remove, between use-values and exchange-values as dimensions of the commodity form. This radical incommensurability (or what Gayatri Spivak calls “the irreducible possibility that the subject be more than adequate — super-adequate — to itself”) is the necessary condition of possibility in order for exploitation — the expropriation of surplus value — to take place at all. How can Negri imagine that what he is describing here is a radically new conditon, that marks a rupture or “caesura” from the previous history of capitalism? How can he write as if Marx’s radical critique of “the law of value (understood in a strictly objective and economic manner)” were actually Marx’s erroneous buying into such a law, or his buying into such a law that was valid in the 19th and 20th centuries, but suddenly is no longer so today?

I could go on — but then I would never finish this post. The basic problem is, I think, that the new “production of subjectivities” that Negri celebrates cannot be separated from the ecstasies and excesses of consumerism; because consumption itself increasingly cannot be separated from productive labor, the two blending into one another almost seamlessly in the regime of aesthetic capitalism. Karatani has some interesting ideas about how we might resist and oppose capitalism on the basis of our dual identity of “workers qua consumers and consumers qua workers” (Transcritique, page 294) — but this is a way of thinking to which Negri seems entirely oblivious.

Paolo Virno, Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation

Paolo Virno’s newly-translated book, Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation, is somewhat misleadingly titled, since it has very little to say about the concept of the multitude as featured in Virno’s previously-translated book, as well as in the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Rather, it is a text composed of three essays, a longish one about jokes and the logic of innovation, flanked by two much shorter ones that deal with the ambivalent legacy of humanity’s linguistic powers.

The first essay argues against the notion, crystallized by Carl Schmitt but held more generally in the “common sense” of political philosophy and conceptual thought (from Hobbes, we might say, through Freud, right down to Steven Pinker), that any democratic or liberatory political theory is founded in the naive view that human nature is innately harmonious and good, whereas the more “realistic” view of the human capacity for “evil” mandates belief in a strong and repressive State. Virno argues, to the contrary, that if we are to worry about the “evil” in human nature — which is really our “openness to the world,” or our underdetermination by our biology, which is what makes it possible for us to have “a virtually unlimited species-specific ambivalence” — then we have all the more reason to worry about what happens when the power to act (to do evil as well as to mitigate it) is concentrated in something like the State’s “monopoly of violence.”

Theorists of the State, from Hobbes to Schmitt, posit the transition from a state of nature to a civil state, involving the rule of a sovereign (in the conservative version), or the rule of law (in the liberal version), as a defense against this innate aggressiveness that would be endemic to the state of nature. But Virno says that this transition is never complete; even a sovereignty based on laws still has to declare a “state of exception” in order to maintain its rule; and this state of exception is, in effect, a return to the never-surpassed “state of nature.” The state of exception is a state in which rules are never firm, but are themselves subject to change and reinvention. We move back from the fixed rules to the human situation that gave rise to them in the first place. Though the “state of exception” has often been described as the totalitarian danger of our current situation, it is also a state in which the multitude can itself elaborate new practices and new forms of invention.

The third essay in the book makes a similar argument, in a somewhat simpler form. Sympathy with others of our kind is an innate biological endowment of our species — here Virno makes reference to recent discoveries involving mirror neurons. But language frees us, for both good and ill, from this state of sympathy. Language gives us the power of negation, which is the ability to deny the humanity of the other (the Jew, the “Musselman,” the non-white) and hence to torture and kill them mercilessly. Since there is no possibility of returning to a prelinguistic state, the only solution to this potentiality for evil is to potentialize language to a further level, make it go meta-, have it reflect back on itself, in a “negation of the negation.” The power to objectify and kill is also the power to heal, to establish “reciprocal recognition.” Just as the state of exception is the ambivalent locus both of tyrannical imposition and of democratic redemption, so the potentiality of language is the ambivalent locus both of murderous destruction and of the elaboration of community, or of the multitude.

But both these essays are little more than footnotes to the long central essay, “Jokes and Innovative Action,” that is most of the book. Virno rather curiously takes Freud’s book on jokes as his primary text, despite disclaiming any interest in the Freudian theory of the unconscious. All his examples of jokes come from Freud; but he reclassifies these jokes in terms of their status as public acts of expression (“performative utterances” in a way, though precisely they do not positively refer back to institutions in the way that a performative utterance like “I sentence you to a year in prison” does), as gestures that disrupt the “normal” functioning of a rule, and as “paralogisms” (logical fallacies, or defective syllogisms).

The point behind all these classifications is a Wittgensteinian one. Most of the time, in “normal” situations, we apply rules to concrete situations unproblematically. But in fact a rule is never sufficient to dictate how it is to be applied in any situation whatsoever — any attempt to do so involves making a second rule to explain how to apply the first rule, then a third rule to explain how to apply the second rule, and so on in any infinite regress. There is always an incommensurability between abstract rules and pragmatic acts of applying those rules. We have to appeal, as Wittgenstein says, to actual practices in a given “form of life.” But these forms of life are themselves subject to change. A joke is a disruptive intervention in this process; it introduces an “aberrant” application of a rule, thus exposing to view the inherent incommensurability between rule and application. It throws us back upon the “form of life” in which the language game of which the rule is a part is embedded. It exposes the contingency of the form of life, the way it could be otherwise. It returns us to what Wittgenstein calls “the common behavior of humankind.”

Virno interprets this “common behavior” to be our species-specific biological endowment (basic “human nature”) — or with the “regularities” of human behavior that ultimately underlie all rules, but which explicit rules cannot fully encompass. The gap between an explicit rule and the way we can apply it refers back to this prior gap between rules and the regularities upon which they are based, but which they are never able to encompass. This is in turn the case because Virno — as we have seen –defines basic human, species-specific and biological regularities not as a fixed “nature” but precisely as an underdetermination, a reservoir of potentiality — something whose incompleteness can only be given fixed form by the still-more-indeterminate, and still-more-open-to-potentiality, power of language. Language is what fixes our biological potentiality into specific forms, but it is also (as jokes witness) what allows us to rupture any given fixity, and reconfigure things otherwise. Wittgenstein’s return to the “regularity” of empirically-observed human nature as the court of last appeal for what cannot be guaranteed or grounded by rational argument is also a kind of return to the state-of-exception-as-state-of-nature, or to the moment of emergece when language first emerges out of our innate drives, both reshaping and giving form to these drives, and opening them up to a still more radical indeterminacy.

Virno claims that this is what is happening, in miniature, in jokes when they twist intentions and laws, multiply meanings, and turn seemingly fixed principles into their opposites, or into sheer absurdity. He therefore takes the joke as a miniaturized version, or as a paradigm case, of innovation and creativity in general. The way that jokes play with and disrupt previously fixed and accepted meanings, is a small version of the way that any form of social innovation or creativity alters relations that were previously taken for granted or seen as fixed.

Ultimately, Virno says that jokes and all forms of social innovation play on the indeterminacy between grammatical statements and empirical statements — an indeterminacy that is the major focus of Wittgenstein’s last writing, collected in the volume On Certainty. Wittgenstein says, on the one hand, that certain statements are not in themselves either true or false — because they express the presuppositions that we are already taking for granted and pointing back to when we make any judgment of truth or falsity. For Wittgenstein, it is a weird category error to assert the truth of a statement like “I know that I have two hands” — because we do not “know” this, so much as we already presuppose it whenever we learn something, or come to know something. My sense of having two hands is precognitive (which is precisely why I do not have to check all the time to make sure that I really do have two hands, neither more nor less).

On the other hand, however, and at the same time, Wittgenstein says that this pre-knowledge is not absolute. Over time, there can be shifts in which sorts of statements are empirical ones (that can be true or false), and which statements are foundational or grammatical ones (already presupposed in an act of cognition). I might lose one of my hands in a horrible accident, for instance. Or some empirical fact might become so central to my understanding of everything that it would come to take on the form of a pre-assumed (grammatical) statement, rather than a merely empirical one. These things can and do change over the course of time. One language game morphs or mutates into a different one. For Virno, this is where social innovation takes place. Jokes are the simplest example of such a process of change: one in which “an openly ‘fallacious’ conjecture… reveals in a flash a different way of applying the rules of the game” (163), and thereby changes the nature of the game altogether, or allows us to stop playing one game and to play a different one instead. Virno expands this reading, in order to suggest that it really comprises a theory of crisis in Wittgenstein, so that his naturalism is something more than just a passive cataloging of various “forms of life” — something which he says is “stubbornly ignored by all of Wittgenstein’s scholars” (163).

