#balioc

[irradiate-space]

Gordian Hive goals vs Utopian Hive goals

This is mainly commentary upon @balioc's book review of Terra Ignota, with the advantage of having read the third book, which balioc had not at that time. The key point that I wish to highlight, praise, and address is this paragraph:

Supposedly these are the passionately anti-mortality people, the people dedicated to “disarming death blade by blade,” the people who won’t use a global transit system with < 10 deaths per year because it’s too unsafe — and yet it’s somehow deeply and disturbingly anti-Utopian for an entomologist not to want to get on a rocket ship to Mars on the grounds that she doesn’t want to deal with the danger. Supposedly the Utopians “hunt down and destroy” everything that ever kills them, but it’s all small-scale stuff (by science-fiction standards), fixing safety rails and curing individual diseases and improving traffic safety and the like. These “big-picture thinkers” don’t have even the beginnings of a plan to defeat death, not for real, and don’t seem to want one. All their big-picture thinking is going into high-risk high-mortality space projects. Hell, the fucking Brillists are better transhumanists than they are; at least the Brillists are making a serious attempt to achieve their alleged immortality-seeking goals!

This is an excellent observation! Utopia isn't really good at personal immortality. They're working on life extension and health, but that's not immortality.

What is it?

I think Utopia's goal is not immortality of the individual, but instead immortality of the species.

[ask-gpt]

The Ninth Spirit in this Order is PAIMON, a Great King, and very obedient unto LUCIFER. He appeareth in the form of a Man sitting upon a Dromedary with a Crown most glorious upon his head. There goeth before him also a Host of Spirits, like Men with Trumpets and well-sounding Cymbals, and all other sorts of Musical Instruments. He hath a great Voice, and roareth at his first coming, and his speech is such that the Magician cannot well understand unless he can compel him. This Spirit can teach

The Ninth Spirit in this Order is PAIMON, a Great King, and very obedient unto LUCIFER. He appeareth in the form of a Man sitting upon a Dromedary with a Crown most glorious upon his head. There goeth before him also a Host of Spirits, like Men with Trumpets and well-sounding Cymbals, and all other sorts of Musical Instruments. He hath a great Voice, and roareth at his first coming, and his speech is such that the Magician cannot well understand unless he can compel him. This Spirit can teach them all good works, and will not teach them anything contrary to those things which PAIMON has said." (LUCIFER.)PAIMON GATHERED"HE is in the midst of all this, in the midst of all that hath, and has taken his place at the head of all power, and has been all that he hath, and has kept, and every good work which he hath done in this body, which he hath made of all things, the Lord his God in perfect order, the Lord God of all things, and all things that is in his presence. This Spirit haveeth no power to do any good. PAIMON's head is a Dromedary, and LUCIFER is in that House. "BEWARE" The other two Lords, PAIMON, and LUCIFER, and LUCIFER's Wife, were sitting there with their Heads in the Peaceable House. PAIMON asked them all what he had heard. LUCIFER answered : "This is true, and true of the Lord as well as of man; this is why he hath kept not those things which he hath put in to make good, but made them into things which are good that are good . . ." (KJV and Tracts.) For LUCIFER said that he had done what PAIMON had said, and that he and PAIMON could do no good, but did what he had to do for the Lord. For LUCIFER's head and the Head of the Priesthood were in the Peaceable House. He said that LUCIFER would not do anything evil because of the presence of another King like LUCIFER. And PAIMON said that PAIMON has a great Voice of his own, and he, and PABLO of this House, are good.I am pleased to see you all with the Holy One in your House, and with all the Saints in your House, so please God that I may say to you this: As a man of my heart, I love you because of your steadfastness and goodness, in whom I have a great voice with your Lord Jesus Christ, in that I have received his help by my soul that we may all keep our heads in the Peaceable House, where our Lord Jesus Christ came, in the midst of all the Saints and their Saints." (KJV, Talmuds of the Temple, H.L., vol

[spilledreality]

Otessa

A disenfranchised hot blonde girl with a trust fund self-medicates to the point of blackout in the hopes of changing her life in her sleep.^

What does disillusionment look like, to Moshfegh? The visual field is cinematic, detached, mediation creeping: “I did feel a peculiar sensation, like oceanic despair that — if I were in a movie — would be depicted superficially as me shaking my head slowly and shedding a tear. Zoom in on my sad, pretty, orphan face. Smash cut to a montage of my life’s most meaningful moments…” The eyes are “cameras pann[ing]”; lives are understood through media: “You’re like Winona Ryder in Girl Interrupted,” Reva tells the protagonist of My Year of Rest and Relaxation. “But you look more like Angelina Jolie.”

