menageriel anallegories in a fictional space
The Science Fiction being, of its course, not an exploration of a future, but a bearing witness of this annealed understanding of the Times: it is in consequence(sic) the exacerbation, the apprehension of a tensile present. Past and future are confused-- crushed like Aad and Thamood, by the true god, Dead Labor.
[comment] [edit]And so I am come from a future, if time is understood as moving backwards. It is this perspective that allows nostalgia to serve as a force for production. It is this knowledge that that informs an analectic, pataphysical misanthropy — that is an embodied tradition of practices, discourses, visions and yes, truths that hold a great love for people in general, and a great dislike for them in the particular — not particular people, but their current historical construction. It is in this sense that we can understand, or more importantly stand under the miracle in the story of the loaves and fishes -- that people came together and shared what they had.
Santayana claimed that those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it, and it has become a sort of commonsensical chant, with a few variations each unaware of its previous speaking, sometimes even concieved as an original thought. To that sterile chorus then, let us put a counterpoint, that those who know history are doomed to repeat it as well. Thus Marx understood the repetition of history as first a tragedy, and its second iteration a farce -- but left open the idea of what infinite repetition of the moment might produce(See DeSelby). In that sense, we find ourselves in an emergent teleology, the conviction that the future has already happened, over and over again, for and in no particular reason.
These time circuits can be perceived as a continuum, as they are, or they may be understood as the basis of other things, of oneiricologies, that grow from the moment and have evolved relations with time, but have no dimension of time themselves. Eliade's dreamtime then is not just a socially recognized clinical condition, or a trope. It is a Semiotomatic Issue, with a material basis.
The job of the historian is to come into the demesne of human experience and reconstruct it to suit a purpose. To repair it according to the needs of the household of human endeavor. We find ourselves the embodiment of social and historically constructed ideas more often than the reverse, except for this nagging memory of what will be.
The science fiction, then, is a menagerial anallegory in a fictional space. It is delicious. I want to put it in my mouth.
[comment] [edit]A discussion on Cordwainer Smith, James Tiptree, and Olaf Stapledon mainly.
[comment] [edit]The discourses of Discovery, of the New World(Imperialism) and/or its conquest are a mottled patina encrusted in Science Fictions, particularly American ones.
Besides the garden variety conqueror nightmare -- Mars Needs Women and the like -- it does happen at times that a surfactant trope is worked upon it -- an epistemological horror that reveals the quantity of its Real Estate -- in the reading, the conceit of essence, the romantic notion, is scoured away.
As in the Lafferty's Where Have You Been, Sandaliotis,.Our initial condition is to be inured to the existent. The New World presumes to have some Ur quality, an intangible that harkens to a primordial -- read ideal -- state.
The highway in this happenstance countryside where we find ourselves is at first not a "scar upon it," but like the Grand Corniche adds a "striking beauty." Through the narrative we follow Constantine Quiche in his Sassari Twelve to the exit where the journey itself is discovered to have only the quality of a fraud. Lesser detectives might let that be the truth, but we are compelled in the reading to realize that the fraud is not an essential nature, but an alien act.
Landing is also used as an angle of approach of the conquering story. The Jones' White Queen brings to us the Aleutians, who in their first earthly incarnations attempt to stage a number of pranks geared machine-like to accrete property to themselves. The venture proves not so profitable, but mutually shapes each party into something unrecognizable by either, even to themselves.
[comment] [edit]Emschwiller's The Mount has achieved, through grand assumption and transparent prose(characteristic of true allegory), the induction of a subjective double-take--The people are anthropomorphized, that is they are made into animals by the aliens that ride, breed, educate and acculturate them -- and in turn, turned lovable humans by the shearing force of the narrative.
This conceit is maintained throughout by the tale of Charley, a 12yr old racehorse wanting to be the fastest runner, like his dad. The trope of the naive narrator is so masterfully ridden, over the long bridges and potholes (& even the wild mountains) of the social and historical landscapes of Charley's world, that we imagine what lies in these caesuras (because we know what is there: a bottomless pit of the here and now).
It is a fascinating exploration of the dynamics of the forms of power; the discourses and subjectivities that give rise to, develop and sustain them. Anyone can see this in the reading, even a "Charley."
And this knowledge is mortifying— you want the fine racing shorts, the jaw-breaking(but fine as well) surcingles, to be glad to have such loving and merciful masters.
Its unsatisfying and deceptive rapprochement (you feel this happened before) is not a betrayal, but a true&faithful enactment of the sense of an ending -- that of the novel in general, and the science fiction in its grotesque particular. That the Emschwiller does this faithfully to the point of subversion marks it as the achievement of a truth.
Hold, my steady, my true!
[comment] [edit]http://www.iran-bulletin.org/interview/MACHOV1.html
Marx writes a lot about it, especially in the third volume of Das Kapital. Basically, in outline, to put it very crudely the idea was that over time the organic composition of capital goes up. Roughly speaking the organic composition is what is now called capital intensity, that is, the amount of invested capital per worker, if you like. The ratio between the capital invested in inanimate capital and the capital invested in labour grows in favour of the inanimate capital.
Thus increasingly we are chained and ruled by the power of dead labor. Machover continues to make a point that the rate of profit does not fall, implying the infinitely generative powers of capital. What Marx and others have failed to articulate is the possiblity of the Dead returning to walk the Earth
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