How useful and convincing is all of this? To my mind, the best part of Virno’s argument is the last thing I mentioned: his parsing of Wittgenstein on the shadowy and always-changing boundary between the “grammatical” and the “empirical.” I think that this is a more informal and naturalistic version of what Deleuze calls “transcendental empiricism.” At any given moment there is a transcendental field that determines what is possible and what is not, and that delineates for us the shape of the empirical (which cannot be interpreted without it). At the same time, this “transcendental field” is not only not an absolute (in Kant’s language, as transcendental it is precisely not transcendent), but is itself something that has an empirical genesis within time, and that varies through time. (This is the point that I was trying to make in a previous posting: capitalism arises entirely contingently, but once it has imposed itself it takes on the shape of a transcendental, circumscribing both what we can experience, and how we can experience it).

Now, doubtless this always-open possibility of shifting the boundary between the empirical and the transcendental, or of turning one into the other, is where creativity and innovation are located. The bad, or mainstream, interpretation of Kant is the one that always insists upon the necessity of separating the transcendental (the regulative, the norm) from the empirical — that is how you get Habermas, for instance. A much better Kantianism is the one — it can be found explicitly in Lyotard, for instance; and I argue that it also works implicitly in Whitehead and in Deleuze) — that sees the gap or incommensurability between the transcendental/regulative and the empirical not as a barrier, so much as a space that is sufficiently open as to allow for innovative transformation.

So, to this extent I find Virno’s formulations (including his reading of Wittgenstein) extremely useful. But I also find Virno’s discussion curiously bland and incomplete, and this because of its failure (due to its “naturalistic” orientation?) to say enough either about aesthetics, or about political economy. I think, on the one hand, that the view of creativity and innovation implicit in Virno’s discussion needs to be thought at greater length within the framework of a post-Kantian aesthetics, and that this aesthetics needs to be affirmed precisely against the temptation (all too common in current academic discourse) to render it in “ethical” terms. (I won’t say more about this here, because it is the implicit argument of my entire book on Whitehead and Deleuze). On the other hand, I find Virno’s silence on matters of political economy quite disappointing in someone who explicitly presents himself as a Marxist or post-Marxist philosopher. Rather than deepening a sense of how we might understand the “multitude” in the framework of contemporary global capitalism, Virno opts for a much vaguer, and context-free, understanding of how social and cultural change is possible. He prefers to speak in terms of the State, and of the foundations of law and sovereignty, than in terms of modes and relations of production. I know my position here is an unpopular one, but I am enough of a “vulgar Marxist” to think that these sorts of political-philosophy distinctions are too vague and abstract to have any sort of traction when they are separated from “economic” considerations. (Again, this is an argument that needs to be pursued at greater length than I have the time or the patience to do here).

But the limitations of Virno’s argument in this respect are most evident when he discusses the forms of social change. Basically, he lists two. One of them is “exodus”: the Israelites, faced with the choice between submitting to the Pharaoh and rebelling against him, instead make the oblique move of leaving Egypt altogether. This for Virno is the exemplary situation of changing the parameters of what is possible, changing the rules of the game instead of just moving within an already-given game or form of life. The obvious reference, beyond the Bible, is to the Italian “autonomist” movement of the 1960s/1970s, which is the point of origin for Virno’s thought just as it is for Negri’s. Now, much as I admire the emphasis on obliqueness rather than dialectical oppositions, I also suspect that the idea of “exouds” is a too easy one — in the sense that, when capitalism subsumes all aspects of contemporary life, outside the factory as well as inside, it is as difficult actually to find a point of exodus as it is easy to make the declaration that one is doing so. “Lateral thinking” is a business buzzword more than an anti-capitalist strategy. Things like “open software” and “creative commons” copyright licenses are not anywhere near as radical as they sound — if anything, they not only coexist easily with a capitalist economy, but presuppose a capitalist economy for their functioning. All too often, what we celebrate as escapes from the capitalist machine in fact work as comfortable niches within it.

But Virno’s other form of change, “innovation,” is even more problematic. It seems to me to be symptomatic that Virno introduces his discussion of what he calls entrepreneurial innovation with the disclaimer that this involves “a meaning of the term ‘entrepreneur’ that is quite distinct from the sickening an odious meaning of the word that is prevalent among the apologists of the capitalist mode of production” (148); and yet, immediately after this caveat, he goes on to explain what he means by “entrepreneurial innovation” by referring to the authority of Joseph Schumpeter, the one theorist of the entire 20th century who is most responsible for the “sickening and odious” meaning that Virno ostensibly rejects. Virno insists that, for Schumpeter, “it would be a mistake to confuse the entrepreneur with the CEO of a capitalistic enterprise, or even worse, with its owner.” This is because, for Schumpeter, entrepreneurism is “a basically human aptitude… a species-specific faculty.” However, this disclaimer will not stand. On the one hand, the entrepreneur is not the same as the CEO or owner, only because the former refers to a moment of “invention,” whereas the latter refers to an already-established enterprise. When the businessman ceases to innovate actively, and instead simply reaps the fruits of his market dominance, then he has become a CEO instead of an entrepreneur. Bill Gates was a Schumpeterian entrepreneur in the 1970s; by the 1990s he had become just another CEO. The owners of Google, whose innovations surpassed those of Microsoft, are now making the same transition. Even if the entrepreneur is not yet a CEO, his actions are only intelligible in the framework of a capitalist economy. If the entrepreneur is successful, then he inevitably becomes a CEO. To say that Schumpeterian entrepreneurship is a basic human aptitude is precisely to say (as Virno doesn’t want to say) that capitalism is intrinsic to, and inevitablely a part of, human nature. (My own commentary on Schumpeter is available here).

I think that Virno’s reference to Schumpeter is symptomatic, because it offers the clearest example of how he fumbles what seems to me to be one of the great issues of our age: which is, precisely, how to disarticulate notions of creativity and innovation and the New from their current hegemony in the business schools and in the ways that actually-existing capitalism actually functions. VIrno fails to work through this disarticulation, precisely because he has already preassumed it. I myself don’t claim by any means to have solved this problem — the fact that we can neither give up on innovation, creativity, and the New, nor accept the way that the relentless demand for them is precisely the motor that drives capitalism and blocks any other form of social and economic organization from being even minimally thinkable — but I feel that Virno fails to acknowledge it sufficiently as a problem. In consequence, for all that his speculation in this book offers a response to the Hobbesian or Schmittian glorification of the State, it doesn’t offer any response to the far more serious problem of our subordination to the relentless machinery, or monstrous body, of capital accumulation.

Doktor Sleepless

The text of the talk I gave about Warren Ellis‘s in-progress comic book series Doktor Sleepless at last month’s New Narrative conference in Toronto has now been published in the backmatter of the latest issue (#7) of the comic. I’m thrilled, as this is my first ever publication in comics.

Reinventing the Sacred (Stuart Kauffman)

Stuart A. Kauffman’s Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion recapitulates many of the ideas about the role of emergence in biology that were worked out in Kauffman’s earlier books (At Home in the Universe and Investigations), but also tries to place these ideas within a broader philosophical focus. Ultimately, Kauffman hopes to repair the breach between reason and emotion, or between science and culture, or between a naturalistic worldview and one that emphasizes spirituality.