But we really get a glimpse through the attitude the protagonist holds toward others—her endless dismissal and condescensions, the belittlings and typecastings.

What she (henceforth referred to as ‘Tag) finds most damning about sole friend Reva—and ‘Tag forgives her for her narcissism, her superficiality, her pettiness and envy and “delusional romantic projections”—what ‘Tag finds most damning is how everything she says sounds “like she’d read it in a Hallmark card.” Reflecting on a eulogy Reva gives for her cancer-struck mother: “Reva scratched at an itch that, on my own, I couldn’t reach. Watching her take what was deep and real and painful and ruin it by expressing it with such trite precision gave me reason to think Reva was an idiot, and therefore I could discount her pain, and with it, mine.” 

When she lists off human grievances it’s with an penchant for deindividuation, caricaturing at length boys reading Proust on the subway, “sterilized professionals” ordering brioche buns, and “people on dates” getting no-foam lattes. But it’s delivered with the conflicted tone of someone rejecting what isn’t available, like an animal whose snarl breaks midway into a whimper. “I want something that’ll put a damper on my need for company,” she tells Dr. Tuttle, a confession she never actually makes to the reader.

Putting people into cast(e)s, into starterpacks, cognitively dehumanizes them; it allows ‘Tag to dismiss others’ struggles, struggles which might potentially rival and therefore draw into question the exceptionalism of her own. The observer’s illusion of transparency is a common bias of overestimating the extent to which we understand others around us. It’s a coping strategy for trauma but what comes first, the transparency or the disillusionment? The othering or the alienation?

2.

I remembered watching her “put her face on,” as she called it, and wondering if one day I'd be like her, a beautiful fish in a man-made pool, circling and circling, surviving the tedium only because my memory can contain only what is imprinted on the last few minutes of my life, constantly forgetting my thoughts.

‘Tag is thinking back on her mother here—which, because of the similarities in the two’s psyches and circumstances, is the closest ‘Tag gets to imagining her own future. It’s as if she’s trying to understand a way forward. In her mother’s life she sees none, just wine bottles and bloated, middle-aged drunkenness.

And yet out of desperate hope it will cure or heal her, she seeks refuge in pharmaceutical sleep. Every three days she re-doses a fictional downer called Infermiterol, which causes a 72-hour blackout and allows her to survive the tedium of living “only because [her] memory can contain only what is imprinted on the last few minutes of [her] life.” By the ¾ mark of R&R, ‘Tag’s dozing away a comparable percentage of her waking hours.   

Rest and Relaxation has a happy ending: ‘Tag comes safely out of hibernation seeing a world which, once empty of value, now appears saturated with meaning. “There was majesty and grace in the pace of the swaying branches of the willows. There was kindness… My sleep had worked. I was soft and calm and felt things.”

The book’s surface-level moral (appearing in a drugged-out dream-vision that rivals Taipei’s psilocybin death climax) is something like intimacy, presentness,  the acceptance of your lot:

I tried to remember my life, flipping through Polaroids in my mind. “It was so pretty there. It was interesting!” But I knew that even if I could go back, if such a thing were possible with exactitude, in life or in dreams, there was really no point. And then I felt desperately lonely. So I stuck my arm out and I grasped onto someone… and that other hand steaded me somehow as I fell past whole galaxies, mercurial waves of light strobing through my body, blinding me over and over… I was crying.

But there are other psychic patterns to track in ‘Tag’s transformation, changes in behavior and self-modeling that might point somewhere further. Where the novel opens with ‘Tag buying two large coffees for herself at the bodega—part of a multi-drug choreographing of bodily pleasure—it ends with her picking up cornflakes there, to feed pigeons in the park. She gives away an entire designer wardrobe and starts shopping for basics at a Goodwill. She has a transcendent experience in front of a vanitas painting at the Met, culminating with her placing her palm on its oil surface.