It’s really a question of how we get there from here. Kauffman, who has long been associated with the Santa Fe institute, draws upon complexity theory in order to elucidate the role of emergence in biological processes. Working with computer simulations rather than with actual organisms, he has sought to show how, given the right conditions, autocatalytic loops might have emerged out of a primary soup of organic chemicals, and how such a process might have contributed to the origin of life. He has pioneered the idea that living organisms, and the environments they interact with, might exist in a zone of “criticality” in between excessive stability, on the one hand, and excessive chaotic tendencies, on the other. And he argues that the emergence of spontaneous, self-generated order — “order for free” — plays a major role in evolution, alongside natural selection. All these themes from Kauffman’s earlier books are recapitulated in the course of Reinventing the Sacred.

Kauffman is thus one of the few scientists who challenges the neodarwinist consensus that is endorsed by the overwhelming majority of contemporary biologists. Alongside Kauffman, one could also list Lynn Margulis (theories about the role of symbiosis in evolution), Stephen Jay Gould (both for punctual evolution, and for his insistence, together with Richard Lewontin, on the importance of exaptation), Susan Oyama and her colleagues (Developmental Systems Theory), Humberto Maturana and Francesco Varela (autopoiesis), James Lovelock (the Gaia hypothesis), Jean-Jacques Kupiec and Pierre Sonigo (who deploy Darwinian selectionism against genetic determinism). One might also mention recent attempts, from within the neodarwinist framework, to rehabilitate the idea of group selection (e.g. David Sloan Wilson), to insist upon the continuing importance of embryology and development, rather than seeing these as a mere matter of implementing what is already coded in the DNA (e.g., the work of Mary Jane West-Eberhard on developmental plasticity, and other work in so-called “Evo-Devo”), and to show the importance of non-adaptive “genetic drift” (e.g. Michael Lynch). These numerous strands of recent biological theory differ greatly among themselves; and they also differ in terms of the degrees to which they are conciliable with, or in opposition to, mainstream neodarwinism. Also, these strands are not themselves all mutually compatible; and it is too early to judge the extent to which any of them stand or fall. But together they point to the fact that the neodarwinian synthesis has not altogether disposed of philosophical questions about “life.” It is possible to take issue with neodarwinist reductionism without thereby slipping into vitalism or creationism. Darwin’s legacy remains richer and stranger than is accounted for in current mainstream discourses of genetic determinism and evolutionary psychology.

Kauffman is one of those scientists who strongly insists that the neodarwinian synthesis leaves far too much out of account. Reinventing the Sacred moves from biological speculations to a broader attack on the very notion of scientific reductionism. Kauffman insistd that biological emergence (and other forms of emergence in the natural and social/cultural worlds, for that matter) leads to the existence of phenomena that cannot be accounted for or predicted on the basis of physical laws alone. Nothing in biology contradicts the laws of physics; but the biological world does not follow from the laws of physics in themselves, and cannot entirely be described or understood in terms of those laws. Even in principle, a perfect knowledge of the positions and velocities of all the particles in the universe (Laplace’s demon) would not suffice to determine the future. For the future is open and unpredictable. The universe is characterized by a “persistent creativity,” operating on all scales and in all contexts, but especially where there is life. This creativity cannot be accounted for in terms of natural laws, and elementary particles and forces. It will not be comprehended within whatever supposed “theory of everything” the physicists manage to come up with (if they ever do). Kauffman is arguing very much in the tradition of Bergson and Whitehead (though, unfortunately, he never mentions these thinkers, and doesn’t seem to know anything about them), and Ilya Prigogine.

Reinventing the Sacred is mostly concerned with “breaking the Galilean spell” that has held us in its thrall for something like four hundred years. Even complexity theory, with its understanding of “deterministic chaos,” involving abrupt, nonlinear changes from one phase state or basin of attraction to another, does not break with the logic of linear causality and mechanistic determinism. It is still “fully lawful” (in the sense of scientific laws — 141). Kauffman claims, however, that what he calls “Darwinian preadaptation” — by which he means pretty much the same thing as Gould and Lewontin do by exaptation, a word that Kauffman oddly does not use — does indeed break with such a logic. In taking already-existing phenotypic features and detourning them to new uses, organisms explore what Kauffman calls the “adjacent possible,” and thereby expand the range of actuality in unforeseen and unforeseeable ways. For “Darwinian preadaptations appear to preclude even sensible probability statements” (139). This is because judging probabilities requires knowing at least the “sample space” within which all possible outcomes are contained. But biological innovation (and cultural innovation as well) changes the very shape of this space itself. It doesn’t just choose among already-existing possibilities, but changes or expands what is possible.

I think that a lot of this resonates with Whitehead’s speculations on creativity and innovation, and with Deleuze’s notion of the virtual or potential (and how it differs from the merely possible). But this in turn brings up the entire question of how to relate science and philosophy. Whitehead and Deleuze are opposed, as Kauffman is, to scientific reductionism: that is to say, they are opposed to the claim that the reduction of mental experiences to neural firings, and of physical phenomena to elementary particles and forces is all there is. As I say in my Whitehead book:

Against all reductionism, Whitehead insists that â€œwe may not pick and choose. For us the red glow of the sunset should be as much part of nature as are the molecules and electrical waves by which men of science would explain the phenomenonâ€ (1920/2004, 29). The phenomenologist only considers the red glow of the sunset; the physicist only considers the mechanics of electromagnetic radiation. But Whitehead insists upon a metaphysics that embraces both. For â€œphilosophy can exclude nothingâ€ (1938/1968, 2).

The problem is not with scientific explanations in themselves, whose truth we can and should accept. The problem is only with thinking that these lower-level scientific explanations are ultimate and exhaustive, so that “higher-level” sorts of explanation can be entirely reduced to them — as E. O. Wilson claims with his notion of consilence, or as Paul and Patricia Churchland do with their notion of eliminative materialism. In other words, the problem comes when the low-level scientific explanation is accepted as what really is the case, and everything else is regarded as illusion or mere appearance. (This ironically reinstates the old reality/appearance distinction that scientific empiricism was supposed to get rid of once and for all). Now, it is unclear to me that this really makes much of a difference to the way that working scientists actually do their research. It only comes up when those scientists sit back and reflect upon their research in a non-experimental context — or when philosophers like the Churchlands, or armchair cultural speculators like myself, ask meta-questions about such research. But such speculations are themselves inevitable and unavoidable — it is impossible to separate “pure science” from them. The result is, we are left in a kind of circle. And Kauffman’s generous speculations are certainly welcome in contrast to Wilson’s “scientific imperialism,” his reductionist attempt to subordinate all other forms of understanding and inquiry to his particular kind of science.

At the same time, of course, we need to beware of the trap of taking Deleuze or Whitehead as an absolute starting point, and judging scientific theories on the basis of how well they conform to an already-existing philosophical argument. Both Whitehead and Deleuze were keenly interested in the science of their times, and both of them sought to create a metaphysics that was in tune with that science. This was (is) a two-way process. Both Whitehead and Deleuze insist that there is no such thing as positivistic, value-free science; all empirical research presupposes a background of theories, assumptions, and already-accepted facts. There is no physics free of metaphysics. Whithead and Deleuze therefore both strive to provide a metaphysics that will be adequate to the needs of modern science; but this does not mean that they claim, in the Kantian manner, to stipulate in advance the necessary and sufficient conditions for all knowledge (scientific or otherwise). This is part of what it means to say that they are (as Deleuze put it) “transcendental empiricists” rather than Kantian transcendental idealists. As the metaphysical process of what Whitehead calls generalization or speculation proceeds, it must continually test itself and modify itself in accordance with the developments of scientific knowledge (and other sorts of knowledge), even as it resists the exclusivist or imperialist claims that arise from, or are made on behalf of, these developments of knowledge.

To get back to Kauffman: given his interest in the role of creativity in the universe, and particularly in life processes, it’s really too bad that he seems entirely unaware of Whitehead. It is all too easy for me to translate Kauffman’s formulations into Whiteheadian terms; but I’d like to get more of a sense of how Kauffman’s speculations might allow us to modify or ‘update’ Whitehead. The weakest aspect of Kauffman’s book is his attempt to move from science to philosophy: there is a sense in which his philosophical musings are just too simplistic, or “naive.” When he gets beyond the technical details of his computer simulations, Kauffman is way too eager just to make a “leap of faith” into an embrace of teleological and spiritual concerns. There’s a lot of blather in the book about the wisdom of past civilizations, and the need to construct a “global ethic,” and far too little a sense of what it means to engage in speculation.