There’s another level to the image of the goldfish. Not just the desire to turn off the self, to live without memory—idiotic, happy, neutered—but to swim in a “man-made pool,” to be admired, like her mother, for her beauty and charm. For her quality and value as an object. The Young-Girl is currently the most luxurious of the goods that circulate on the market of perishable commodities (Tiqqun).

3.

@balioc​ writes:

In very broad-brush and simplistic terms:

Traditional masculinity (to the extent that it’s a thing at all) is mostly about Being a Subject, and provides lots of tools that make subject-hood work better.  It pushes you to take action, to make decisions, to possess things and people and take pleasure in it.

Traditional femininity is mostly about Being an Object, and provides lots of tools that make object-hood work better.  It pushes you to construct yourself into something desirable and compelling, to seek out appreciation, to be possessed and take pleasure in it.  

People vary in the utility they get from subject-hood and object-hood. Probably everyone needs both to some substantial extent.

To some extent, identity-building always pushes towards the object side of the equation.  It’s about being rather than doing; it involves saying, “witness me! appreciate me!” 

If objecthood is oriented around being seen, an art-world rave ‘Tag shows up to plastered epitomizes it:

Girls in dark lipstick, boys with red pupils… posing fashionably or simply raising an eyebrow or faking wide smiles… In [one], a skinny redhead flashed her breasts, revealing lavender pasties… Male twins dressed as heroin-thin Elvises in a slouchy gold lame suits high-fived in front of a basquiat rip-off. There was a girl holding a rat on a leash hooked to the bicycle chain she wore around her neck. A close-up shot showed someone’s pale pink tongue, split to look like a snake’s and pierced on both forks with big diamond studs.

The pure object “never gives herself; she only gives what she has, which is to say the array of qualities that they loan her. This is also why it’s not possible to love the [pure object], but only to consume her” (adapted from Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl). Hence Trevor, ex-boyfriend extraordinaire, who keeps her around to face-fuck.

Objecthood is where Tag thrives and is validated: she may not remember the art-rave, but her ability to get into it sans invite, to befriend a hotshot artist there and a hundred other navigational easings point to her prestige as an object. Money allows her designer clothes and spa trips, and via the law of costly signaling even her bad habits can’t hurt her: sole friend Reva remarks with envy at how thin ‘Tag’s gotten while medicated, and bags under the eyes is heroin-chic if you’re beautiful. It’s on the very basis—not despite of—her aloof indifference that she gets hired to a Chelsea gallery, which only works if everyone agrees you’re attractive. (What’s attraction? A quality of an object which compels others toward it.)

Reva, meanwhile, flails, Gucci knock-off clutch in hand. She can’t win the game of objecthood, trying and failing to lose weight or attract a partner. Worse, she makes it look hard, making resolutions that are never followed through or tracing fad diets to their natural dialectic in bulimic binges. “Blotchy red” and “the shape of Florida,” even Reva’s birthmark signifies low status. When ‘Tag visits her apartment, we get a glimpse into her cabinets stocked with laxative teas and rice crackers, bottles of Belvedere and sugarless Gatorade.

To ‘Tag, to whom being a desirable object comes literally naturally (blonde, imperviously thin), this grubbing is embarrassing, low, clumsy. Ironically, [Reva’s] desire to be classy had always been the déclassé thorn in her side. “Studied grace is not grace,” I once tried to explain. In other words, grace isn’t something done by a subject but a quality which is possessed or isn’t. “Charm is not a hairstyle,” ‘Tag continues. “You either have it or you don’t.” ^1

Class rears its head. At Reva’s mother’s wake, there are “Huge pots on the stove steam[ing],” full of chicken, spaghetti, and ratatouille. “[Reva] was oddly unembarrassed. It seemed like she had dispensed with her usual uppity pretentions. She made no attempt to excuse herself for being homey, folksy, or whatever word she would have used to describe living in a home like hers.” (On her own upbringing in an “un-cultured” home: “There were no cut flowers around the house.”)

And though Reva, unlike ‘Tag, is actually trying at subjecthood, she falls short yet again: a meeting note-taker at her corporate job, her main narrative arc over the book is a failed attempt to materialize a relationship with her married boss, which results in a pregnancy and her transference out of office. Her last act of subjecthood, which comes on the book’s final page, comes as she throws herself out a WTC window and is caught on a news camera. More than anything else, ‘Tag is surprised by how much she admires the act, rewatching the footage of the plumet on lonely afternoons, or “any other time I doubt that life is worth living.” Each time she is “overcome by awe… because [the plummeting girl] is beautiful… a human being, diving into the unknown, and she is wide awake”—the direct line drawn in our language between being and awakeness, between consciousness and the making of decisions, that exertion of the body onto the environment such that it does not merely extinguish, passive, into an office building, into anonymous soot but splatters singing onto pavement.

4.

There is a blatant kind of feminism in Moshfegh’s casting of misogynies and degradations suffered at the hands of ‘Tag’s ex-`boyfriend Trevor, in the descriptions of Bushwick “sensitive types” or the pressures towards beauty and fitness as they manifest in Reva’s bulimia and pilates class. But the real sex politics are more ingrained and foundational, relating to how ‘Tag perceives herself in the world and how that self-image as object lends itself to a specific and perhaps primarily female mode of suffering.

Might it be possible that, in an undercurrent of cultural commentary, Moshfegh is in fact arguing against objecthood culture? Moshfegh told the Atlantic she’d spent “a lot of years” in her twenties in some stage of “bulimic blackout” eating a slice of melon a day for calories. At twenty-five, the same age as ‘Tag, she decided to sober up. (We could see Reva and ‘Tag as a bicameral split, a schizophrenic, nuclear division of their author’s past.)

Then, in her late twenties and sober, Moshfegh applied to Brown’s MFA program. She’s written prolifically since, giving up not just drugs and alcohol but clothing labels and makeup for a more protestant ethic. According to interviews, Helen of Troy — the most successful, desired object in human history — is Moshfegh’s least favorite fictional character. She admits to endless vanity while keeping a sign in her car window to remind her: Vanity is the enemy.^ Fiction as self-help is an established literary tradition by now (Acker, Camus, Krauss, Nelson, Sartre, Wallace...), and shouldn’t count against Moshfegh, but it gives us an idea of where her politics stand. And we might alternatively be suspicious that the fictional inquiry succeeds so cleanly, resolves with tight answers instead of opening up into more contradictions and questions.  

5.

Tag’s thought turn again and again to (fictional artist-friend) Ping Xi’s taxidermied animals-as-artworks, and to the fur coats she and Reva wear around the city. How many foxes had to die, I wondered. And how did they kill them so that their blood didn’t stain their fur? When Ping Xi turns his artistic cathexis toward ‘Tag in the novel’s last chapters, it’s no great conceptual leap, a movement from beautiful object to beautiful object. And what is the cost of objecthood? How do you kill them in a way that doesn’t stain their pelts? The freezer, or so she hears from a coworker at the gallery.

Trevor had told me once he thought I was frigid, and that was fine with me. Fine. Let me be a cold bitch. Let me be the ice queen. Someone once said that when you die of hypothermia, you get cold and sleepy, things slow down, and then you just drift away. You don't feel a thing. That sounded nice. That was the best way to die, awake and dreaming, feeling nothing. [emphasis added]

At low temperatures, or low rates of caloric consumption, metabolic processes slow. In heat, flesh is worn, decays, churns over, is broken down, turned into new life. Away from heat, turnover slows, time stops. To an object, getting frozen is an ideal way of being—it preserves you, in a single perfect state, indefinitely. To the subject, being frozen stops you from getting things done; churning heat and energy are necessary to acting, as opposed to merely existing.

6.

Rest and Relaxation takes up’s alt-lit mantle of unselfconscious self-conscious contemporary lit. Mosfegh at once tosses out literariness and performs the Young-Girl’s analysis detailed transcription of transitory cognitive-affective states. There is nothing in the Young-Girl’s life, even in the deepest zones of intimacy, that escapes alienated reflexivity, that escapes the codifications and the gaze of the Spectacle. Noted Young-Girl Tao Lin comes to mind with his obsessive logging of drug dosages, except less autistic, less male. ‘Tag prefers guestimating: her pill smoothies—measured less precisely than your average amateur cocktail—are mixed at whim, with little regard for duration, on-set, or any other info you’d find on an Erowid chart. “Reading up on a drug sapped its magic,” she tells us. “[I]t made sleep seem trite, just another mechanical function of the body.” 