Now, when I say that Kauffman’s claims are largely speculative, this is not a criticism, because I do not share the positivist sense that speculation is unacceptable and that we must confine ourselves to hard empirical evidence and legitimate induction from such evidence. As Whitehead says, “the Baconian method of induction… if consistently pursued, would have left science where it found it.” A certain amount of speculation is necessary, if we are to discover or invent anything at all. Kauffman is indeed unique among contemporary scientists because of the degree to which his research has been almost entirely speculative — his work has largely consisted, as I have already noted, in running computer simulations of biological processes, rather than looking at any actual organisms. This is precisely why his claims about emergent order have been ignored, rejected, or dismissed as incomprehensible by the vast majority of biological researchers. But it’s also why his suggestions are important, for any effort actually to think the biological in terms that go beyond genetic determinism and strict adaptationism.

However, some of Kauffman’s speculations in Reinventing the Sacred are just too tenuous, too lame. This is especially the case when he spends a chapter proposing a quantum model of the brain — one that differs from Roger Penrose’s better-known proposal, but that shares with it an argument that quantum indeterminacy could account for brain processes that are non-deterministic, and (especially) non-algorithmic. This is a case where Kauffman protests way too much — every step in his tortuous line of reasoning is qualified by statements like, “the hypothesis… is not at all ruled out” (211), certain factors “may remain available” according to his particular scenario (212), “perhaps something similar” is happening in a completely different realm from the one in which a particular kind of pattern has been noted (214), “it may always be the case” that such and such a process can take place (219), and so on at embarrassing length. In effect, Kauffman is constructing a Rube Goldberg machine to account for a process — let’s call it “decision” or “choice” — that classic determinism cannot explain, but only explain away. This seems utterly misguided to me — it makes far more sense just to accept, as a primary datum, recent observations about, for instance, fruit flies making unconstrained, undetermined decisions, than to go through Kauffman’s barely plausible chain of inferences and pleadings in order to allow for such a possibility.

The trouble, in a case like this, is that Kauffman’s speculations are simply not speculative enough. There needs to be some middle way between Kauffman’s appeal to a tortuous chain of reasoning on the one hand, and delirious invocations of cosmic forces on the other. It is especially noteworthy, and symptomatic, that Kauffman pulls off his explanation by appealing to quantum mechanics. It strikes me that the appeal to quantum indeterminacy, to give a scientific explanation of some otherwise unaccountable phenomenon, is a sort of get-out-of-jail-free-card to be used on all occasions when one cannot come up with anything else, or anything better. The same thing happens, for instance, in Greg Egan’s novel Teranesia — except Egan pulls out his quantum trump card in defense of neodarwinist reductionism, while Kauffman does so in defence of anti-reductionism.

In any case, for all that Kauffman is a speculative biologist (and, again, I am using this in a laudatory rather than dismissive sense), he fails to realize how his own mode of speculation is itself an example of the creative process that he sees at work throughout the biosphere, and perhaps the entire physical universe. Even though he has in effect abandoned the “scientific method,” he remains overly attached to “hard” factual claims, rather than understanding the continual play between what Whitehead calls “stubborn fact” and the way that, as Whitehead also says, “there is not a sentence, or a word, with a meaning which is independent of the circumstances under which it is uttered”, so that “every proposition proposing a fact must, in its complete analysis, propose the general character of the universe required for that fact.” This is why science must always be accompanied by robust speculation, whether in the form of metaphysics or in that of science fiction.

Dr. Franklin’s Island

Dr. Franklin’s Island, a young adult science fiction novel by Ann Halam, is a contemporary rewrite of H. G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau. (“Ann Halam” is the pseudonym used by the British SF writer Gwyneth Jones for her YA fiction. There’s been a lot of discussion in the blogosphere recently, initially spurred by John Scalzi, about the virtues and limitations of fiction written for “young adults,” i.e. teenagers. I agree with Scalzi that there is a lot of interesting speculative fiction being written for teens nowadays. I am not sure what the reasons are. But works by Halam, and by Philip Pullman, Scott Westerfeld, M. T. Anderson, and others, are as interesting as any of the adult SF that has been published recently. Writers like China Mieville and Cory Doctorow have also recently published excellent YA books).

Dr. Franklin’s Island tells the story of three teenagers marooned after a plane crash on an island off the coast of Ecuador. At first, the island seems to be uninhabited. But it turns out that the island contains a large research facility, hidden in the middle of the island, in the caldera of an extinct volcano. Here Doctor Franklin secretly pursues transgenic experiments. He has an odd menagerie of animals whose DNA has been altered to give them incongruous and disturbing human traits (bats with human legs, pigs with human faces instead of snouts, and so on). The teenagers are captured and imprisoned by Dr. Franklin, who uses them (without their consent) as test subjects for transgenic experiments in the reverse direction: he grafts them with various animal traits. Semirah, the narrator, is transformed into a fish, something like a manta ray; her friends become, respectively, a bird and a snake. (it’s significant, I think, that Dr. Franklin not only dehumanizes them, but de-mammalizes them as well. Turning the teens into dogs or tigers, or even rats or pigs, would not be alien, and alienating, enough).

There are several noteworthy things about Halam’s treatment of the story. The book expresses the wonder, as well as the horror, of metamorphosis. Semirah is kidnapped, imprisoned, and forced against her will to be the subject of grotesque and dangerous medical experiments. She finds this both horrific and depressing. The psychological and physical stress of the experience creates feelings of abject dependency, and pushes her or tempts her into something like the Stockholm Syndrome. Yet she never fully succumbs to these feelings; she retains a strong desire to escape from her confinement, and to return to her original human form. Yet at the same time, there is something wondrous about her transformation into a fish. Her body has a new form, with new sorts of perceptions, and new powers to affect and to be affected; and she finds a certain joy in discovering all the things that her fish-body can do, and in exercising her new powers to the fullest. She retains her human consciousness and perceptions, alongside her new fishy consciousness and perceptions. These do not become fused, but they also do not line up against each other in any sort of dualistic split. Rather, within limits, she is able to flip back and forth between fish-awareness and human-awareness, translating each into the terms of the other. She cannot speak, as her lungs and larynx have been altered, but the speech centers of her brain are intact, and (thanks to an implanted microchip) she can converse “telepathically” with her friends in the forms of bird and snake. There is always a slippage back and forth between the human and animal poles of the teens’ mentality; but they never slip entirely to the animal pole, despite Dr. Franklin’s expectation that this might happen. Animal genes have been inserted into their bodies’ cells, alongside the human genes they previously possessed; but there is no certainty as to which genes will be expressed, and which will be turned off or blocked from functioning. At the end of the book, the teens escape and regain their human forms; but they return to “normal” life knowing that they are different, that the genetic potential for animal metamorphosis is still present in their bodies, and could be triggered again given the right circumstances (and, hopefully, only when they are willing for this to happen).

It is hard to think radical metamorphosis, because once I undergo such an experience, I am no longer the same “I” that I was before the metamorphosis happened. What does it mean to “will” something that changes the very nature of the one who wills? Halam is deeply sensitive to this problem, as she differentiates unequivocally — and on firm ethical grounds — between coercion and consent, while at the same time she shows how slippery and uncertain “consent” can be. The book expresses the preciousness of being human, and of being able to speak as we alone are able to do; but it also expresses the preciousness of fish-being or bird-being, the sense of life-possibilities which need not be confined to the human. Or, to put this in another way: the book takes embodiment seriously. All thought is embodied, and it differs as its embodiment differs. At best, the transgenic is also a transductive and transversal experience: it doesn’t fuse different modes of being, but continually puts one in relation to the other, transports feelings and things from one to the other as it moves back and forth and in between. (Writing of Proust, Deleuze compares transversality to looking out of different windows of a moving train; Halam perhaps creates a more radically apt metaphor for the process). In any case, nothing would be more wrong than to read Dr. Franklin’s Island as a tale of liberating deterritorialization followed by a sad return to all too human reterritorialization. For both becoming-animal and becoming-human-again are simultaneously both re- and de- territorializations; the point is the moving-between. Semirah is glad to escape from confinement, and to return to human form and to her family; but on the very last page she continues to dream about “breathing water and swimming through the music of the ocean… having a skeleton of supple cartilage instead of brittle bone… feeling my whole body as one soaring, gliding, sweeping wing.” This could never be the dream of a manta ray, nor of an entirely territorialized and domesticated human being; but only the dream of a transgenic being, a human-become-fish-become human hybrid entity. Dr. Franklin’s Island expresses this dream and this beauty, at the same time that it recounts the terror of a technoscience that seeks absolute domination, and that instrumentally treats human beings only as “experimental subjects.”