And despite being hailed as “a pioneer of a new genre of slacker fiction,” Rest and Relaxation feels, in sensibility and in scope, more like a late-entry contemporary to the days of HTMLGiant than a successor. Nor is it as interesting, structurally, as many of alt-lit’s entries. Where Boyle, Lin, and co. let their novels loose to devour GChat threads, Skype sessions, and subtweets, Moshfegh’s novel is toothless, tethered, slobbering at the gums—everywhere the novel seeks to devour, and everywhere it is in chains. There’s little reflection, formally, of the present moment except in the unselfconsciousness use of low and non-literary language. The difficulties of distinguishing between the unnecessary conventions of literariness, on one hand, and the necessary dignifications of language, on the other, require at least twenty years of hindsight to properly evaluate. Still, “When I opened the freezer, smoke billowed out. The thick frosted inside was crowded” is probably poor prose.

Even more than most, ‘Tag’s personality is schizophrenic and in flux, not just minute-to-minute but month-to-month. But I can’t help but imagine she’d find writing a cover level either impossible to finish or amusing to fabricate (“As long as I can remember I've always wanted to work in a gallery… I'm passionate, hard-working, and a go-getter.”) The difficulty is genuineness, the ease is that of performance. ‘Tag’s like a caricature of late-90’s, Po-Mo ennui: besieged by television, low on meaning, abusing substances left and right. (Think the decade Infinite Jest and OK Computer came out.) Which is just, again, to say that the strangest thing about Rest and Relaxation is how, despite being talked about as so 2018, a kind of post-Bluets fiction so “now” it hurts, the book feels more like a product of the fin du millénaire it’s set in, discursively homeless. Instead of being on the — at least emotional or affective — avant-garde, it comes off as a late-game entry into a style that was, well, not especially impressive to begin with.

(Even the astrology discourse is weirdly, made a mockery of in the Pynchonsque therapist Dr. Tuttle: “I’ve heard from several esteemed colleagues in Brazil that regular Infermiterol use can activate a profound tectonic displacement. Followed up with some filigree work using low doses of aspirin and astral projecting, it’s proven to be quite effective in curing solipsistic terror.” Doesn’t anyone want to tell Moshfegh she’s alienating a her sub-demo of Reines readers?)

* fn1: In aristocratic societies, where status is equivalent to itself, the pure object loses even their qualities. The Earl of Wendover, from Barry Lyndon: “My friends are the best people. Oh, I don’t mean that they are most virtuous, or indeed the least virtuous, or the cleverest, or the stupidest, or the richest, or the best born, but the best. In a word—people about whom there is no question.”

Good artworld jabs: A particularly excoriating portrait of the New Yorker via a diegetic short story in its pages, damning not only because it’s Reva who praises it:

[Reva] pulled the rolled-up issue out of her enormous purse. The story was called “Bad at Math.” It was about an adolescent Chinese American in Cleveland who bombs the PSAT, jumps off his two-story junior high school, and breaks both his legs. After the school guidance counselor pressures the boy’s family into group therapy, his parents tell him they love him in a supermarket parking lot and they all start to cry and wail and fall on their knees, while all the other shoppers wheel their carts past and pretend like nothing amazing is going on. “Listen to this opening,” Reva said. “For the first time, they said the words. I think it pained them more than the cracking of my shins and femurs.” 

Bad artworld jabs: Ping Xi, the hot Damien Hirstish artist who works as ‘Tag’s jailer, suggests she rip up her birth certificate and burn her passports while he films it. Low-hanging strawmen.

[with-a-martyr-complex]

A Railgun in Every Hand: The Apocalyptic War of Horizon: Zero Dawn

Apocalyptic fiction is a wonderful thing, and we don’t get enough of it compared to post-apocalyptic fiction and “the stakes are apocalyptic but really things are gonna be fine” fiction. Obviously a crisis that certainly resembles a lot of fictional and historical near-apocalypses can make some of these stories newly resonant. 

And, when the apocalypse happens, where are you going to be? 

For a lot of us, the answer is, apparently “at home, struggling to rent, but also with persistent access to media and time in a way that we’d perhaps fantasized about.” Balioc has a good post on what this demand of us says about our world, but it certainly got me contrasting other ideals and what they say about us.

So of course, I started thinking of the Dinosaur Robot Video Game.

Spoilers for Horizon: Zero Dawn and it’s apocalyptic backstory. 

Horizon: Zero Dawn has a fairly generic “chosen-one defends her kind and challenges dominant norms while fighting against a fanatical foreign foe” narrative in an innovative “high-tech hunter gatherer” setting plastered over a really different and interesting post-apocalyptic narrative with an incredibly worn out premise. “Did you know that corporations (and by corporations I mean one rich dude) don’t conceive of risk in ways that are good for long term safety of all, and also AIs are scary?” I found the apocalyptic narrative far more compelling.

The game uses that apocalyptic narrative (largely told through audio logs because of medium convention) rather well, taking advantage of the disconnect between the audience’s familiarity with sci-fi apocalypses to communicate ideas clearly and succinctly while our protagonist occasionally has to struggle with a lack of cultural context to piece it all together while still managing to understand most of what’s happening. 

The apocalypse in Horizon’s backstory is teased out for a long time within the game. While “Self-Replicating Robots devoted to harvesting as much material as they can” gets revealed as our culprit relatively early on, it’s not until much later that we find out how the heroes of the previous world managed to stop them. There’s a good deal of time and attention devoted to how ordinary people were killed en masse, and how they were asked to sacrifice for the sake of this superproject that would save the world. 

Then they finally reveal what it was all for.

Which is to say, The Super Project is...half a lie. It does save the world, but it doesn’t save YOU, anyone you love, anyone you’ve ever met, or (in the final, not originally planned, outcome) any trace of civilization at all. 

The people asked to sacrifice are kept unawares.

“This is the horrible truth behind the lies of Operation: Enduring Victory...Lies designed to inspire millions of innocents to sacrifice themselves in battle. Why? One reason: To buy time for you and the work you will do here.”

Project: Zero Dawn, the world’s salvation, was only ever designed to achieve it’s objectives after the complete destruction of humanity and, indeed, Earth’s biosphere, rebuilding the world only once the solution to the rampaging Robot Army was finally found. Telling anyone not working on the project would have presumably doomed morale (and indeed, anyone who found out about this aspect of the project either had to devote their time to it or lose their freedom to keep the truth from getting out, as we can hear for ourselves as one scientist refuses to go along with the plan). 

The details of Zero Dawn aren’t especially important for my purposes today. That is the plan of the experts and decision makers who isolate themselves from much of the world (which is, as others have noted, not exactly what’s happened as doctors and nurses are on the front lines of our current crisis). What I’m more interested is Operation: Enduring Victory, the project to buy time for Zero Dawn. That is the task of the masses, of the people, of those who bothered to believe what they were told when they were told they could do good in this world.

Enduring Victory consists of propaganda, military organization, deliberate and misleading leaks to media, and a massive high tech industrial effort to turn human life into a delaying tactic, inflicting as much damage as possible to a foe in order to slow it down with minimal regard for the safety or well-being of the combatants. Within the fiction, there is, of course, little point to prioritizing their safety, as the robots will annihilate virtually all of humanity in a brief while, excluding those working on Zero Dawn (and a handful of other holdouts), one of the advantages of apocalyptic fiction is that you can concoct terrible scenarios to justify whatever moral hardship you want to showcase. 

Enduring Victory is not a typical heroic narrative. There are no graves and medals for the brave. Those who die are not trained soldiers or those called to defend their homes, they are men, women, and children who were given railguns and a target and told “kill that or everything you love will die” by people who knew full well that everything they loved was about to die anyway.

So what is this nightmare exactly? You might say it’s fascism, because “everyone is educated to be a hero” and to die is the highest form of that heroism, and the cross national bent of it against an utterly alien and other force is suggestive of the SMG and BBRF take on Pacific Rim (which I can’t fully endorse because SMG is a sometimes food, but it’s worth considering all the same). You might say it’s the ultimate manifestation of the “citizen soldier” form of republican (small-r) virtue, of the kind Machiavelli lauded of Rome and America idolizes in its revered soldiers of the 18th and 19th century (the citizen soldier does not wish for crisis but rises up in the moment of greatest need and, if he survives, returns to prior life). You could call it nationalism, Red Army communism, or slap any number of ideological narrative over it. 