It should also be noted, in this regard, that Dr. Franklin is not portrayed as a maniac, or a raving. megalomaniacal dictator, or a traditional “mad scientist.” It is rather precisely his cold rationality that makes him creepy (and evil). Even when the teens try to escape, or when underlings deceive and even betray him, he never breaks out into a rage. Rather, he sees this behavior as a new source of experimental data, as more useful fodder for his research. He absorbs challenges to his mastery by reasserting that mastery on a meta-level. In a certain sense, this makes him more “inhuman” than any of his victims. Even as a lone experimenter, he is technoscience or bureaucratic, corporate science personified (in much the same way that Marx sees an individual capitalist as Capital personified). Indeed, it turns out, in one of the book’s most brilliant ironies, that Dr. Franklin is utterly devoid of any Nietzschean or extropian fantasies of transcending the human. Rather, he hopes to sell his transgenic formula “to an exotic holiday company… Imagine it. You take a pill, or a couple of injections. Like being vaccinated… You wake up in a five-star underwater hotel, on your ocean safari. Or in some kind of luxury cliffside flying lodge, on the wall of the Grand Canyon. Spend two weeks exploring the deep ocean, or flying like a bird, then go through the same thing in reverse” (170-171). The real opposition in the book isn’t between human and animal, or even between freedom and containment. It’s between desire and technoscience, or between the dream of metamorphosis and the commodification of all possible experience in the form of a business plan.

Proxies

Laura Mixon’s SF novel Proxies was published a decade ago, but I only just got around to reading it. It is a compelling book, filled with ideas — mostly about robotics, virtuality, and telepresence — that are played out in a semi-dystopian setting. It is the mid-21st century. Global warming has become catastrophic; but in the US, the affluent adapt to the heat and live their lives much as before, using “canopies” and “cool suits” to reduce the effect of the extreme heat, and fortifying the borders against the global poor from the even hotter countries, who have tried to storm the US as refugees. Technologies involving electronic communications, “syntellects” (artificial intelligence) and “waldos” (robots) continue to be developed, often in secret and with enormous funding from the military and other arms of the government. (There is also an interstellar exploration project underway, which ends up playing an important part in the plot).

The “proxies” of the book’s title are a new breed of robot, nearly indistinguishable from human beings in appearance, but with far greater strength and a wider range of sensory capabilities. They are not autonomous machines, however; a proxy needs to be “piloted” by an actual human being. You lay yourself down in a “creche,” a sort of isolation chamber, a coffin-like enclosure with a nutrient bath, feeding and breathing tubes, and various electronic connections: the sensations of your actual body are pretty much shut down, and instead you operate the proxy body, feeling its physical sensations, moving and acting with its limbs and organs. In effect, you have physical telepresence elsewhere. The technology is a government/military secret; it is extremely expensive. Most people not only lack access to it, they don’t even know it exists. The general population is forced to make do with much cruder, less immersive and less satisfying, sorts of telepresence.

Mixon imagines life via proxy with great care and detail. Most importantly, she insists upon the glitches in the process: all those things that prevent the technology from being altogether seamless. For instance, sensation in your actual body is never entirely cut off; in moments of stress or high emotion you are especially prone to feeling things in your creche body rather than your proxy one: you cry, or breathe fast, or are shaken with spasms of fear. Also there is a certain degree of lag in the actions and responses of the proxy: you are never quite as fast and coordinated as you are in your own flesh. This is partly because of transmission delays (net latency), and partly because of the way our neurons are wired (we’ve “learned” from early childhood how to make our own limbs move; but making the proxy’s limbs move involve slightly different connections that we aren’t as accustomed to, so they aren’t as smoothly and thoroughly automatic). The lag is only a matter of milliseconds, but there are times when this is enough to be significant. The difference from primary physical reality becomes disorienting and disturbing in the long run. A pilot may stay in his or her proxy for a number of days, or weeks; but eventually there’s a need for some psychological and physical rehab in one’s own actual flesh. Excessive piloting can lead to a psychotic breakdown.

Proxies are used to accomplish tasks in the real world — often tasks beyond the physical capacities of unenhanced human beings. But they are also open to various sorts of play, as when you pilot a proxy with a different gender than your own “actual” one. (I wish there had been more of this in the novel; as it stands, Mixon just teases us with the prospect). The remote physicality of the proxy allows for an intensity that merely virtual presence cannot quite match (full-immersion virtuality is itself a commonplace in the world of the novel, but it is more limited, more evanescent, and less satisfying than proxy telepresence).

However, the drama of the novel turns upon a still further, and more extreme, technological twist. Proxies are a secret technology; but there is another level of experimentation, a secret within the secret. The scientist in charge of the project recruits, or adopts, small children to be the ideal proxy pilots. The ethics of doing this are questionable, and are debated at great length throughout the novel. The scientist justifies her experiments on the grounds that the recruits are young children with severely damaged immune systems, who could not expect to live very long in the ordinary world. Instead, they spend their entire physical lives in the sterile and low-gravity environment of creches in an orbital space station. Their bodies atrophy, or never grow to normal adult dimensions, but their isolation and chemical treatment keeps them free from infection; and their entire lived experience is through their proxies. The scientist theorizes that, growing up in this way, without any direct physical experience to contradict their virtual lives, these pilots’ neurons will be wired optimally for their proxy bodies, and they will not suffer from the disorientation and deprivation that adult proxy pilots are always in danger of.

The scientist turns out to be only partially correct. The child-pilots do turn out to optimize their neural organization for life by proxy, and they are able to achieve precision tasks with their proxies that adult pilots are incapable of. Growing up in so highly prosthetic an environment, they also develop computer programming skills far beyond those of adult programmers. And they do not develop the sorts of depressive psychoses that adult pilots with overly extensive exposure do. They are attuned to the prosthetic, and to multiplicity — the ability to switch between several proxy bodies — in a way that people who grow up with their “own” bodies can never be.

But, of course, there turns out to be a price to pay for all this. The creche children somehow never become “mature” (I am using the quotes just in order not to be pinned down to too explicit a definition of just what “mature” might mean). They exist in a permanent state of emotional dependency upon “Mother” (as they think of, and call, the scientist who has “adopted” them). They look to her desperately for approval, carry out her commands, endure her erratic mood swings and violent outbursts of anger, and accept the punishments she burdens them with when they have not properly fulfilled her orders. All this could be thought of as pre-Oedipal regression (or as never having reached an Oedipal state at all); though I don’t think the novel necessarily enforces so psychoanalytic a reading (psychoanalytic theorists may argue that the absence of the father has much to do with the failure of the children to attain autonomy, but the novel never thematizes such a reading, either positively or negatively. One of the “normal” human protagonists does have a strained relationship with her father, however). One of the most emotionally telling moments in the novel — it’s an image that absolutely haunted me — comes when Pablo, the creche child who is one of the book’s protagonists, sits (via proxy, of course) in Mother’s lap (she is also in proxy), and immediately, unthinkingly, starts to suck his thumb (his proxy is adult-sized, and he is 15 or 16 years old). The creche/proxy children are intellectually advanced, but emotionally crippled and blocked.