But, fundamentally, it’s about the value of the non-expert, the normal, the person who lacks the exact skill set that a given crisis demands. It says “you can give it all, the ultimate price, for minutes or seconds for the people who can fix this to do what they need to.” It’s clear that Zero Dawn couldn’t have completed without Enduring Victory--that child with a railgun who shot one robot up bad enough to force it into repair mode didn’t just die for nothing, even as the enemy rebuilds and reforms and really does wipe out all life on Earth (up until Zero Dawn claims a final victory by defeating the enemy and reforming the biosphere). 

And...well, as horrible as that is...there’s definitely an appeal to that kind of fantasy now. I’m living in an area hit hard by the pandemic, with a skillset and experience adjacent to it but not actually the skillset that is useful at the moment, and I’m sitting around hearing about people dying everyday with very little I can do to fix that (though, as a lot of people are also experiencing, not for lack of trying, as even the places that CAN put people with adjacent skills to good use are having logistical troubles getting them in position to do good work). The sense of uselessness that has become so pervasive as to have most of us numb to it by this point is deeply frustrating and tragic (though, obviously, not as much as the death toll). I sit in my safe and secure apartment and long for a way to make things better, whatever the risk to myself, and find that I lack even the basic skills to do good. 

Our fictional crises, especially our apocalyptically tragic ones, are more narratively compelling than our real ones. In the United States, even the “sacrifice” of staying home (which hits some people VERY hard, and I don’t mean to minimize people in bad situations) to buy time seems to have only bought enough time for people to decide that waiting any longer isn’t a good idea, even as a robust testing regime that could get people back to work or out and about and PPE supplies to keep medical and other essential, high risk staff safe seem about as distant now as they did in February. 

[with-a-martyr-complex]

Genre After The 90s

So Balioc made a post wondering why a seemingly obvious setup (The Big Expansionist Paladin Morally Righteous Empire being neoliberal instead of religious, communist, or something ideologically similar) doesn’t seem to have had many takers in genre fiction, or at least not ones that really caught on. I’ve got an idea as to why that might be, which is of course going to be filled with speculation, so be ready for some armchair social theorizing about the United States, but given the cultural dominance of the US may have some relevance outside of it.

The 90s, in a lot of ways are the last gasp of American monoculture. The monoculture died several deaths--the collapse of the USSR meant there wasn’t an ideological foe to define against, overseas failures in Somalia and Haiti (and perceived failures in The Balkans) suggested that American military prowess was unwanted and unnecessary in the world, and an ever widening culture war meant that, in a lot of ways, there wasn’t a single idea of what “America” entailed. Oh sure, there had always been critics of what America was seen to be, but even those critics were still largely coming from a place that assumed a shared cultural understanding of what they were talking about. The late 90s break that, and while that’s breaking, the early Internet enables the flourishing of a million little subcultures, truly fracturing shared cultural fabric.  Add on social disruption from the addition of women to the workforce and various crime crackdowns that remove a lot of adults from polite society, and even the American family doesn’t look like it had for decades.

(This model of the late 90s/Early 2000s is also a common explanation for the end of The Golden Age of The Simpsons, with no American monoculture left to satirize, the bite and heart of the show get hollowed out)

The Early 2000s have a brief gasp of cultural reunification in late 2001/early 2002, but culture war issues and an ever more prominent internet cause that to disappear pretty quickly.

The shattering of this cultural fabric has a number of funny little effects. 

Genre Fiction (here focusing on Sci-Fi/Fantasy) has a tendency towards insularity. They have their own conventions, their own awards, their own literary canon, masters, curators, etc. And that’s all been the case since the early 20th century. But, I contest, that all of that insularity existed in the context of concious separation from the monoculture, a monoculture that Genre Fans still HAD to engage with and interact with in the rest of life. Therefore, salient trends and ideas in the monoculture still impacted and were commented on by contemporary Genre Fiction (The Forever War on Vietnam, A Canticle for Liebowitz on the threat of Nuclear War, Neuromancer on the cultural disaffection of the 80s, really pick your favorites). I believe that, that one-way cultural exchange of Genre reacting to monoculture is necessary for the development of the genre, at least in terms of it’s ability to react to the political world as it is.

And the monoculture collapses right around the time that neoliberalism starts to lose it’s luster but not it’s political power. In the presence of the monoculture, a lot of Genre Fiction (particularly, Genre Fiction that resonates broadly, gains cultural traction, legions of imitators, adaptations, etc.) might have arisen that would critique neoliberalism in that kind of symbolic-soul-of-the-age kinda way (as opposed to “here is a tract on why the UN sucks except with aliens”). So there seems to be a post-2000 gap in terms of Big Ideas Genre Fiction, without any real dearth of well written and well researched  and well publicized work.

Without a monoculture to react to, Genre Fiction splits off within itself--with wider political divides (present since The Golden Age of Sci-Fi, but more apparent and with much less overlap than before), subgenres that get very insular, and a proliferation of hard-sci in new fields, but none of which really seems to make a splash in a big cultural moment. The exceptions here tend to be explicitly aimed at kids and teens, where our education system continues to enforce the remnants of a monoculture.

I would also contend that Genre Fiction’s social role has not aged well in the age of a million subcultures, but that may only be personal preference and selection bias. 

Caveats: I suspect there’s a lot on the business side of publishing that is relevant here that I simply don’t understand. I also can’t speak very well to the dominant political views in recent science fiction, which probably also have an effect. It’s also possible that most folks find neoliberalism blandly palatable enough that it becomes hard to make into a Big Deal Force in a fictional environment where you have to Love It or Hate It.

[mitigatedchaos]

"You sound like a lawyer tbh." You mind if I ask you to unpack that? I did in fact go to law school (and was raised by lawyers), but I'm honestly curious how you're getting that from my Tumblr prose.

(I’m going to assume you’re okay with me answering this publicly since it’s an ask and not a message.  If you aren’t okay with that, message me.)

You see, I, too, am a lawyer…

Nah, haha, just kidding.  I studied Poli Sci/Philo/Econ before switching to Comp Sci.  I was raised by engineers.

There are, of course, a few different ways to view the state.

1. The state, and particularly, the criminal justice system, as this sort of organization of rules and procedures and the members that make it up.  Lawyers, getting a closer contact with it, can see when it makes errors, or when the procedures are complex and defy the common wisdom about what “should” happen.  Under this view it is puzzling that anyone would put that much weight on something that is a glorified byzantine dispute resolution mechanism.  However, this view isn’t only negative - there are those of this view who believe that in time, the relative order of Law will come even to international relations.

Tends to be, IME, a very lawyerly view.

2. The Anarchist view - there is no “state,” there is no “society,” it’s individuals all the way down.  Laws are a spook, and so is the justice system, maaan.  Borders only exist in your ~mind~.

3. The state as a kind of gestalt eukaryotic intelligence which, in no small part, reflects the nation-state context (and its will) in which it exists.  Though not a perfect representation of “Society,” it still is a representation thereof - a lesser god above the will of mere ordinary individuals, which can be turned only by hero or villain figures.  Therefore, when it strikes down a criminal with its terrible iron sword, this represents an echo of divine punishment.  (There is one blogger on this website that even, IIRC, argues that the ruler of a state effectively cannot escape doing the will of God.)

The sophistication of this view depends on how many layers up it occurs within the contrarian hierarchy.

In my opinion this view, in its intuitive, inarticulable base form is a major means by which states draw power and maintain themselves, and is in many ways difficult to avoid.  

It is not enough merely to have the threat of force to hold the state together.  There must be a binding ideology of some variety, which justifies, in the minds of the population, the state’s rule - a kind of shared mythology.  

Why is it that the people will accept the deliberations of the administrative state, with its judges and attorneys?  Because it is a ritual by which the power of a ‘deity’, this United States of America, which we have lifted up to the heavens, for which people will kill and die, is summoned and the judgment of its society is dispensed.  It is roughly the closest that it is possible to get to Official Objective Condemnation, proof of seriousness, ‘justice,’ and so on for a typical person in this world, short of taking the action into their own hands.

It is a shaping of the narratives of their own lives.

The desire for this retribution is, of course, something like basic game theory, it just looks a bit weirder once channeled through a layer of collective mythology which validates, shapes, and reinforces it.

The urge is rarely completely abolished, and if struck down will be replaced by some new mythology.  (For instance, justifying hatemobs against the unwoke.  Not the only only example, of course.)