What’s more, although the creche children do not suffer from the alienating effects of the gap between telepresence and “immediate” presence, they are also (or thereby?) unable to deal with any sort of ambivalence — and this creates gaps of its own. Although the creche children do not suffer from the psychotic disintegration (or dephasing between physical body and proxy) to which adult pilots are prone, they tend to develop, instead, something like Multiple Personality Syndrome. Pablo shares his body with Buddy, who hates Mother as desperately as Pablo loves her; further splits occur in the course of the narrative; and by the end we get to meet Pablito, the little boy who was separated from his birth mother and placed in the creche to begin with, and who is the initial “personality” whose primordial trauma is at the base of the split (as is generally the case in MPS narratives). Pablo and Buddy are sometimes together piloting a single proxy, but at other times they pilot separately. Since they are both ultimately driven by raw pulsions (as the French call them) rather than integrated or “sublimated” emotions, they are unable to compromise or to deflect conflict.

I am perhaps putting the “psychology” of the novel in more Freudian terms than the author would necessarily wish. The originality of the novel has to do, however, with the way that these “pre-Oedipal” conflicts are, precisely, symptoms of technology. Mixon does not suggest any such thing as a “natural,” pre-prosthetic, unalienated state. Like Donna Haraway, she evidently prefers the status of the cyborg to that of the goddess. Prosthetics are a matter of degree, and nobody is entirely free of them. The sense, therefore, is less that of a regression in development, in the Freudian sense, than it is one of psychotechnology, of the ways in which our prosthetic technologies (of any sort, because these technologies are themselve constitutive of what we mean by “humanity”), together with their political and economic circumstances, shape and affect our psyches. The novel ends, not by trying to restore “symbolic efficacy” or to push the creche children onto a more “normal” or “complete” developmental path, but precisely by suggesting that their “line of flight” needs to be pushed to its own extreme, to become whatever it is capable of being — and this is left deliberately open. Such a (literal and metaphorical) flight can only take place, however, if the creche children can be removed, or liberated, from the economy of the military-industrial complex in which they were initially produced — and the novel literalizes this removal, as well, as the children end up on a flight into deep space with no prospect of return to our own solar system.

In short, Proxies displays the contradictions that lie at the heart of our relation with new technologies, without pretending to resolve them. Telepresence or virtual presence has often been seen, in SF as in philosophy, through the lens of an inveterate dualism. For William Gibson’s Case (in Neuromancer), as for Descartes, the mental is a different order of being from the physical. Indeed, Case pushes Cartesian dualism further than Descartes ever did, since he hates his body and sees the exultation of cyberspace as an escape from that body. Much has been written on this dualism, and on the need to overcome it by understtanding the embodiedness of even the most abstract and virtual technologies. But Mixon gives this whole problem a different inflection. The creche children have a strange misunderstanding, grounded in their own always-proxied experience, of dualism. They cannot think of their proxy embodiments as anything but physical, for it is the very way that they function and participate in the physical world. But they distinguish between bodies (which they understand as finite and limited, as capable of being injured or destroyed) and “flesh” (which means their degree-zero locatedness in the creche, and which they imagine as the indubitable way in which they always exist (like the sense of myself as a “thinking thing” in Descartes). This creche “flesh” is in fact extremely vulnerable and weak — we can see this when we look inside a creche and see the child’s crippled, vestigal form — but the children imagine it as being invulnerable and eternal, that which they will never be without, and to which they will never be merely reduced. They don’t understand death, even (or especially) the death of others: because they imagine it as something that happens only to “bodies” (which can always be replaced; if one is injured or destroyed, all you need to do is move your awareness into a different one), and not to the underlying “flesh.” In this sense, they are not denying embodiment, so much as they are taking it too much for granted.

(Is this not also the error of singularity enthusiasts like Ray Kurzweil, who assume that, once they can upload their minds onto the network, they will live forever? Even if “I” am only software, I still need some hardware, somewhere and somehow, in order to instantiate the program that I am; Kurzweil may hope to distribute copies of his intellect in multiple nodes all over the network, but he will still need the physical presence of the network as a “body” within which alone he can survive. Isn’t Kurzweil more naive than the creche children of Proxies, who at least have some awareness of the physical basis — involving both the creches, and the medications with which they are continually being supplied– for virtual and distant presence, even if they overestimate the security and stability of this physical basis?)

I will cease here, even though I think there is more to be said about this novel, which is often classifed as “cyberpunk” (or perhaps as a feminist revision of cyberpunk) but which actually goes off in new — and still insufficiently theorized — directions.

Some thoughts on “character”

I’ve been thinking for a long time about the following quote from Warren Ellis:

Chris Claremont once said of Alan Moore, “if he could plot, we’d all have to get together and kill him.” Which utterly misses the most compelling part of Alan’s writing, the way he develops and expresses ideas and character. Plot does not define story. Plot is the framework within which ideas are explored and personalities and relationships are unfolded. If all you want is plot, go and read a Tom Clancy novel.

For me, this is a key to understanding genre fiction — or maybe I should just say, fiction in general. Plot is overrated. SF novels and comics and movies and the like where it’s all about the plot, how well it is put together, how if a gun is on the table in Act One, it has to be used in Act Three, and so on, bore the hell out of me. The better and more cleverly it is put together, the more it seems to me to be just a dumb, creaky mechanism which provides neither pleasure nor insight. I know that lots of people (readers/viewers as well as creators) get off on carefully crafted plots; but such things do nothing for me.

Which doesn’t mean that all I want to read is avant-garde novels which have no narrative whatsoever. Fiction entirely devoid of a plot is like movies entirely devoid of sound (i.e., not like “silent films” as they were actually exhibited pre-1928, because they always had musical accompaniment, but silent films shown today without the needed music, or arty silent films that have no soundtrack by choice) — they are extremely difficult to follow, or to keep my attention on, or to have any sort of temporal dimension at all — it is like not having short-term memory, each moment happens and then disappears in a void, never to be recalled or related to anything else. [One of the many brilliant things about Kenneth Anger’s films is how, even if he has no specific soundtrack in mind, he just drops in pop songs almost randomly because that energizes the films somehow, allows us to apprehend the images in their duration better — I love, for instance, the way that silly “things that go bump in the night” song accompanies Pierrot gesturing at the moon (or am I confusing two of his early films?)].

So. Warren is right, I think. Plot has to be there, but only as a “framework” allowing for the development of what really matters: “ideas and character.” Plot is like a medium or an atmosphere, “within which ideas are explored and personalities and relationships are unfolded.” Just like you need the atmosphere in order to live, so you need the plot in order to explore those ideas, and to see those personalities and relationships. But you’ve got to look through the plot, just as you look through the air to see somebody or something. Of course, there are times when the air itself is important (like when there is a tornado, or when it is heavily polluted), and there are certain times when the plot in itself is important. But for the most part, this is a realm in which McLuhan’s “the medium is the message” does not work.

Of course, ideas are important especially in SF; maybe not as much in some other genres. But what I am interested in here is the question of characters, or “personalities and relationships.” It seems to me that this is something very hard to talk about, yet it is an incredibly important part of how we react to fictions, and why we like some of them so much. It’s common to talk about “identification” with a protagonist, but I think this notion is so vague and general that it doesn’t get us very far. Indeed, William Flesch’s Comeuppance argues quite cogently against both the “identification” theory and the Aristotelian notion of an intrinsic human delight in mimesis. Our relations to the characters we encounter in fictional narratives (and to some extent in non-fictional narratives as well) is much more indirect and convoluted than an “identification” theory can account for.

But for the moment I want to think about only a certain subset of the question of characters in narrative. I want to think about the ways in which characters in genre fiction tend to be, well, generic. Or rather, I want to think about why the best and most interesting characters we encounter in fiction are generic ones. The greatest, most memorable, and most enjoyable characters in English-language fiction (leaving aside Shakespeare for the time being) are almost certainly those of Charles Dickens. And Dickens has no interest at all in anything like interiority, or psychological depth, or Freudian unconscious complexes. Of course, these terms are all 20th-century (or at least late-19th-century) ones, so that their application to Dickens could only be anachronistic. But that’s not the crucial point. What I mean is that Dickens’ characters are, in a curious way, indexical. By this I mean that they are each defined by a single trait, or at most by a couple of traits. These traits tend to be exaggerated, even caricatural. And the characters flagrantly exhibit these traits each time we see them — it is almost as if they were machines programmed to exhibit the same tic over and over. Or else, as if they were maniacal exhibitionists, except that the exhibitionism is not felt by the characters themselves, it is only orchestrated by the author.

What I am trying to get at is that Dickens’ characters are, in a certain sense, not “psychological” at all — they are all outer display, not inner depth. And that, far from detracting from either their “realism” or how compelling they are to the reader, it is precisely on account of what I am calling their outwardness, and their indexicality, that they are both naturalistically plausible and emotionally compelling to us. In a curious way, this mode of presenting character is “truer to life” than any degree of introspection or stream-of-consciousness detail could ever possibly be.

Why is this? I’m not entirely sure, but I think it is because Dickens’ indexical style of character presentation is very close to the way that we actually encounter, get impressions of, and judge people in the real world. I’d even say that, not only do we (obviously) not know other people through introspection, but also we do not even know ourselves through introspection. Self-knowledge is the hardest type of knowledge to obtain. I lack the disinterest that would be required in order for me to see myself objectively. And when I do introspect, the more I strain to examine myself, the more blurry and confused I appear to myself, and the less I am able to apprehend myself in any well-delineated way at all. I am unable to objectify myself, to caricature myself, let alone to characterize myself. Introspective fiction, similarly, tends not to be about character at all. It blurs and dissolves character into something else: at best, perhaps into Language or Style, or sometimes Time, in the great modernist novels. (Leopold, Stephen, and Molly are functions of Joyce’s stupendous linguistic inventiveness, rather than the reverse; Proust’s narrator is so profoundly introspective, so drawn into the flows of duration and memory that he scarcely exists as a “character” at all).

When characters are indexical, as they are in Dickens — and as they also are, for example, in classical Hollywood movies, i.e. those from approximately 1930-1960) — they have the odd quality of being both generic and singular. Generic, in the sense that they are all recognizable types. Singular, in that each one has some sort of unique inflection, something that is wholly idiosyncratic. What’s left out is everything in between these two poles: the individualizing characteristics that are less than generic, but more than the mere idiosyncrasies or tics that enable instant recognition.

Here, I am thinking in part of Thomas Wall‘s wonderful discussion of “character actors” in old Hollywood movies:

Character actors are absolutely familiar to us but they never possess “star quality”… [They] never work hard to disguise themselves or to dissolve into a role as in “method” acting. To the contrary, they play their various roles in much the same way, film after film, decade after decade. They are actors who become so familiar because their reality is entirely made up of their various roles such that their mannerisms, habits, looks, vocal tonalities, and gestures all become characteristic and as familiar as the actors themselves remain unfamiliar to us… They always play “types” and they are nothing apart from the types they play… We know them only as images and we see them only as images, that is, as allegories of themselves. Each role is another allegory.

These marvelous actors are therefore singularities… [They] are completely absorbed into the celluloid, the stock, the stereotypes they play so perfectly. They are “types” and they have assumed themselves as such. The character actor cannot be identified with any particular role but neither do they evoke nor express anything other than the role. They have a pure relation to cinema.

Wall describes these character actors as being at the same time “types,” or purely generic, and “singularities” — by which Wall means something like individual instances that can serve as “examples” of some generic quality, but that have no content to them aside from being, in this way, exemplary. A certain character actor cannot be equated with Cowardice or Drunkenness overall — for he is only an individual instance (or instantiation) of one of these generic qualities. He is certainly not the quality in general. This is what makes him singular. But at the same time he is nothing other than a coward or a drunkard — this entirely defines his being. Walter Brennan is never anything more than the Western hero’s old geezer sidekick. Donald Meek is never anything more than the “timid, worrisome, reticent, cowering” figure he plays so often.

Wall is describing Hollywood character actors in explicit contrast to movie stars. Yet I would claim that, in classic Hollywood at least, the stars can also be characterized by this strange combination of the wholly generic and the wholly singular, with nothing in between. Of course, as Wall points out, we recognize the big stars by name, which is not the case with the character actors. But “John Wayne,” “Cary Grant,” and “Katherine Hepburn” are in fact as much generic figures as the character actors are. It is just that the “types” they embody are themselves. You can’t imagine John Wayne playing Hamlet, because whatever role he plays, he is always John Wayne. In each of his roles, Wayne is a singular instance of John-Wayne-ness, nothing more and nothing less. In some of his roles, he is unabashedly heroic, while in others he may even deconstruct his own heroicness (e.g. The Searchers). But even though he is the only instance of the generic type that he embodies, he still appears always, and only, as a singular example of that type.

The telling contrast, I think, is not between character actors and stars, but between the actors of classical Hollywood (significantly, Wall names Thelma Ritter, Elisha Cook Jr., and Thelma Ritter) and those who belong to more recent times, from the “New Hollywood” of the 1970s to today. Today, for the most part, characters are supposed to be specified — they are all supposed to have “plausible” backstories and motivations. This is partly due to the ubiquity of Method Acting (Wall emphasizes how the generic/singular nature of character actors is incompatible with anything like the Method), and partly due to the way screenwriting conventions have changed, or screenwriting has become “rationalized” (this is due in part to screenwriting classes). The idea is that everything in the narrative — every detail, everything about a character — has to be “motivated,” assigned a plausible rationale. The generic is scorned as being cliche — which leads, in fact, to the much worse cliche that everything has its own particular reason for being, incomparable with anything else. In America today, each of us has his or her own “individuality” — and this is precisely the way in which we are all exactly alike, all atomized consumers with our own bundle of “preferences.” The generic and the singular are both repressed, in favor of the in-between ground of busy particularity.

The result of imposing motivation and backstories on everything is that the film’s characters lose their generic quality — and by that fact, they lose their singularity as well. Today’s character actors are completely interchangeable, in a way that Walter Brennan, Donald Meek, Thelma Ritter, etc., were not. They are interchangeable precisely because they are not typecast, but are rather each crafted as an “individual.” The trouble with such “individuals” is that they are not singular; the fact that each of them has his or her individual differences is precisely the characteristic by which they are all the same. And I think this is true of stars as well. Daniel Day-Lewis and Robert Downey Jr. are both totally brilliant actors whose performances I greatly admire. But they aren’t iconic in the way that John Wayne, James Stewart, and Cary Grant were; and this is because they are somehow too immersed in their particular roles, which vary from film to film.

[There are some exceptions to this, of course. The two Toms — Hanks and Cruise — are much more in the tradition of old-style Hollywood iconicity; but I can’t help it, they both seem to me to be completely lame when compared to Stewart or Grant. It may also be that the generic/singular formation can be revived, if not by individual contemporary actors, then by the pairing of such actors, as with the Ed Norton/Brad Pitt doublet of Fight Club. — Also, my old friend Philip Wohlstetter once suggested to me, rightly I think, that part of the brilliance of Titanic was precisely that it had dispensed with post-Method motivation, and gone back to the old Hollywood style of generic typecasting.]

To turn to another type of narrative — science fiction novels — you can see the same sort of contrast if you compare a novel by Philip K Dick to one by a contemporary hard-SF writer like Greg Bear. Nobody praises Dick for his delineation of character; yet part of what makes Dick’s novels so poignant is precisely that his metaphysical and socio-commodified predicaments, and paranoid dislocations, are always experienced by everyman, ordinary-Joe-who-just-wants-to-get-by characters. Joe Chip in Ubik is entirely generic/singular in the ways I have been describing; he has no “depth”. But isn’t this precisely why we feel so drawn in by his struggles, whether he is being shaken down by his refrigerator for a ten cent payment, or struggling for his life-after-death against a spirit of entropy and decay?

On the other hand, I just finished reading Greg Bear’s Darwin’s Radio, which is very interesting from an ideas point of view (it imagines a form of directed evolution, in which an endogenous retrovirus emerges from its thousands of years of sleep as “junk DNA” in the human genome, in order to orchestrate a new speciation, or at least subspeciation, of humanity). But I am really irritated by the way Bear introduces characters. Each one is givien a specification when first introduced. For example, chosen entirely at random: “A middle-aged Republic Security officer with the formidable name of Vakhtang Chikurishvili, handsome in a burly way, with heavy shoulders and a thick, often-broken nose, stepped forward.” No matter that we only meet this character for an instant on page 20, and never again in the course of a 524-page novel; we have to be given some “hook” that will de-genericize him, that will give him a certain “plausibility” as a character. The result is that all the characters of Darwin’s Radio get muddled, precisely because of the way that we have been given details to distinguish them. We know a lot more about the novel’s protagonists, Kaye Lang and Mitch Rafelson, than we ever do about Joe Chip; but we never care about them anywhere near as much as we do about Dick’s hero. And this is precisely because, like contemporary Hollywood actors and characters, they lack the generic dimension, and lack singularity as well, falling in between, so that their very plausibility turns them into stick figures without any deeper resonance.

I don’t mean to single out Bear for special censure; he is, in fact, one of the more interesting SF writers at work today. But, although I value SF very largely for its ideas, for the ways it tries to think through the hints of futurity that have already arrived in our present, and to negotiate the tricky shoals of the meeting between technology and socio-political actuality — I also like it because (in contrast to Bear’s technique, which is closer to mainstream fiction) it is one of the places where the generic-singular mode of character presentation is still viable. The same is true, and perhaps even more so, for comics — the medium of comics, with its tendency towards iconic images rather than fully naturalistic ones (as Scott McCloud notes), and with its linguistic compression (for reasons of space alone, text has to be brief and pointed, resonant and charged, rather than over-specific), almost requires the kind of iconic, generic/singular approach to character that I have been discussing.

Which is why, for instance, I am so looking forward to Matt Fraction’s forthcoming run with Invincible Iron Man, in which we are promised an epic battle between Tony Stark’s corporate fascism and the “post-national…open source ideological terrorism” of “bad guy” Zeke Stane.

Shriek

“We shouldn’t become accustomed to anything anymore. We are beginning to live in our own future, and it should feel strange” (p. 309). Jeff VanderMeer‘s Shriek: An Afterword is a lovely rendition of the world’s — which is to say, the future’s — strangeness, and of the ways that people strive either to come to terms with it, or to evade and deny it — and of how people get affected by it, in unforeseen and often unpleasant ways, regardless of their attempts either to embrace it or escape it. VanderMeer’s work, like that of China Mieville and K J Bishop, can be classified under the rubric of the New Weird — although that appellation doesn’t get us very far, since at this point it signifies little more than “fantasy” writing (in contrast to “science fiction” proper), but fantasy that takes its moorings not from Tolkien and similar psuedo-medievalism, but rather from such exemplars as Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast books, and M. John Harrison’s Viriconium series. It’s fantasy fiction (with elements of horror) that is dark, baroque, and deeply ambiguous — rather than engaging in Joseph-Campbell-esque Quests or staging the struggle of Good against Evil.

In Shriek, the city of Ambergris is overrun by fungus. Mushrooms and other fungi grow everywhere, insinuating themselves into every nook and cranny. Spores float through the air, depositing themselves everywhere. Everything in the city is dankness and rot, which the fungi convert into new, monstrously throbbing, life. There are psychedelic mushrooms, mushrooms in all colors, poisonous mushrooms, “mushroom bombs” which can rot your body from within in a matter of seconds, and even tiny fungi that function like bugs (surveillance devices, not insects), transmitting sound and vision to distant locations. The fungi seem to have some sort of symbiotic relationship with the Grey Caps, the sentient aboriginal inhabitants of the region, whom the human founders of Ambergris slaughtered and drove underground. But the Grey Caps subsist underground with their fungi, in a vast labyrinth of caves and tunnels, waiting for opportunities to re-emerge and take their revenge…

The narrative voices of Shriek try to come to terms with this madness. The novel presents itself as a memoir written by one Janice Shriek, formerly famous but now fallen upon hard times, about her life and especially that of her brother, Duncan Shriek, once a famous historian but long since relegated to the crackpot lunatic fringe, because the inhabitants of Ambergris are willfully deaf to his warnings about the powers of mushrooms and the threat of the Grey Caps. Janice writes her book as an “afterward” to Duncan’s historical book (which has only been published in mutilated form, and which, for the most part, we never get to see). But Duncan has added his marginal annotations and corrections to Janice’s account, which is then presented to us as edited by a third party, after Janice and Duncan have both disappeared. The novel’s narrative indirection, and cacaphony of voices, are well suited to a tale about “underground” matters — the cryptic codes and incomprehensible motivations of the Grey Caps, the oblique proliferation of the fungi — that cannot be viewed head-on or brought to light.

There is no lack of “human” content to this novel: the difficult relations of brother and sister, and the ways they both embark on self-destructive spirals; Duncan’s obsessive relationship with a woman, Mary Sabon, who betrays and destroys him; the experience of trying to survive the horrors of civil war; the experience of growing old; the rich and decadent roles of art and religion in Ambergris; the torment of trying to tell unpleasant truths to people who will do anything in order to avoid recognizing them. All this makes up the foreground of the novel.

But ultimately, this foreground is swallowed up by the novel’s fungal background, which is inhuman, and therefore difficult of comprehension. Duncan’s genius, and his torment, is a consequence of his journeys underground, his strange commerce (if you can call it that) with the fungi and the Grey Caps. He starts out trying to study them objectively, as an historian, to find out their experiences, and consequently to evaluate the reality, and the severity, of their threat. But he cannot “study” them without being transformed by them, without to a certain extent becoming them. He experiences a strange becoming-mushroom, his body colonized and metamorphosed by strange fungal growths, his mind fractured and multiplied so that he himself speaks in many, not necessarily conciliable voices (see p 303). His transformations are deeply disturbing; but the novel continually suggests that such transformations are the only alternative to the extinction otherwise threatening Ambergris. If you don’t allow yourself to be transformed by the encounter with this otherness, this alienness, this fungal proliferation, then the only alternative is to be broken and destroyed by it. Two refrains haunt the novel, repeated throughout its length like leitmotives. One is: there’s no way out, you are going to die. The other is, enigmatically, “there may be a way” (see p. 325). The latter is not a promise of immortality or transcendence; it is rather a giving way, a giving in to metamorphosis, a becoming (not superhuman, but) less-than-human or inhuman. (Nietzsche’s Ubermensch, and current “transhumanist” projects, are comforting, even self-congratulatory, myths: they pretend that a becoming-other, a becoming-inhuman, really means staying the way we are, only better. VanderMeer allows us, or forces us, to see beyond these puerile fantasies; this is one of the many virtues of his book).

Biologists tell us that fungi are neither animals nor plants; they constitute a separate kingdom of life. They stand outside our customary plant/animal binary. They can reproduce both sexually and asexually; but their sexual reproduction involves multiple sexes, rather than the polarized two that we tend to take for granted. They can survive for long periods as spores, suddenly bursting into life when conditions are favorable; since they are not photosynthetic, they come in an array of strange colors unlike the green of plants. For all these reasons, they are uncanny. Shriek is fantasy/horror, rather than science fiction; but it taps into this uncanniness, explores some of its many odd shapes, and creates a powerful fable of what I can only call the materiality of metamorphosis. By this I mean that metamorphosis is not shorn of wonder, but that is rather stripped of its superhuman pretensions, whether these be “rational” or “mythical” ones. If the 20th century was a time of both mystification (in the fascist exaltation of myth) and demystification (in the humanist exploration of the powers and limits of rationalization), then VanderMeer’s 21st century text refuses both of these gestures. It opposes both the exaltation of myth and unreason, and the exaltation of rationality and demystification. It opposes both Jung and Freud, both myth and science, both the Dionysian and the Apollonian. It gives us, not an ethics of existence, but an aesthetics. While I was reading Shriek, it infiltrated my dreams, something that novels almost never do to me. I would wake up with vague premonitions of fungal extrusions and excresences.